Competition is the mainstay of many businesses and individuals. How does UPS compete to hire drivers for their trucks? One way might be to offer air conditioning, which has been negotiated for the first time. Lenders and vendors are led by competitive people, and several own interests in major or minor league sports franchises, the latest being Stan Middleman & the Phillies. Competition in the food and beverage industry? SF’s Anchor Steam was scaling back, Tupperware is in rough straits, and now the owner of Pyrex and Insta Pot is filing for bankruptcy! How is the public expected to keep its leftovers!? Builders are out there competing for lots. Residential lenders don’t compete with real estate agents, but NAR is always discussing its lobbying efforts. This week the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) is hosting a national, industry-wide campaign to grow its free grassroots advocacy network, the Mortgage Action Alliance (MAA), a non-partisan and effective way
It isn’t as if building or lending products, or ways of doing business, were handed down by Trappist monks. Change is always afoot, for better or worse. What is old is new again. Teachers are moving to oral exams to counteract AI and ChatGPT, similar to ancient Greek and Roman times. In the West and Southwest, adequate water rights and supplies have always been contentious but have resurfaced (get it?) with news that may impact other cities and towns: Arizona began limiting approvals for new developments within the Phoenix area. It’s hard to build large affordable housing developments or swaths of housing in general if there is no water. Or road or sewage capacity. For fans of tiny homes, what is old is new again, and the Sears catalog kit houses (sold between 1908 and 1942) of old are back at Home Depot: Here’s 837 square feet for $43,000, 540 square feet for $44,000, and 444 square feet for $32k. (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s is
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I am in Reno today, Spokane tomorrow, but I spent much of last week in Chicago which is very much a melting pot of languages. One can walk down the street and hear similar words for the same thing: Hypothèque (French), hipoteca (Spanish), hipotēka (Latvian), hypotheek (Dutch), and hypothek (German). You’ll have to figure out the word on your own. Renovation there is indicative of what is happening in many other cities: Developers and city agencies in Chicago are working together on the LaSalle Street initiative, which seeks to bring 1,000 homes (including 300 affordable ones) to a mostly shuttered stretch of the city’s financial district. With plenty of people still content to work from home, living in a converted empty office may be the answer to the housing crisis in many areas. (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s is sponsored by the STRATMOR Group, the data-driven mortgage advisory. At STRATMOR, insights and knowledge are app
For some reason, companies laying off large numbers of people (most recently Better, Freedom, Mr. Cooper) make headlines, whereas shouldn’t the unusual, like companies that aren’t laying off anyone or who are hiring, be more newsworthy? There are indeed companies that are not laying off anyone, and in fact are hiring to take advantage of slow times. There is other good news. Despite inflation, elevated mortgage rates, and slowing sales activity, severely limited housing inventory will prevent large home price drops for most of the country next year according to NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun in his 2023 outlook. “For most parts of the country, home prices are holding steady since available inventory is extremely low. Some places are experiencing price gains, while some places, most notably in California, are seeing prices pull back… Housing inventory is about a quarter of what it was in 2008, distressed property sales are almost non-existent, at just 2%, a