There’s an alarming imbalance between the number of people who want to sell homes and the number of people who want, or are able, to buy.
There are simply more people selling these days than buying, maybe a lot more.
The people who are actively looking to buy was down 2.5-percent during the month of July, to the lowest level since 2013.
That puts a strain on a housing market that’s already reeling under high mortgage rates and growing problems with commercial real estate.
Here in Texas, “you’ve got a lot of existing inventory that’s been scooped up by investors over these past years, but you also have a lot of new homes built, and a big problem for investors is they aren’t getting the homestead exemption,” says Melody Wright, a Florida-based housing market analyst and writer on Substack.
Homestead exemptions are only allowed to individual or married homeowners, with significant discounts for those over 65, none of which can be obtained by corporate homeowners.s
Not only aren’t the speculating investors able to obtain homestead exemptions, they’re seeing property taxes and home valuations rising along with soaring insurance costs in many cases, leading those investors to sell, sell.
“Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, so many places in Texas overbuilt,” she says, so the local housing markets are a little complicated right now.
“So they’re fire selling in places like San Antonio, for instance, already, these institutional investors, and you’re seeing it in Houston too,” she says.
“You’ve got two phenomena going on, you had people moving into Texas buying up properties for long-term rental because when everybody thought that every Californian was going to move to Texas they thought that was a really good idea.
“So when the tech bros came, they often would buy two houses.
“And then the second thing was, you have all those newly-built homes, so you’ve got a lot of new inventory that was scooped up by investors, and you’re already seeing this in Houston too.
“But this is just starting to play out, and it’s going to be pretty impactful over the next two-to-five years, and we will probably see pretty significant [home] price reductions in Texas,” she adds.