Matrix Blog

In this Sunday’s New York Times Real Estate Section (online now), the Calculator column featured some data trends I’ve gathered during two significant prior housing market events: What Can 9/11 and the Great Recession Tell Us About Coronavirus Recovery?

Tags: New York Times, 9/11, financial crisis, Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy, NYT Real Estate, Michael Kolomatsky, racism, diversity

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During the Super Bowl advertising blitz, the most controversial advertisement seemed to be (no, not Mountain Dew’s PuppyMonkeyBaby) Quicken Loans RocketMortgage Super Bowl Ad: What We Were Thinking

David Stevens, CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association was annoyed at the public outrage.

Wow – this piling on @QuickenLoans is outrageous. They try to make a complex process easier for qualified buyers https://t.co/sR8ulREGyq

— David H. Stevens CMB (@DavidHStevens) February 9, 2016

Even the Urban Institute’s Laurie Goodman who is another voice of reason, writes a blog post on Why Rocket Mortgage won’t start another housing crisis.

I am one of those who were angry after seeing the QL commercials that aired before the Super Bowl and my disbelief continued after watching the Super Bowl ad. I lived the insanity and the QL commercial was completely tone deaf and gave me great concern about repeating mistakes in the past. In fact I was so concerned that I made the QL Super Bowl commercial the cornerstone of last week’s Housing Note: Rockets Engineered to Amaze Housing: What was Quicken Loans Thinking?

A week later my view on the ad hasn’t changed and in all due respect to Laurie and David, I think they missed the forest for the trees (there’s a digital v. paper pun somewhere). I’ll explain by going through their own points:

• Borrowers can give lenders easier access to bank information – this is one of those wiz bang promises we always see with new technology (assuming this product is new technology). But I don’t think anyone is arguing to keep the process arduous.
• Approvals might be less prone to human error. – Sure, that’s entirely possible although this argument is like saying if there was less air pollution we might all feel better. We would have to assume that borrower data entry is better and it matches up to official documents like tax returns and pay stubs – something that was not a lender concern in the last cycle.
• Automation may ease tight credit. That’s another one of those wiz bang assumptions that any technology gain – automation is better – remove humans and the process gets easier (again, we don’t understand what the details are of this wiz bang new technology). EZ Pass scanning technology on the highway is far better for toll collecting but it took a few decades to perfect. The mortgage lending process is full of judgments that need to be made and common sense has been removed from the mortgage underwriting process so it can be completed with checkboxes. I contend that automation will NOT ease credit any time soon because automation means a series of lending rules and it will take years to iron out. It may even delay credit normalization as lenders are reluctant to fully trust it. Plus lending continues to remain tight because of bad decisions made in the past and a weak outlook for the future (30 year fixed is below the level just before the December Fed rate hike), not because the process needs to be more efficient. Mortgage origination volume has fallen nearly every year since 2006 so I can’t see lack of automation as holding back the normalization of credit.
• Digital lending is here to stay. No one is really arguing against digital lending per se. The future across most industries is digital and that transition can be good and bad. The mortgage process is much more digitized than it was a decade ago so disagreeing with the Rocket Mortgage message doesn’t make someone anti-digital.
• Make a complex process easier for qualified buyers. Of course! If that is what is actually being delivered. It’s a black box and the consumer is getting their information from a commercial that conveys dated message. If David gave a speech in a 1970s era polyester suit with bellbottoms, would his current information leave the audience with a current market impression?

The real reason for the pushback on this rocket thing is not because we are anti-digital, anti-efficiency, anti-credit easing, anti-automation or anti-polyester bellbottoms. The pushback comes from the messenger being the second largest mortgage lender in the U.S. who marketed their product seemingly devoid of any understanding of the housing bubble, which after all, was really a credit bubble.

And it becomes even more clear to me as an appraiser, looking at their complete reliance on appraisal management companies and how awfully unreliable that post-financial crisis industry really is at estimating collateral, that their judgment is flawed in the long run.

