Tune into Lance Lambert’s episode on the MovotoMic to learn from a seasoned data storyteller and housing market expert. From building a following of more than 80k followers on X to co-founding his own company, this episode is a must listen. For more updates follow Movoto on Instagram @movotorealestate or download the Movoto app. You can find Lance on X and make sure to keep up with the housing market by following his work with ResiClub.
Full Episode:
Full Transcript:
Patrick: All right. Hello and welcome to Movoto Mic, a new real estate podcast brought to you by Movoto.com. My name is Patrick Kearns. I’m an ex-journalist and 10-year vet of the real estate industry, currently working as Movoto’s head of communications. With me today, as always, is my associate Sophie Brandeis. Sophie, how are you doing today?
0:23
Sophie: I’m doing great, Patrick. After doing some research on our guest, I’ve decided that my name doesn’t sound nearly as cool as his and I wonder what my parents were thinking when they chose my name.
0:34
Patrick: Not about Sophie. Who have you brought as our guest today?
0:38
Sophie: So today on Movoto Mic, we are joined by someone whose ongoing creation of content has been instrumental in shaping not only my understanding but that of countless others when it comes to the intricacies of the housing market. On top of that, he has a really nice sounding name, and that someone is Lance Lambert. Previously, Lance has worked as a data journalist at Bloomberg and Realtor.com and as the real estate editor at Fortune magazine. Lance is not just a journalist; he’s a data storyteller and an entrepreneur. Lance Lambert is currently the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Resi Club, a media and research company dedicated to unpacking the housing market from a regional lens. With that, welcome to the Movoto Mic, Lance.
1:17
Lance: Well, thank you for having me. Housing, housing, housing. Always so much going on both in the market and the industry. It’s just been a crazy few years, and you know, it looks like it’s going to be a crazy few more heading forward in many different ways.
1:35
Patrick: I love it. Let’s start a little bit about your career journey. You are a journalist by trade, right? Sort of a journalist first. Talk to me about housing as a beat, how you fell into real estate. Like, I found it as a passion but started in sports when I was a journalist. Like, what brought you to real estate and what’s made you want to build your career in real estate?
1:56
Lance: I would definitely describe myself as an accidental housing journalist. I had worked at publications including daily newspapers like Cincinnati Enquirer and Dayton Daily News. I’ve always been more analytical and more into the data. And when I was at Bloomberg, I kind of made a career decision that I was going to leave media. I was going to leave journalism. I wanted to actually go become a data scientist. And so I decided to take a bridge job where I would take a job that was kind of a little bit outside of traditional journalism but also would put me in a position where I could take classes on the side and kind of prepare myself for the career transition.
2:41
Lance: And so I went to Realtor.com and, you know, I was very much into the data there. I was pretty much their data storyteller and helping them build out a strategy for using their data to tell stories, get attention. And when I was there, it was, you know, every day it was in the SQL databases, analyzing housing data down to a zip code level all across the country. And they had a lot of proprietary data, both that they don’t necessarily share publicly and that they buy throughout from, you know, a lot of different sources across real estate. And when I was there, you know, deep in the data, I made a decision which is I didn’t want to become a data scientist anymore. I decided that I was almost going too deep into my own head because I was already a little more introverted, more analytical. And I kind of realized if I went even further that way, I was just like too far in my head.
4:00
Lance: And it’s kind of a hard thing to explain, but pretty much when I would be doing a lot of the data analysis, I could go like hours with not even talking, and I was just like deep into thought and super focused. And I just decided that’s not really where I wanted to take and spend my time. But I decided I did want to still be a data storyteller. So I left Realtor.com, and I went to Fortune magazine to build a data newsletter for executives and for CEOs across Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 companies. And it was called Fortune Analytics. And pretty much what it was is me just doing a poll and trying to tell a story every week for these different executives. And when I was at Fortune, I had started in 2019. In March 2020, you know, you might have heard about this—the lockdowns, the pandemic, all the craziness happened.
4:45
Patrick: A wild time for real estate.
