Bryan

Hello and welcome back to Change and the Market, your weekly look at the changing real estate market. I'm your host, Bryan, joined as always by our resident real estate expert, Mr. Chris Masiello. Chris, how are you doing this morning?

Chris

Hey, Bryan. Hey, folks. Good to be with you.

Bryan

Fantastic. We're going to get right into it. Chris, we're gonna kind of follow on from last week and talk about, you know, how the market has changed. Obviously, that's where we always start. But maybe the thing is that it hasn't changed too much. So what's our angle this week, Chris?

Chris

Well, it's the continuing developing perspective around things. I was updating our PowerPoint deck that we send out along with this video to our staff internally—so they have, you know, a deeper view into what's going on—and we source various industry articles for them. And I was going through it again like last week; I was looking at the PowerPoint deck and actually, the articles themselves provide enough of a talking point that I'll kind of shamelessly just refer to them.

But you know, one thing that really struck me was the fact that that we're in a ... for as much as we're seeing like a slowdown in annual sales and there's a lack of inventory—and those are certainly the symptoms of the environment we're in—one of the articles I read, that I forwarded to everybody, was that foreclosures and mortgage delinquencies are at an all-time low. And so I think we have to understand this to be an actually pretty stable time as it relates to housing.

Now, lots of things are changing in all facets of either social life or business life. And you've got office buildings—like in major metro markets, you know, major metro downtowns—that are being converted from office buildings into apartments. There will be a lot of different solutions for housing. But I think we need to really understand that this is really a pretty stable time.

If we take a look at our unit sales and we understand what our unit sales are generally going to be annually, then we can adjust to that to that workflow. If we take a look at inventory, we understand what that's going to be. And we still have appreciating sales prices.

And so we have, again, this total realignment of an industry. And when you look at it fundamentally, it's pretty good. And we'd all like to have more annual unit sales, of course, however, appreciation is still going up—high single digits and low double digits—and foreclosures and mortgage delinquencies are at an all-time low. So people aren't losing their homes in the middle of this shift.

I think it's kind of remarkable and I think that as an industry, we just need to find our footing in this new environment. And because it's so stable, actually, I don't think it's going to be that hard.

Bryan

Yeah, this definitely echoes what we've been talking about for the past few weeks of kind of falling into that new normal and finding that stability. And I think the thing that I kind of want to bounce back on and see—which we've touched on a little bit—and I want to see what your input is: how do you use that stability? How do people in the industry use that stability right now? I mean, you already touched on it a little bit, but is there kind of like a concrete path forward that you see using this stability that can be capitalized on?

Chris

Well, we talked about it last week: stability gives you the opportunity for more consistency. And now this is a consistency environment. And so if you're a practitioner, there are certain things, certain consistent habits that you need to get into—your sphere of influence, your database, practices as it relates to how you're going to interact with consumers, and things like that.

And as an organization, we're rich in those resources. So, you know, we'll guide our people through that. And then, I think if you're a buyer or seller, one of the things about consistency, too, is that you don't have to work or make decisions under a lot of pressure. So I think there's going to be this opportunity to be maybe even more strategic in what you're doing as a homeowner, with the "when" and the "where," like—when am I going to sell? Why am I going to sell? Where am I going to go? All those all those things.

So I think this is really a pretty remarkable period of time, actually. It's, you know—nobody likes change, but you can't avoid it. So if you can't avoid it, you might as well enjoy it. And I think this falls into that category.

Bryan

So then broadening that out beyond the scope of real estate to kind of wrap things up today, how do you how do you approach stability in your life? What do you find in stability in your life? And how do you think you can expand that to everybody else? And what should we be looking for when we're in a place of stability in our own lives?

Chris

We've gone from a very volatile environment to a very stable environment. And although there's a little chaos in going from the last five or six years—and actually, probably really since the end of World War Two, the housing cycle has always gone through 7 to 10-year, very volatile cycles. I think that's over. And so then the question now becomes, alright, we have this stability. And really the transfer or the migration from a more volatile set of cycles that we've had really since the end of the Second World War to where we are today—that's change.

And really change is where all the opportunity is. Like opportunity doesn't exist any place else other than moments of change. Opportunity only exists in the space where you've never been; it doesn't exist in the space you already know, because you already know what it is. And I think now is really a time to—whether you're in the industry or buyers and sellers—this is a great time to just assess and use this cycle, the cycle of change, to your advantage because that's where all the opportunity is.

Bryan

Just to kind of put a bow on it—I think the thing that's really interesting about this perspective is that initially, I was little like... because you're talking about finding opportunity in the change, and I'm like, well, we're talking about stability—but I think the thing you're getting at, the point that you're hitting on is that in that transition from the volatile state that we were previously in, into stability, that's the change moment. That's the kind of the fulcrum that you're talking about. And then using that period to find that opportunity while moving into stability. Is that kind of the angle you're going for there?

Chris

Well, thank you for that—yeah. So when we are going through change cycles, you have the cycle you're leaving... the change point that you're leaving to the new point that you're going to. And that gap—it can be measured by minutes, it can be measured by days, it can be measured by months, years. You know, it depends on the circumstance.

But in that gap is where all the opportunity is. And that's where it's like a slipstream—you slide into it. You know, everyone's circumstance is different. So the opportunities can be different for everybody. But that's where you get the opportunity because basically, it's like looking at a blank whiteboard. What do I want to draw? And I can create everything from that in-between space.

Bryan

Awesome. Very good stuff. Chris, Thank you for that again this week. That's going to do it for this week's episode of Change and the Market. As always, do us a favor—make sure you like, follow, subscribe, whatever you can do on whatever platform you're listening to us or watching us on, and make sure you join us back here next week for another brand-new episode of Change and the Market.

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