Hey there, welcome to HomeSweet - your one-stop shop for the best homeowner news. We will give you - holy homeowner - the tools, resources, insights, and memes to both build wealth and build a better life at home. Imagine a Ralph Lauren Home ad… we want you at THAT turbo-level of ease and comfort. Alright, let’s go!
The Blueprint 🗺️
🗞️ Front Porch News: U.S. home sales are down for sixth month straight; today’s housing market compared to 2008.
🛠️ Weekend Warrior: The paint, the paint, the paint, people.
🧠 Shower Thought: What to do when everything seems unaffordable?
🤡 Meme Menu: The rates are not great.
Front Porch News 🗞️
U.S. Existing-Home Sales Fell for Sixth Straight Month in July (BBG, Inman). Even the chief economist of The National Association of Realtors called this a "housing recession.” For crying out loud, the dark Sith lord Blackstone stopped buying homes in 38 cities. Last month, the average price of a U.S. single-family home hit an all-time high of $413,000. Ouch! What do homesellers, homebuyers, and homebuilders all currently have in common? A negative attitude! Pessimism is high.
Chloe Says: Homeowners should be happy they do not have to deal with this mess. Everyone knows that home prices (and rates) cannot go up forever, and we think prices will halt before the Fed lowers rates. But until one of those two things happens, homeowners can sip bourbon on their porch and watch the show.
It’s Bad Out There But It’s Still Not 2008 (Newsweek). Take a deep breath. This is not (yet) 2008. We say that because we have not seen a complete systematic failure (lenders losing all credibility with borrowers, ugly 'explosive' securities wrapped in pretty paper with a big red bow on top, etc.). And while recently some mortgage lenders have begun declaring bankruptcy or laying off workers, 2008 comparatively will be the greater disaster between the two. The current real estate predicament is caused primarily by a decade-plus of cheap money (i.e. ultralow interest rates which caused widespread speculative investment). But, still, with analyst consensus around the Fed hiking rates aggressively in September (75 bps or more), things could get worse before they get better.
Chloe Says: Homeowners can take solace that this most likely will be less chaotic than 2008, but we urge folks to behave like it is 2008. Stay safe out there, gang.
Weekend Warrior 🛠️
Everybody wants to be a weekend warrior until they realize that warriors have to (uh) train, diet, sleep, practice, and do it all over again. 'War' is literally in the title. In a word, warriors have to Work. So we minimized the work for you. Below we have two easy DIY home projects that can be started and finished in a single weekend. They will increase the value of your home without paralyzing you - forget the intensive planning and the massive $10k+ budget.
Change the paint color of rooms from dark to light (say, dark green to a light, bright grey). This will make the room literally feel bigger. Humans yearn for space, even your Manhattan-dwelling colleague who lives inside a microwave.
Make sure the ceiling color and the wall colors are different. Err on the side of making the ceilings white/off-white. Again, this makes the rooms feel bigger. Bigger is better. Such a room will make your short friend feel less short. Now, be a good friend.
Look, you can either do this yourself or you can hire someone. If the latter, google a local painting company that both has a website and whose staff wears a uniform of some sort (we are not afraid of the Dad Golf Polo swag!). Eighty percent of the local painters merely have a phone number (no website, no testimonials) and will send two ex-convicts in a beat-up white van from hell. Some of them may even do great work, but it’s not worth the risk - just hire the aforementioned Dad Golf Polo guys and you won’t be sorry.
Shower Thought 🧠
Interest rates will keep going up, making homeownership too expensive for most and thus converting shelter-seekers into renters. This is already happening, as we see (a) home inventories up 50%+ since February, (b) cancellations of home purchase agreements, and (c) lower homebuilding activity. Call it an affordability crisis:
So what’s the move? Invest in your own home, keep an eye out for foreclosure opportunities, and seek out self-storage investment opportunities (work-from-home phenomenon, people selling homes, and an increasingly mobile population mean that MORE SPACE is needed for all of people’s $#%&). Credit card debt/defaults are reaching historic highs, so be mindful with your discretionary spending so you don't become part of that statistic.
Meme Menu 🤡
Thanks for coming through and we hope you enjoyed it. See you next week.
