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[ad_1] First thing’s first. There’s a problem with the U.S. single-family housing market. “U.S. housing supply is dwindling once again as homes continue to fly off the market at record prices,” said Jeremy Sicklick, CEO of real estate data analytics firm HouseCanary. “For homebuyers, across the country we expect the shortage of homes for sale to extend well into 2022.” In assessing blame for a high-demand, low inventory housing market, one finger is pointed at companies that purchase single-family homes as an investment. “Selling out: America’s local landlords. Moving in: Big investors,” reads a Reuter’s headline from this July. “A $60 billion housing grab by Wall Street,” trumpets an October New York Times magazine story. Last month, Zillow said it was winding down its iBuying division, and courting corporate investors to buy its 18,000 homes remaining in inventory. Meanwhile, Redfin released a report with the headline: “Investors bought a record 18% of U.S. homes that sold in the third quarter.” But despite these headlines and recent developments, big investors and Wall Street play a small role in the U.S. single-family home market. Take the Redfin report. The report’s methodology is a keyword search from counties with publicly available deed records, using the keywords “LLC” “Inc” “Trust” “Corp” and “Homes.” An “LLC” can be used by individual homebuyers to shroud their identity, and “Anyone with a living trust is supposed to buy the home in their trust’s name,” said John Burns, at John Burns Real Estate Consulting. Added Burns, “I would ignore this study completely.” Sheharyar Bokhari of Redfin, who co-authored the study, acknowledged it is “Very hard to figure out which homeowners are really Wall Street firms and which ones are mom-and-pop landlords.” The report should be read for what it is, Bokhari said, the universe of possible “investors” who do not use their home as a primary residence. This includes institutional investor Invitation Homes, or a person who buys a property and then rents it out on Airbnb. It’s this latter group – which also includes owners of a summer home, timeshare participants, and people who hold on to the abode of a deceased relative – who predominate non-owner-occupied single-family homes in America. As HousingWire reported last month, an Amherst Pierpont study found that 85% of single-family U.S. rentals are owned by investors who own 10 or fewer properties. Institutional investors – companies with a multistate presence and the capital to buy dozens of homes at once – own 2% of single-family rental homes, or less than 300,000, the study found. The National Rental Home Council – a Washington, D.C. group that lobbies for Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 Rent and most other corporate single-family landlords – puts the number at 261,000 homes owned by their members. That’s 1.1% of all single-family rental units in the country. It’s 0.2% of all housing units in the country. Burns, the real estate consultant who produces his own data on single-family home investors, said he believes the trade group’s numbers to be accurate. The National Rental Home Council data raises questions about why corporate single-family home ownership is a focus for some real estate agents, and, well, journalists in diagnosing the housing market’s ills. Still, the overall number does not end the possibility that institutional investors may impact particular geographic areas or niche housing economy sectors, including iBuying. HousingWire recently had an extended discussion with David Howard, who is the executive director of the National Rental Home Council. Howard is, as they say, inside the beltway, having worked in Washington on behalf of various housing organizations for the last 22 years. This includes time with the National Association of Real Estate Investments Trust and the Urban Land Institute. Howard discussed what his organization does, and the contention that, regardless of their exact reach, the impact of big investors in single-family homes is harmful. Here’s an edited version of that conversation. HousingWire: What’s the National Rental Home Council’s objective? David Howard: We are a trade association that represents the single-family rental industry. We do a good bit of legislative and regulator work. We are a relatively young organization (founded in 2014), which reflects the fact that the single-family rental industry is relatively young. In the past 12-18 months, we have also focused on issues that were borne out of the Covid crisis including moratoria on evictions, rent control, and rental assistance. Lately, we’ve been working with various legislators in our offices in D.C. on issues of home ownership and affordability. HW: You say it’s a relatively young industry. Is it true to say that the single-family rental industry got its start after the housing bubble burst in 2008? DH: The business of single-family rental has been around as long as I can remember. Certainly, the great financial crisis accelerated the growth and development of the single-family home industry. From 2007 to 2014, institutions accounted for about 2% of homes that were purchased out of foreclosures and short sales, which is out of five million-plus homes. That period of time did jumpstart things for the industry. There were very few people actually purchasing homes, and home prices started falling. Investors came in, and I think we created a floor for the housing market. HW: How did you arrive at the figure that your members own 261,000 single-family homes? DH: At the end of the year, we ask our members to provide a count of properties owned by state. We already have prior statistics and have a pretty good sense of the inventory of some companies who are publicly traded. When companies join, they do commit in writing that they will accurately self-report. I have no concern about the validity of the data. HW: Any major institutional investors that are not members? DH: Yes, Amherst Properties and they have a portfolio of about 35,000 properties nationally. HW: Okay, that’s a small part of the market, but your members might be making a significant dent in some areas including iBuying. You have said before that

