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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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If a typical American believes their eyes over the economists and focuses on housing, they will view inflation as being close to zero.

Typical situation: not moving this year.

If you aren't moving, rent increases for lease renewals are generally much smaller than rent increases for new tenants. (See Zillow Rent index = asking rent for stuff on the market, vs CPI Rent which is what people who take a survey actually pay.) If you are a homeowner and have a mortgage the only thing that is going up is either home insurance or property tax (which often gets rolled in, i.e. my mortgage bill is actually principal + interest + escrow to cover property tax/home insurance), which is at most 1/3 of the total.

People see this, they feel trapped and frustrated by it

The illiquidity of the market is unfortunate. People made an interest rate bet and won a lot of money. Consider a mortgage with 25 years of $2000/month payments (principal+interest) - this was worth $446k to the bank at a 2.5% discount rate (i.e. 0% interest + 2.5% to cover default probability) but if the bank sold it today they'll get $284k (assuming 4.5% interest + 2.5% to cover default = 7%). The homeowner is richer by $162k in NPV!

But it is unfortunate that this $162k comes with a lot of hassle - namely they can only realize it slowly over time by holding onto a specific piece of real estate. A regulatory fix I'd propose: if a mortgage holder sells the loan the debtor gets a 30 day call option at the sale price + $1k.

If you aren't moving, rent increases for lease renewals are generally much smaller than rent increases for new tenants. (See Zillow Rent index = asking rent for stuff on the market, vs CPI Rent which is what people who take a survey actually pay.)

CPI Rent looks pretty high. The Zillow Rent index is actually lower at 3.2% YoY.

If a typical American believes their eyes over the economists and focuses on housing, they will view inflation as being close to zero.

Nope.

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