4:47
Lance: A very wild time for real estate. And, you know, it’s wild now, but it’s been four years. It feels like yesterday, but four years have passed since then. But what occurred at the time is that housing went into a cyclical boom. It started to boom despite, you know, unemployment being elevated. Despite, you know, the economy passing through those lockdowns, there was that elevated demand for housing, there was all of the stimulus, there were the low rates, and of course, you know, that secular shift to work from home, which accelerated the amount of housing demand because people needed more space. And so home prices started to boom, lumber, commodities, home building took off. And I found myself one week writing a story about housing or lumber. A couple of weeks later, following back up, and it slowly just got to the point where, you know, almost where it is today where it’s like just nonstop.
6:01
Lance: And so I got sucked in. And what sucked me in was what was occurring out in the outside world. People just had a lot of uncertainty, they were trying to figure out what was going on. And then the fact that because I had spent that time at Realtor.com, I knew this data intimately and I was able to tell stories that were a bit different than some of the national outlets. A lot of them just focus on the existing home sales report or the Case-Shiller number comes out. And I could kind of take it a step deeper, and it was like, hey guys, look at these remote parts of Boise, you know, around Idaho, and these parts of Texas and Austin and Tampa and Jacksonville, and kind of get down deeper in a way. And that’s what helped to accelerate the audience that I was able to build. And so a lot of, you know, what I built was my Twitter and, you know, getting my name out there.
7:01
Lance: Which I appreciate that you like the byline. I never get that compliment, so I’ll take it. If anything, it’s the opposite where some people are like this name sounds made up. I’ve got a few of those. And that was when I got it, you know, I covered the fact that, you know, GameStop was unsustainable and all of the GameStop apes came at me on Reddit and were making fun of my name.
7:28
Patrick: If you’re not being made fun of on Reddit, you’re probably doing something wrong.
7:31
Lance: Hey, I’ll take it. And, you know, it is true as somebody who writes and, you know, makes content, publicity is good even sometimes when it’s bad. And so when I was at Fortune, I went from what I was doing with Fortune Analytics, built a different business for them called Fortune Education, which is a lead generation vertical. And then I became the real estate editor just because I kind of pushed myself in that direction with my coverage. And what occurred is I kind of got bit by the entrepreneurial bug while I was doing all this coverage of housing. When I was building that business, Fortune Education, I built out a team for it. And I kind of, you know, was like, wow, this is kind of fun building a business. But it’s like if you build a business for another company, you don’t get the upside for it, right?
8:41
Lance: You don’t take the risk, but you also don’t get the upside. And I kind of just realized I like working a lot and I like also building a business. And I also really am passionate about this housing real estate, and it’s like, hmm, maybe I should just bring all those together. And instead of building a business for another company in an area that I also wasn’t passionate about, I’d build a business for myself in a place that I’m passionate about. And so all of last year for me was kind of laying the foundation for that move. And it was continuing to build the audience. It was finding what partner, if I was going to do it with a business partner, that would be the best for me. And I came into contact with Anthony Pompliano. You know, he’s really big in the Twitter space. He has like 1.6 million followers. And now some people might be like, why would you do it with Anthony? His whole thing is crypto.
9:35
Lance: But to me, I saw Anthony as someone who had expertise in a financial asset. That’s kind of how I viewed him. And I viewed him as somebody who kind of built it from scratch, built from the ground up. And he was somebody that I liked, and I had worked with his wife at Fortune, and I just felt like it was the right relationship. And so we went into this, and in October of 2023, we launched Resi Club.
10:01
Sophie: It’s so funny you bring up Twitter because I think people don’t see the value always that like social media networking brings. But like I, before working at Ojo, which you know, is Movoto, every job or every writing opportunity, especially as a journalist, that I got was from relationships with people I met on Twitter, right? So it is like there are so many people creating and building things on Twitter, and it is like a pretty tremendous way to network regardless of your feelings about who owns it or what its name is or what its logo looks like right now. I’ve probably built more of my career on Twitter than in rooms and real estate conferences and things like that.