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[ad_1] U.S. consumers see near-term inflation rising at twice pace of wage gains, survey shows [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Zqube Infracon was declared the highest bidder for the commercial property in Powai, Mumbai — which had been mortgaged to Srei Infrastructure Finance (SIFL) — after an e-auction on August 11. SIFL had engaged iQuippo as the auctioneer to sell the property, whose owner is Supreme Infrastructure India. [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Oregon State Rep. Mark Meek When the Dolensky family made the decision to sell their home of 20 years in the Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, a home they had raised four children in, there was a sense of melancholy surrounding the experience. But changes brought on by the progression of life and work made it clear that it was time to move on.  To their delight, they received two “more or less equally strong offers” on their home. In the end, they decided to sell their beloved home to a newly married couple who expressed in a letter accompanying their offer, their desire to raise a family in a home and a school district that clearly had been good to the Dolensky’s now-adult children. “It certainly wasn’t my parents’ main deciding factor,” the second oldest son, Tim, said. “But I know they were happy to know that it was going to people who were clearly as in love with it as they were when they moved in, in 1999.” As local housing markets across the country have hit alarming highs over the past 18 months, buyers desperate to get into a house have tried anything and everything to win the deal. From waiving contingencies such as home inspections, to offering to pay for the seller’s moving expenses, and even pledging to name their first-born child after the sellers – buyers and their agents have been doing their best to get creative. One tactic that has been popular for years, writing letters of introduction or “love letters” to the home seller to accompany the offer, however, has recently come into the spotlight and not in a good way. Earlier this year, lawmakers in Oregon passed a bill (HB 2550) that banned sellers’ agents from passing “non- customary documents” on to their clients, which has largely been interpreted as a ban on love letters. The bill was sponsored by Democratic state representative Mark Meek, who is a real estate broker himself. Meek and others argued that the law was necessary “to help a seller avoid selecting a buyer based on the buyer’s race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, marital status or familial status as prohibited by the Fair Housing Act (42 U.S.C. 3601 et seq.).” Although this is the first law in the country to attempt to put a stop to the so-called love letters, the practice has been under fire for a few years now. In an October 2020 Fair Housing Corner blog post, the National Association of Realtors warned agents that, “While this may seem harmless, these letters can actually pose fair housing risks because they often contain personal information and reveal characteristics of the buyer, such as race, religion, or familial status, which could then be used, knowingly or through unconscious bias, as an unlawful basis for a seller’s decision to accept or reject an offer.” In response to the passage of the law, last month, the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian public interest law firm, filed a preliminary injunction against the new law on behalf of Bend, Oregon-based Total Real Estate Group. Total Real Estate Group is asking for a federal judge to block the law before it goes into effect on January 1, 2022. The injunction claims that the ban violates the First Amendment rights of brokers, agents and their clients and that based on previous precedents set by commercial speech cases, such as Virginia State Bd of Pharmacy v. Virginian Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., and Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission, the “law forbid, or at the very least substantially burdens, this valuable exchange of truthful and non-misleading information.” Pacific Legal Foundation is no stranger to First Amendment cases. The organization has successfully argued many free speech cases for their clients, including in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, in which the Supreme Court voted 7-2 in favor of PFL’s client MVA, finding the state’s restriction on clothing worn in polling places to be unconstitutional. While the organization has also had success arguing property rights cases, this will be their first case that combines free speech and real estate. Although he disagrees with PFL and TREG’s reasoning, Allan Ryan, a Harvard University professor who teaches “The Constitution and the Media,” believes that the First Amendment claims against the law are strong. “I don’t think the issue of whether or not it’s commercial speech will be the key here,” Ryan said. “What I think is the key, is that what you’ve got is a regulation that is both over inclusive and under inclusive. It is over inclusive because it bans all love letters that are transmitted to the seller by the seller’s agent even though the letter may have absolutely nothing in them that could lead to discrimination. It could say something like ‘This is an old house and I love historic homes.’ Nothing about that has anything to do with protected classes. It is under inclusive because all it does is focus on letters that are transmitted by the seller’s agent. There is no prohibition on a buyer writing a letter and dropping it through the mail slot of the home.” In other words, Ryan feels that in order to withstand scrutiny, the law needs to be more narrowly tailored to fit the exact types of speech and means of communication that are in violation of the Fair Housing Act. “If there were a law that said something like ‘No prospective buyer can urge that a sale be made to them based on a protected class status’, then I think you have two things there: there is a compelling interest on the part of the state based on fair housing legislation in place and you also have a narrowly tailored law,” Ryan said. However, with the law as it currently stands, Ryan sees too many loopholes for sellers to garner information on the protected class status of the prospective buyers, either through communications transmitted directly to the seller from the

