Snow in the East Bay!

Is it still a good time to sell?

• Walnut Creek – 12
  
  
• Danville – 8
  
  
• San Ramon – 5
  
  
• Alamo – 2
  
  
• Pleasant Hill – 2
  
  
• Diablo – 1

MARKET WATCH

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• The Housing Recession is being fueled by higher interest rates and consumer sentiment: only 17% of consumers surveyed by Fannie Mae in January said that it’s a good time to buy a home, compared to 52% in January 2021. Lenders are getting creative with new products that allow you to refinance later at no charge, transferring interest rates upon sale and one-day mortgage commitments/approvals. (Marketwatch).
  
  
• The collapse of the US mall industry, long hyped by billionaire investor Carl Icahn and other doomsayers, may indeed finally be near. The industry has been shaky for years, but now that interest rates are soaring from record-low levels, lenders are beginning to move aggressively against property owners. Massive spaces occupied by malls have been replaced by massive warehouse spaces (cheaper) for online shopping. (Bloomberg).
  
  
• Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and others noted lower securities-based lending in their wealth units in the fourth quarter. (WSJ)
  
  
• The US’s budget could be balanced not by raising taxes or lowering spending, but by collecting what is owed: The IRS officially estimates the US lost $470 billion to tax cheats in 2019, and in 2021 the head of the IRS told Congress that the figure is likely much higher, perhaps as high as $1 trillion per year. Somewhere around the entire U.S. defense budget is stolen – legally and illegally – by tax cheats. This means if everyone paid what they owed, tax rates could come, down! The distraction is tax rates; the focus should be the tax code and enforcement. The preferred means of tax avoidance by corporations are offshoring and profit-shifting, setting up operations in low-to-zero-tax-rate domains such as Ireland, and then reporting your income there. In 2015, U.S. companies booked $46 billion in profits in the Cayman Islands alone, 17 times the value of the entire Cayman economy. Today more than 50% of multinational corporate profits are booked in foreign tax havens. You and I pay for this. (Scott Galaway).
  
  
• As the fear of recession looms those renting their homes may have to cut back on their rental rates: well-off vacation home rental customers that boomed during the pandemic, renting whole homes in places like beaches and mountains, are shifting in the opposite direction. Revenue per available room for short-term U.S. vacation rentals is forecast to decline in 2023 after years of growth. (WSJ).
  
  
• Another list. Oh boy, here we go, are you ready? The 10 most sinful states in the US according to Wallethub are Nevada, California, Louisiana, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, South Carolina, and New York based on greed, vanity, anger & hatred, jealousy, excesses, and vice and lust. What's next?
  
  
• While 58% of respondents to a recent survey making less than $50,000 said they were significantly impacted by inflation in their lives, a surprisingly high 35% of those making $150,000 or more said so too. Walmart said in its last earnings call that nearly 75% of the grocery market share it gained came from households that make more than $100,000 in annual income. (WSJ).
  
  
• So who buys all these swell properties we showcase at COMPASS? The number of New York City’s millionaire residents grew by 40% from 2012 to 2022: Chicago had a 24% growth rate and Los Angeles had a 35% growth rate in the same time frame. New York City has 340,000 millionaires, while Los Angeles has 205,400 and Chicago has 124,000. But wealth is spreading around the country. Austin saw the highest millionaire growth rate between 2012 and 2022, with 30,500 people with $1 million or more in assets living in the city, a 102% growth rate in the past 10 years. Other cities were Scottsdale, AZ,(up 88%), West Palm Beach (up 90%), and Miami (up 75%).
  
  
• Connecticut’s neighboring towns of Greenwich and Darien have a combined population of around 85,000 people and 11,900 of them are millionaire residents, a growth of 72% in the past decade. That means nearly 15% of people living there have upwards of $1 million in assets.
  
  
• Debt across all categories totaled $16.9 trillion, up about $1.3 trillion from a year ago, as balances rose across all major categories. (CNBC).
  
  
• Globally, inflation is 6.4% in the US, 10.1% in the UK, 8.5% in the Eurozone, 6% in France and 4% in Japan. It’s over 57% in Turkey, 94.8% in Argentina, and 7.9% in Mexico. (FT)
  
  
• “Inflation usually lags sustained changes in the money supply by 12 – 24 months. By April 2021, headline inflation had increased to 4.2% from 1.5% in March 2020. By March 2022, it was 8.5%. Year-over-year we said inflation would end 2022 at 6% – 8% and would fall to 5% by the end of 2023. We are lowering our forecast for the year-over-year inflation rate from 5% to between 2% – 5% at the end of 2023”. – John Greenwood, Johns Hopkins Institute of Applied Economics.
  
  
• Utah’s population grew from 2,763,885 people in 2010 to 3,271,616 in 2020, up 18.3%, the highest in the US. People move to Utah for its natural beauty, tons of open spaces and National Parks, low crime, education, and strong local economy. It has a 4.9% flat state income tax, good for high earners, and not-so-great for lower earners.
  