10:45
Lance: Exactly. Twitter is the sandbox for Resi Club. I test my ideas there. I see the things people are interested in. I find the things people aren’t interested in. I brought the audience together there, and yeah, a lot of opportunities have come from it. And the great thing about Twitter is that it’s upstream. It’s upstream in thought, it’s upstream in culture, it’s upstream in a lot of these different things. And so, even though most people aren’t on Twitter, the fact that you can quickly and over time show your viewpoint, show how you think, show a lot about yourself, and you can also push ideas too that later become downstream, it’s a good place because it is upstream and it’s a natural fit for showing your view on something, trying to show, for me, I show a lot of data there and it’s very digestible and it works.
11:35
Lance: Now, the downside to Twitter is there because it is essentially you’re blogging in real time. You have a thought, you throw it out there. You can easily burn bridges and maybe shit talk when you shouldn’t be.
11:59
Patrick: I have 100% done that.
12:02
Lance: Some people make it a little too easy sometimes.
12:05
Patrick: They’re like asking for it. But, you know, it is, I have learned in my non-journalism more corporate job as head of communications now where words do matter quite a bit more that I’m like, all right, Patrick, tweet less, say less. You don’t have to say this. You don’t have to tell this journalist your thoughts. I still do it to some Jets beat reporters sometimes.
12:28
Lance: The Jets make everybody crazy.
12:29
Patrick: Yeah, and so I had to bite my lip a lot.
12:31
Lance: And I think that to get the most value from Twitter, avoid the toxic parts of the site. I could go on and on about how much, you know, what’s there, it’s quite a bit, you know, bite your lip at times. Be careful about the things you subtweet that are or tweet negative because somebody might take that as you tweeted about them, right? I kind of am an authority on the site for housing data and stuff. So if I see some of these people who, you know, maybe messed up on something or got something a bit wrong, instead of putting people on blast because I do have this bigger audience, I DM them. I’m like, hey, you know, I kind of think blah de blah. So just trying to be careful about how you treat people because it is kind of a rowdy place, Twitter. And so working there in a professional sense and building a business or a career there, I think is just, you know, try to avoid the worst parts of Twitter.
13:19
Patrick: And I think the power of social networking and using social media to make connections is huge. I mean, I met you on LinkedIn. I don’t know if you remember that. A few months ago, I DM’d you, and that’s how this relationship started. So when I first started this job, my first assignment was to learn as much as I could about the housing market and the real estate industry. Through doing that, I read tons of your articles, saw a lot of your tweets, and that really helped me educate myself. So my question to you is, who were the people who you learned from? How did you establish yourself as an expert in this industry, and maybe give some of our audience members some tangible tips to become experts themselves, like you did.
14:01
Lance: You know, the honest answer is those two years when nobody followed me, nobody really knew who Lance Lambert in real estate writing was. And that was when I was at Realtor.com. But I just had access to a tremendous amount of data, and I would spend my time cutting through the data, going through it. And then, you know, there’s a lot of reading. And that was also a time in my life where, you know, I read a lot of books, I read reports. To be honest with you, I don’t read very much now. Maybe it’s because I have kids or, you know, busier. I spend a lot more of my time writing, producing content, and then just analyzing the data and hearing my thoughts on it. So I think having a journey where a part of my career was kind of just down and deep in thought and reading a lot, analyzing data, and learning has set me up for this place where now I’m kind of, you know, teaching people how to analyze the market, writing about what’s going on in the market, trying to highlight businesses that are up and coming throughout the real estate space.
14:57
Lance: So it’s all the things that laid that foundation. Everybody learns in a different way, so I don’t necessarily have great resources. But if you want to learn like, you know, how to analyze what’s happening in the market and which, you know, metrics maybe to follow for housing, hey, you could follow me. There you go. I’d love to teach people about that. But in terms of learning, I think it really just boils down to having a great assessment of yourself and knowing how you learn and just building that journey around that.
