Agents, are you taking this time to binge or build?

Let's kick off this episode's theme with a quote from Andy Andrews, author of, Bottom of the Pool.  "You have the power to choose every moment of every day, what YOU do with your time is entirely up to you.  You can invest it wisely or waste it foolishly. 

By choosing how to invest your time, it follows that you are also choosing what you learn, how much you learn, how deeply you understand what you’ve learned, what your imagination makes of it——and in what fashion you act upon whatever that might be."

Somewhere along the line, the decisions that were made by the government in their haste to solve the consumer need, we got broken along the way. When they solved one problem, what happened is we had three to four new problems that surfaced. The very first problem was all the money that the federal reserve was pushing out in the market buying mortgage-backed securities. They were creating inequality of supply and demand and they were flooding the market with money. Now that money was creating instability and now we have ups and downs, this 2.5% coupon is just the 30-year coupon that we watched similarly to the 10-year treasury. So forget about the specific bond that I'm tracking, but this is the one that we track when we associate what is our 30 year fixed loans doing, our mortgage loans. So you'd have ups and downs, but within each day, you had very little volatility. Then the fed started pushing out all this money and every single day was a massive swing.

Think of a property manager. Property managers don't own assets and they don't have savings accounts specific to that property. They're managing your property. So that rent check comes in every month from that, they take their cut, their 10%, they pay all the bills for any maintenance that needed to happen that week or that month. They might take care of any other expenses and then they cut you a net check. So they don't have a massive piggy bank to take care of what happens if the rents don't still come in, but I'm still required to pay my owners. It doesn't work that way.

FHA said, "You know what? We're just going to wait and see." Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is saying, "No, we need the stability of the mortgage market to create stability in the real estate market. It was stable coming in. We needed to be stable going out and this is how we do it."

He's leaning in on FHA to make that happen and he's reassuring that it will happen. Now the treasury doesn't have the ability to do it on their own, but he's certainly behind it. So is Federal Chair Powell. Powell Absolutely gets it, he sees it. And interestingly enough, Mnuchin and Powell have become allies in all of this and they're going against the FHA director, Mark Calabria.

Housing is going to get worse before it gets better, but it is going to get better. And it's a timing thing. Remember we didn't start this until mid-March. We're only now in mid-April. It feels like forever. It feels like forever because we're trapped in our homes. But when it comes to financial positioning, we don't quite know where it is yet. Because remember all of the statistics for March were only half right. And now April is not over yet. So what does April's number's going to look like? But it is going to get worse before it gets better. But it will be much better when we come out of this.

One of the things that I know is true is because the housing market was so strong coming into it right up until March, the pending home sales were still strong. They still had people that we're buying. I mean, we had a phenomenal January, February, and March. Even April is off the charts and it's because everybody that we had in the pipeline, what's May to look like? But we came into this very strong. Inventory was our problem. Any of the numbers that were weak, sales numbers that were weaker than they should have been was because of inventory. But January and February were phenomenal. We had a 6.25% growth in median sales price just in January and February alone. Again, because of the lack of supply, but the demand was off the charts.

Remember that yes, manufacturing was down, but consumer spending was like phenomenal and consumer spending is 70% of the GDP. People's wages were up, spending was up, savings were up, they were feeling good. Colorado was the number two wage growth. We had consistent job growth week over week, and we had a really strong mortgage and financial environment as well. So if there was a time, and that's the silver lining I'm hanging on to, it's the time that we came into this being strong, we're going to come out of it strong.

In this episode of the DoubleCommaClub, Nicole asks you, "Are you binging, or are you building?" She covers the DMAR market for the month with a detailed dive into the status of lenders, including nonbanks, unemployment immediate and longer-term effect on demand, and whether you should be guiding your borrowers to take action now. 

Listen to this full episode to get all of Nicole's insights and results from her research for the week.

Nicole Rueth
The Rueth Team of Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation
750 W Hampden Avenue, Suite 500
Englewood, CO 80110
303-214-6393
www.TheRuethTeam.com

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