  
• Mortgage demand dropped 7.7% as rates trended a bit higher. Re-financing dropped 13% in the week. Purchase applications dropped 43% compared to a year ago. Retail sales rose 3% versus 1.9% estimates. (CNBC).
  
  
• Homebuilder confidence in the market for newly-built single-family homes in February rose seven points to 42, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, the highest reading since September, the largest monthly gain since June 2013. (CNBC).
  
  
• The housing market has decelerated rapidly as the Fed raised interest rates, but that swing hasn’t produced the job losses economists expected. There are about eight million construction workers in the U.S. Based on the swings in housing activity, models predict we could have lost 500,000 to 800,000 jobs. Housing tends to have large force multipliers in the economy since home purchases are often accompanied by further spending on things like landscaping or furniture. With these ripples through the economy, the total would come to 1-3 million layoffs. That would be a genuine recession.
  
  
• In case you were wondering why Louis Vuitton is so expensive, know that 50% of its goods sold are profit! LVMH is now re-phrasing its classification from being a Luxury brand to a Culture brand, embracing products, music, media, etc. LVMH is now in hotels, Wines & Spirits, Fashion & Leather Goods, Perfumes & Cosmetics, Watches & Jewelry, and Selective Retail the world loves Luxury!
  
  
• Canada has banned foreign home buyers for 2 years in its attempts to curb price escalations, and has passed a 1% annual tax on the market value of underutilized properties: It took effect on Jan. 1, and tax bills will be due on April 30. Vacation properties that are not weatherized are exempt, as are properties that are occupied more than 180 days per year. That’s $3,000 per year on a $300,000 home.
  
  
• High inflation persisted in January, with the consumer price index (CPI) rising 6.4% from a year ago, even though this is much lower than the 9+% seen last June, and down from 6.5% in December, oil, gas, natural gas, housing, and food costs remain elevated and rising. Egg prices rose dramatically caused by a Bird Flu outbreak, although wholesale prices are already down 50% more recently. Appliance and TV prices dropped notably. (CNBC).
  
  
• 88% of buyers had a home inspection before closing in 2022. A pre-listing inspection is becoming more common these days to help sellers identify issues that may be rectified before listing so they do not become a (more expensive) item later. (WSJ).
  
  
• US consumers will spend about $26 billion on Valentine’s Day, enough to build about 74,000 $350,000 homes or feed 10 million for a year just sayin’!
  
  
• As many office buildings sit empty or near-empty after a decade of COVID-fueled rebalancing of markets – combined with many firms desire for brand new, fully amenitized office buildings with high ceilings and huge floorplates – developers are circling in their ambitions to convert many of them to residential, certainly nothing new as witnessed by COMPASS’ One Wall Street, once home to the Bank of New York Mellon, originally the Irving Trust Company Bank. Now it houses over 500 apartments with breathtaking amenities, a Whole Foods, and a soon-to-open Printemps from Paris! (FT).
  
  
• Chatter has emerged defining the economy now as experiencing a ‘rolling recession’. A rolling recession occurs when the recession only affects certain sectors of the economy at a time. As one sector enters recovery, the slowdown will ‘roll’ into another part of the economy. On the whole, rolling recessions occur regardless of nationwide or statewide economic recession, and the effects may not be in the national economic measures (e.g.GDP).
  
  
• Multiple contractors in Turkey have been arrested, some attempting to flee the country, as anger turns toward those who built the many buildings that collapsed during recent earthquakes that have tragically taken the lives of over 30,000 people. Building regulations and codes – like all laws – are only as useful as their enforcement. Are builders being made scapegoats or were building codes that address earthquake resilience violated? Building collapses happen around the globe every year: On May 16, 1968, a single match triggered the collapse of an entire corner of a massive 22-story building in London. On December 11, 1993, a landslide with the force of 200 jumbo jets slammed into the foundations of Block One of the Highland Towers apartment complex in Malaysia. On August 13, 1993, at around 10 am, the once splendid six-story Royal Plaza Hotel in Thailand came crashing down caused by the addition of 3 additional floors.
  
  
• Oklahoma had 562 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater in 2014; California had 180. Alaska, Texas, Hawaii, Oregon, and other parts of the US have seismic activity lesser known than California’s. California’s building has extensive codes related to mitigating future earthquakes. Japan, Chile, China, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Turkey, and other countries vulnerable to earthquakes have adopted the technologies to varying degrees, especially foundations that absorb ground movement. Base isolators are like shock absorbers between the building and the ground motion, letting a building slide back and forth while remaining upright during a quake. Here is a seismic activity map.
  
  
• A multiyear federal study concluded that fixing buildings after an earthquake costs four times more than building them more strongly in the first place. Apple’s California spaceship headquarters is the Rolls-Royce of base-isolated buildings. (NY TIMES).