The same sort of promises and expectations were made during the run up of Countrywide Mortgage. We are nearly 9 years down the road from the 2007 implosion of American Home Mortgage and those 2 Bear Stearns mortgage hedge funds and yet economically, the world is still in the hangover stage.

I don’t really believe that QL’s Rocket Mortgage product will bring down the world’s economy as we saw with financial engineering in the last cycle. But it is a concern and unbelievable that this was the messaging they chose to go with. As Mark Twain said (paraphrased) “History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.”

Please watch that commercial again.

Tags: Mortgage Bankers Association, HousingWire, Quicken Loans, David Stevens, Laurie Goodman, Urban Institute

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Coming to a theatre near you in December…

Aside from playing my favorite Led Zeppelin song “When the Levee Breaks” and being based on one of my favorite books about the housing bust/financial crisis “The Big Short” that was written by one of my favorite authors Michael Lewis (Blind Side, Flash Boys, Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, The New New Thing, etc.) that includes pretty much all my favorite actors – it’s a freakin’ incredible story.

Tags: Michael Lewis, Too Big To Fail, housing bubble, The Big Short, Led Zeppelin

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It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed Miami, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the Magic City. And I’m taking notes on the beach.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedMiami:

As we make our way through the second quarter (more than halfway!), I took a look at some trends extracted from the first quarter reports we prepare for Douglas Elliman. I went all out and created a four charter that addresses a number of issues born out of the financial crisis that still touch the current market..

[click to expand chart]

My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: Miami Drill Down: Picking Up the Scraps of the Financial Crisis [Curbed]

Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed NY

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Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Ski

Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed Miami, 3CW, financial crisis

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Read my latest Bloomberg View column Income Inequality Hits the Housing Market.

This article turned out to be my most-commented on piece so far. The topic of affordability generates a hotbed of conversation.

Here’s an excerpt…

There’s been plenty of talk recently about signs of recovery in the housing market. Rather than think about housing as a single market, it might be helpful to look at housing as many markets based on everything from geography to price to new versus existing…

[read more]

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Tags: New Home Sales, U.S. Census

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[click on image to play video]

Ok, so I like making bubbles. Here’s a reason (or excuse) to watch some bubbles – tie it in with economic theory.

Tags: bubbles, housing bubble, gazillionbubbleshow.com, Deni Yang

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Read my latest Bloomberg View column Hedge-Fund Guys Have Foreclosure Fatigue. Please join the conversation over at Bloomberg View. Here’s an excerpt…

One of the most important ways to strengthen the U.S. housing recovery is to get distressed properties into financially stronger hands. Shortly after the financial crisis began, institutional investors started snapping up foreclosed homes. These buyers, according to RealtyTrac, are entities that buy more than 10 properties in a calendar year. Blackstone Group has been among the most active, acquiring more than $20 billion of foreclosed properties, then making necessary repairs and renting them out…

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Tags: hedge fund, REO, foreclosure

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With big swings in housing related trends over the past decade, long term patterns are called into question. When a long term trend seemingly changes direction, it is reasonable to point it out. As I opined previously, the housing industry often defaults to linear thinking. It’s not enough to point out a trend, it is better to proclaim that the trend will run indefinitely because consumer tastes have changed.

Here are a few examples of trends in the US housing market that are not trends:

Average New Home Sale Size

[click to expand]

When the housing bubble popped in 2006, shortly after it was pronounced that the multi-decades long trend would reverse it self. Yet the change was a purely short term economic shift as the entry level surged with the sharp decline in mortgage rates. After a few years, the trend of expanding sizes resumed. I’m not saying that the trend will run indefinitely larger, but it is important to look at why the average square foot began to fall in the first place. A harsh economic condition with a rapid rise in affordability prompted in a shift in the mix. And remember, this highly referenced metric reflects new homes which is only about 15% of normalized housing sales.

Here is the housing conversation on home sizes from 2007-2011.