[ad_1] Each week, Cut the Crap Investing founder Dale Roberts shares financial headlines and offers context for Canadian investors.  Investors take another look at Omicron, markets spike You may remember that last week I wrote:  Omicron continues to steal the headlines—and the attention of investors. When this new and concerning variant first came to our attention, stock markets sold off. As has long been suggested in this column, stock markets do not like uncertainty. And Omicron was a mystery. We fear the unknown.  It’s still early days, in what might be a new Omi-inspired stage of the pandemic. The markets, and many medical experts around the globe, are becoming more accepting of the new phase. Fear is dissipating somewhat, and stock markets roared back to “risk-on” mode.  Here’s how the U.S. stock market (S&P 500) responded: Source: FactSet via CNBC  Markets were up again on Wednesday, December 8. The next day, they were taking a bit of a breather. Canadian markets followed the U.S. lead.  The optimism is based on limited and early analysis of Omicron, but it was enough to move the markets, according to this CNBC post:  “Time will tell whether investors are getting ahead of themselves but a couple of days without a negative omicron headline has the dip buyers flooding back in,” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA. “On Friday investors rotated out of tech stocks on those Covid-related fears, and into names linked to the recovering economy. Many market strategists and analysts have called this an overreaction but Erlam urged cautious optimism.”  And, once again, it was the retail investor that bought the proverbial dip. This is from Forbes:  “SURPRISING FACT: Despite the market having its worst day of the year on Friday, November 26—with the Dow dropping 950 points, investors bought the dip en masse last week, according to recent data from Bank of America. The firm said that total stock inflows from clients totaled $6.7 billion last week—the highest intake since 2017.” The price of oil took a major hit, down 15%, when Omicron first offered a glimpse of its unique spike proteins. Oil stocks sold off as well. I embraced that risk and added to Ninepoint Energy  (NNRG) last Friday at $27.80. The Energy ETF is trading at $30.88 as I write this. A nice short-term jump. That said, anything can happen, and I doubt that Omicron is done on the fear-factor front.  While there is no definitive answer for the week ending on December 12th, the early reports seem to suggest that Omicron stands a very good chance of becoming the dominant variant at large across the globe.  Many early signs suggest that omicron will steer the direction of the global pandemic. We will likely have the answer in 2 to 3 weeks. #Omicron #pandemic #VariantOmicron Then more questions to be answered. https://t.co/OO2mbe1okd — CutTheCrapInvesting (@67Dodge) December 9, 2021 We don’t know how Omicron will steer the direction of the pandemic. My framing from last week still stands:  “On the other hand, the Omicron variant may pose no threat, or it might be the status quo on the pandemic front. Or, this prolific variant (it has more mutations than other previous variants) might pose a real threat. If it can evade vaccines, we might be somewhat starting over. At the other end of the spike protein spectrum, Omicron may be the best thing that has happened during this pandemic.”  If Omicron becomes the dominant variant and is far less dangerous, we might potentially get to the other side of the pandemic in accelerated fashion and with less harm.  It will come down to the danger level of this new variant.  BlackRock: What did we learn from 2021?  BlackRock (BLK), the world’s largest asset manager, offers three investment lessons from 2021. This paragraph sets the table for the report:  “As 2021 draws to a close, we draw three lessons. First, you need a compass to navigate the unique backdrop of a noisy restart of economic activity. Ours was the New nominal: The policy and market response to inflation would be historically muted. Second, realize that the journey for the world to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 is starting now. Third, have courage of conviction.”  In this Making Sense of the Markets column, I looked at the mid-year review from our friends at BlackRock. Back in July, BlackRock offered:  “A restart is not a traditional business cycle recovery—you can only turn the lights back on once, so to speak. Fiscal stimulus and easy monetary policy have provided a bridge through the pandemic. We have estimated the U.S. has seen more than four times the stimulus compared with the GFC [Great Financial Crisis] for less than one-quarter the shock.”  “We are taking advantage of the pullback in U.S. inflation breakevens to return to an overweight on Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS). We find TIPS particularly attractive relative to inflation bets in the euro area where the outlook for inflation remains sluggish. We also like other inflation-linked exposures, such as commodities and real assets. We prefer TIPS to nominal U.S. Treasuries.” Inflation-linked exposure has been a common theme in this column. We covered those Canadian options for TIPS in this post. Personally, I’m more inclined to use commodities and real assets as they offer more torque, in the fight against inflation. But many investors will certainly go at inflation from all sides, with commodities, other real assets, and an inflation-adjusted bond component.  BlackRock more recently reports:  “Our anchor to interpret this macro environment has been that normal business cycle logic does not apply. The COVID19 shock was more akin to a natural disaster, followed by a powerful restart of economic activity. This restart is nothing like the long, grinding recovery following the 2008-2009 financial crisis. It’s more like the world turned the lights back on. Economic activity surged, corporate profits rebounded at an astonishing pace in the restart, and developed market (DM) equities ripped.”  From that report, here’s a chart that shows the

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[ad_1] Russia says it may be forced to deploy intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe [ad_2] Source link

[ad_1] Trade, import and export for MSMEs: India’s diamond exports are likely to grow past the $20-billion mark this fiscal year from around $16.4 billion revenues last fiscal, according to Crisil. [ad_2] Source link

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