Most housing headlines are wrong. I break down what’s actually happening in real time. $3.5B+ sold | 8,500+ units since 2020 60k+ subs on Substack Newsletter
Jacksonville, FL
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Pending home sales fell in all 50 of the largest U.S. metros.
Second week in a row.
Seattle: -28.8%
San Diego: -25.4%
Atlanta: -23.8%
This isn't just Florida and Texas anymore.
New housing executive order.
Mortgage insurance cancellation pilot (new loans only)
Permanent title-insurance waiver on refis
A manufactured housing task force
None of it touches the real problem.
7.32% rates on prices wages can't support.
Headline grab.
Single-family housing starts just fell to 859,000. Permits: 845,000.
Builders don't stop building when there's a shortage.
They stop building when the buyer disappears.
Where builders are still building around Jacksonville movewithmomentum.com/blog/ja…
Rates "fell" this week. To 7.32%.
A year ago: 6.19%.
And mortgage applications still dropped 5.3%. Purchase apps are down 18% from last year.
We're still pricing homes like it's 2021.
Pending sales are frozen across the country. More here movewithmomentum.com/blog/ho…
Builders are sitting on 113,000 finished homes with no buyer.
In Feb 2022 it was 31,000.
Levels we haven't seen since 2009.
That's not a housing shortage. That's inventory.
How long new construction is really sitting. Full breakdown movewithmomentum.com/blog/st…
Homes for sale: +7.7% vs last year
New listings: -5.1%
Sellers aren't flooding the market.
Buyers just aren't showing up.
Transactions stall. Listings stack. Then prices correct.
The housing market right now is bizarre.
Pending home sales = lowest ever recorded (NAR, since 2001)
Home prices = still up 0.2% YoY (Redfin)
Price is the last thing to move. Not the first.
46% of foreclosure auctions last quarter were loans made in 2022 or later. That's up 73% in a year
A lot of these are FHA buyers who put 3.5% down near the top and did nothing wrong. They just bought at the wrong time
See what homes near you actually sold for movewithmomentum.com/home-va…
Mortgages originated in 2022 or later represented 46% of all foreclosure auction activity in the third quarter:
housingwire.com/articles/for…
People don't realize how much economic activity disappears when nobody buys houses.
No sale.
No mortgage.
No title closing.
No moving company.
Less spending on furniture, appliances, renovations, and repairs.
A housing slowdown doesn't stay inside the housing market.
It spreads through the economy.
And transaction volume is where the damage shows up first.
People are praying for 5% mortgage rates to save the housing market.
But they're missing something.
A lower interest rate does NOT guarantee a cheaper house.
If prices rise enough, your monthly payment barely changes.
That's why affordability is about three things:
PRICE.
INTEREST RATE.
INCOME.
Not just whatever mortgage rate makes the headlines.
A homeowner can have $150,000 in equity and STILL be financially trapped.
Think about that.
They bought at 3%.
They want to move.
But selling means replacing their mortgage with a much higher monthly payment.
So they stay in a house that no longer fits their life.
America has homeowners who are wealthy on paper but can't afford to move.
Down 28 bps from the peak. Still more than a full point higher than a year ago.
On a $400K loan, 7.33% vs 6.18% is about $306 more a month. And that's before taxes and insurance.
Run your real payment: movewithmomentum.com/calcula…
A brutal reality is hitting real estate investors.
Their property taxes went up.
Their insurance went up.
Maintenance costs went up.
But rents aren't guaranteed to follow.
And in oversupplied markets, rents can actually FALL.
Your expenses don't determine what a tenant will pay.
The market does.
A lot of investors are learning that lesson the hard way.
I used to underwrite single-family rental portfolios on Wall Street. Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 Rent.
They didn't cause 2008. They showed up after, when the rent finally covered the house.
Housing doesn't fall to zero. It falls to the investor bid.
America's housing market was turned into a massive wealth extraction machine... and Trump is moving to flip the entire system back toward the American homeowner...
After the 2008 financial collapse, millions of families lost their homes while Wall Street firms with enormous capital reserves purchased foreclosed properties in bulk, converted neighborhoods into rental portfolios, and began accumulating the very equity American families had spent generations building... don't even get me started on AirBNB...
Blackstone helped establish Invitation Homes, later acquiring Tricon Residential for $3.5 billion, bringing another approximately 38,000 single family rental homes into its portfolio...
These institutions could compete with families using cash, sophisticated acquisition systems, and financial resources ordinary buyers could never match...
Consider how upside down this became... Fannie Mae actually backed a $1 billion financing deal for Invitation Homes in 2017...
The federal housing machinery was helping finance institutional rental portfolios while families struggled to become homeowners... those special financing pilots ended in 2018, yet the larger corporate rental model continued expanding...
The extraction reached right down to the tenant... earlier this year, the FTC distributed over $47 million to Invitation Homes renters harmed by undisclosed fees and other unlawful charges...
Now follow Trump's moves... January brought Executive Order 14376, Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers, targeting federal support for institutional acquisitions and prioritizing families seeking to purchase homes...
Congress subsequently enacted restrictions on large institutional buyers controlling at least 350 homes, with implementation beginning January 7, 2027...
October 22 brought another executive order, Decreasing Housing Costs for the American People, pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac toward automated mortgage insurance cancellation for qualifying future borrowers, cheaper refinancing, fewer unnecessary fees, and more efficient housing production...
Then comes the unmistakable signal... Super Intelligence (SI) is explicitly entering federal housing policy to improve mortgage risk assessment and property valuations...
The pieces are converging... institutional purchasing power faces new restrictions, federal housing finance is being redirected toward affordability, advanced manufacturing could expand supply, and technology offers a path to removing financial burdens that have followed families throughout homeownership...
Corporations can earn healthy profits building, financing, and servicing American homes... an economy built around widespread ownership creates opportunities for businesses to prosper alongside the families they serve...
That is the larger sovereign prosperity shift... restoring the flow of wealth toward the people generating it, expanding ownership, reducing dependency, and allowing Americans to retain more of what they earn...
A family home should build family equity... that equity should become generational wealth, strengthening communities and giving children something tangible to inherit...
The American Dream was never supposed to become Wall Street's rental portfolio... it's time American families reclaimed the upside...