Home Ownership

[click to expand]

Perhaps one of the largest misinterpretations of consumer trends has been on the subject of homeownership. As is evident in the chart, the heavily documented push to higher homeownership played was a sudden burst rather than a long term gradual change. The surge in the trend was artificial, based on fraud and unsustainably loose credit conditions that where based on NOTHING. With the multiyear decline, we are beating ourselves up over the decline in the homeownership rate yet we are reverting to the mean since credit is unusually tight. In fact the median homeownership rate of 64.8 over the past 49 years is exactly where we are right now in 1Q14. Will the market overcorrect towards rental? Yes I believe it will until tight credit conditions resume to more historic norms.

Here’s terrific takedown of the homeownership metric by Jed Kolko, Chief Economist at Trulia.

Will the US become a nation of renters and micro-houses? If one makes those arguments out over the long term, I don’t know what compelling information those trends would be based on.

Tags: Square Footage, home ownership

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Former US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is promoting his book chronicling the financial crisis Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises. Great book name, btw.

He sits down with Vox Media’s Ezra Klein to talk about what happened. I highly recommend watching this entire interview. Once you get past Ezra Klein’s sock selection, he touches on all the key points that would help us better understand what went wrong. It reconfirms why I enjoy reading anything Ezra writes.

I also have to say that Geithner has a great engaging conversational style that I enjoyed and helped me gain additional insights. However the problem with the Geithner’s responses – that I can’t seem to get past – is that Geithner was head of the New York Fed, surrounded by Wall Street, during the housing bubble run up. You walk away from this conversation feeling like his actions were the only appropriate responses to the crisis – ie focus only on the banks (and grow moral hazard significantly). Of course it has to be a nightmare to get anything done in Washington. However, I also got that same feeling when I read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s well written “access journalism” book, “Too Big To Fail” – that saving the banks was all that mattered to him.

It doesn’t help that I read previously Neil Barofsky’s terrific book “Bailout” which provides a lot of insights into how the sausage was made – identifying the US Treasury’s exclusive focus on the banking system when there were opportunities to help main street at the same time. Apparently Geithner takes Barofsky to task in the book, probably because Barofsky did the same.

I’m not sure if I’m going to pick up a copy.

Tags: Tim Geithner, US Treasury, Stress Test, Neil Barofsky, Too Big To Fail

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Since housing bust began, Condo Vultures has led the way with distressed new development information on Miami, a housing market that became branded for foreclosures and stalled new development activity after the mid-decade crash. Their name suggests someone who is picking over the dead carcasses of stalled condos built during the boom and no one has marketed themselves more thoroughly in this segment.

They seem to perform a lot of analysis through public record and have the inside track on data from developers not in public record. Good for them. It’s a niche they own. But with that dominance comes responsibility.

Their regular email press releases are chocked full of information hyperbole (as most newsletters are) but there is often a disconnect between the headline and the content (just like we see with the monthly NAR releases). Recently I observed that they stopped the dated approach of marketing properties as a percentage discount from original pricing. I do find the releases interesting to read but I worry about the accuracy of the messaging for the uninitiated. I found the latest one grating so I thought I’d break it down because it symbolizes the challenges and responsibilities of analyzing a market segment with limited transparency.

Here’s the headline:

600 New South Beach Condos Unsold As Sales Slow Dramatically In Q4 2012

That’s sounds quite dire, right?

Not really. In a pool of 600 units, 10 sold in 4Q12, down from 20 sales in 4Q11. Let’s delve into the rules of market trends:

Misuse of percentages – The results suggest a 50% drop in sales. And to use my favorite example of this technique, a market whose sales rise from 1 to 2 experienced a 100% increase in sales. Better to say 10 fewer sales or 1 more sale than last year when the numbers are so small.

Number generalization – There are no precise numbers being provided anywhere in this release yet the results are numbers-based …less than 10 sold in 4Q12 and more than 20 sales sold in 4Q11. If you are burning calories on providing approximate metrics worthy of a screaming headline, why not provide the actual numbers? If it was 9 and 21 or 1 and 29, the same logic would apply so why omit it?

