I love getting tips from Uber drivers especially when it comes to buying real estate. We are now back at that level where real estate can do no wrong, the house humpers are confusing luck with investment acumen, and of course the sheep dive in head first at the most frothy time. It is clear that we are in a mania and hot money is flowing everywhere. Credit card offers are soaring and lending is booming across all areas: credit cards, auto loans, student debt, and housing. With housing, we are now seeing one of our favorite past-time events in treating a home like an ATM. Home equity withdrawals are now moving up in a direction that is not exactly positive if you believe in actually keeping your equity locked in instead of cementing your belief in the bubble and adding more debt. You do need to pay those loans back by the way which many tend to forget. Home equity withdrawals are simply one of the final steps in the delusional mania.
San Francisco real estate is deep into a tech driven mania. Home prices in the Bay Area are comically out of reach for most families and people are getting squeezed out like ketchup in a disposable packet. What seemed like a new peak was once again surpassed. The housing market is running on massive fumes and delusions run rampant. The justifications for current prices run abound. Yet the truth of it all is that we are deep into a manic phase of the market. The current median price for a home in San Francisco is now $1.5 million. This is for your standard crap shack flavored box. People are still buying even though volume has trended lower but just look at the current price range. A lot of this is being fueled by wildly high tech valuations and people believing that prices will never adjust. In other words, a bubble.
California has millions of young adults living at home with parents because they are unable to venture out into an expensive rental or a dilapidated crap shack costing close to $1 million. It is interesting to see many articles written by baby boomers sporting beer guts and how Millennials are “destroying†many industries like chain restaurants (i.e., TGIFs, Buffalo Wild Wings, etc) or retail stores (i.e., Sears, K-Mart, etc), or are simply not buying homes. Of course Millennials have different habits. And getting stuck with an absurd 30-year mortgage on a dump is not a big aspiration for many. They are more into health and wellness, life experiences, and many are delaying marriage. So why do they need a home? The data is backing all of this up of course contrary to the house humpers that continue to sing the praises of $1 million crap shacks. California is in a major rental revolution. And Millennials will continue to live at home in mass for a few reasons.
The housing market is running on opioid induced euphoria and the tentacles of mania are deep into every large metro area. You would think given all this unchecked optimism that mortgage originations would be near a record level since you would assume people are out buying in mass. Yet that is not the case. What is happening is people are fighting over the scraps with low inventory and are bidding prices up on crap shacks to ridiculous levels. And there is data to back this up which is important because people are living in an alternative reality. Loan origination volume hit a three year low this year. What? How is that possible when all the cheerleaders are out in the streets preaching the good gospel of buying real estate? Well the reality is that a good portion of the market is still driven by investors.
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