Data set size – Based on the release, there were “about 600” unsold from boom, new development condo listings in 4Q12, the same size as the prior quarter. However the release doesn’t provide the year ago quarter total. What if it was 1,200?…then the drop was proportional. Why not be transparent and just provide the actual numbers – they must have them to provide such “precise estimating.” The 10 sales or less total represents 1.7% of the inventory or even less depending on how many sales there actually were.

When I first read through this release I did some quick math – I took the 10 sales (or less) which represented 1.7% of the 600 unit market and wild guessed, based on general market activity, that this shadow inventory was at least 700 last year. So at this level, the 20 sales (or more) in 4Q11 would indicate a 2.9% share. With this logic, the sales market share of the shadow inventory fell from 2.9% to 1.7% over the year, a 1.2% drop in market share.

Should a 1.2% decline be described as a dramatic slow down? No, based on the info presented, the decline was more like a rounding error.

C’mon.

Tags: Condo Vultures

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[click to read article]

This 16-room house on the far western edge of Naperville sold in November for $1.05 million. That’s 38 percent of what it cost to build. In approving the short sale—where a property is sold for less than the outstanding mortgage amount—the lender, IndyMac, accepted a loss of over $1 million.

Here’s some local feedback from someone I know in the area – remember this is an 11,000 square foot house built in a neighborhood with homes no larger than 5,000 square feet.

I’m paraphrasing here:

This area was the last big subdivision left in land-locked Naperville which has 140,000+ people. It started in 2005, and the real estate recession hit hard in 2006 and there was a high school boundary change that put this neighborhood out of the favorable high school.

In the listing “Peterson Elementary’ is a short walking distance to this home. That school was built mid-decade and the school district never opened it because the subdivision stalled. It still sits empty 6 or so years later.

When I graduated from college my first job was very close to Naperville and in fact my boss lived there. It was called the fastest growing town in America. My boss used to tell me how she would run her lawn sprinklers at night because there were watering restrictions because of the rapid growth. It was still risky because they had full time patrols looking out for illegal lawn waterers.

Those were the days.

Tags: Naperville, Short Sales

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,br> [click to open RealtyTrac Report]

RealtyTrac released their Q3 2012 U.S. Foreclosure & Short Sales Report which shows a pretty clear recent trend:

A timeline that counters the national “recovery” discussion over the past year. Record low mortgage rates and held back distressed activity goosed housing sales and price up using year over year comparisons.

I feel like I have to qualify myself as NOT being a housing bear (a distressed housing apologist) but I still can’t figure out the math: flat to falling incomes, high unemployment, rising taxes and tight credit = housing recovery? What’s missing? (memories of my contrarian sentiment feels the same as 2006, just not nearly so dire).

Distressed sales have been held out of the mix as RealtyTrac’s report shows in my distressed housing timeline:

• 2008-2010 – Heavy foreclosure volume as a result of the fallout from the tanking economy and housing market
• 2010 (fall) – Robo-signing scandal combined with huge backlogs in judicial states causes a sharp decline in distressed sales entering the market in 2011.
• 2012 (1Q) Major servicer agreement with state attorneys general as distressed volume drops to its lowest crisis level.
• 2012 Calculated Risk and other respected sources call the bottom (and they may be right) but doesn’t factor in the distressed sale phenomenon. “Bottom” does not equal “recovery” but rather it’s a step on the way to recovery.
• 2012 (2Q) Distressed sales begin to rise again. By adding lower priced distressed sales in the mix, housing prices stabilize or slip next year nationally (I see Manhattan rising with low distressed exposure and limited inventory).

Foreclosure levels need to resume their elevated levels or we simply don’t create a real, sustainable housing market recovery. We won’t see a tsunami like 2010 as short sales continue at their high levels and the courts are still backlogged, but I believe we will see a more distressed activity in the next few years than we did during the 2012 lull and that will offset rising prices .

Call me crazy.

Q3 2012 U.S. Foreclosure & Short Sales Report [RealtyTrac]

Tags: Short Sales

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