15:36
Sophie: Something I’d love to ask you because I think you do such a great job of it at Resi Club and you did a great job of it as a journalist, and you mentioned a little bit about it, is that you make data stories interesting. I’m somebody who’s done that in the past too, right? I’ve done it as a journalist, but also then done it on the communication side where we were putting our data in a way that we want a journalist to consume it and we wanted the public to consume it. Like, maybe just walk me through your process of like, okay, we’ve got this data that we’ve got, I’ve got the access to the same MLS data that everybody else had. Like, how am I making that thing? How do I make that interesting? Now, you don’t have to give away the secret sauce but sort of just like walk me through some of the steps and the things that you look at to make a data story compelling.
16:22
Lance: Yeah, so I think the honest answer is everything in terms of, now this is a conversation more about media, but how you create something for your audience is you build on things, so you build on concepts. And so X happens in the news. Well, X happens in the news can be reported 10 different ways. But for my, one of my frameworks is people understand now that housing affordability is very deteriorated, right? It’s very strained, right? And so, you know, I repeat that every once in a while, and it’s something that my readers know. But it’s taking housing affordability is so strained or housing affordability is so out of whack that blah de blah. So housing affordability is so strained that builders are building smaller homes. Housing affordability is so strained that people are buying deeper into the exurbs. Housing affordability is so strained that, you know, blah de blah. So it’s like taking like that framing of how you connect the dot for them very quickly. And I like to connect dots very fast within like 12 words or 10 words. And if you can’t do that, you can’t do it in 15-16 words, you know, you kind of got to work on figuring out what are the hot areas in the thing you’re covering and writing about or producing content for and figuring out how to connect the dots, interesting and new stories as they come.
17:42
Patrick: Yeah, that’s always one of the things that drives me wild is that like, especially when I was a journalist, somebody would send me like a seven or eight page PDF and be like, we just put out this big report. And I was like, you can’t, this is not like something that an audience is going to read, right? You’re tuning people out by the second page. You’ve got to put all of that up front.
18:01
Lance: And that goes back to why Twitter is my sandbox because you will find out really fast if that idea, you know, if people are going to bite onto that idea, if that’s something interesting to them or not. And then you, as you kind of build and create content in an area, you start to figure out what those different things are, and you kind of get a good Rolodex and are in a position as the news happens to, you know, set it up into an interesting light and also just, you know, help people to figure out what’s going on in the world.
18:42
Sophie: Right. So, on that note of X or Twitter and knowing your audience, can you speak a little bit towards how you built this following, how you hunker down on knowing your audience, and maybe what sort of responsibility do you feel like having such a large following?
19:01
Lance: So where my following is today, it’s buyers, it’s sellers, it’s homeowners, it’s home builders, single-family landlords, it’s real estate, it’s loan officers, it’s SFR, BTR, institutional capital that’s going into the space, it’s architects, and on and on and on and on. So I see my audience as the housing sector or the housing stakeholders, like who are the people who have risk in it or trying to buy, sell, and then the people who work in it is essentially my audience. And some people would think, oh, it’s like, oh, that’s very easy, you know, that’s your audience. But what people don’t necessarily realize is that throughout those audiences, they have many different wants and desires from housing, right? Some people want home prices to crash. Some people want mortgage rates to fall quickly. Some people don’t want home prices to crash. Some people want home prices to go up quickly. You know, the builders would love for realtors to have lower commissions. The realtors would not like to have lower commissions. And so a lot of these different stakeholders, their interests are at odds with each other.
20:20
Lance: And so I have to very delicately make sure that I don’t take a punch at these people in a wrong way. But I don’t do that by sugarcoating either. So what I have done with my audience is I’m just very frank with them, and I tell them, I am just going to be honest, I’m just going to tell you guys what I see. Here’s what it is. And so I’m very consistent. The consistent part is key because there are times that to tell the truth, I’m going to have to offend some of these groups. And so I just don’t take big hits that are unnecessary. I try to tell the truth, and I do it consistently. And that is something that people respect. So I’ve had to earn my audience’s respect, which puts me in a situation to be very honest and just chase where the story is going. There are times when one group is getting more offended than others because of what I’m writing. In particular mortgage loan officers, where in 2022, I was very insistent like, hey, guys, you know, these transaction volumes are going down very quickly. There’s a lock-in effect in the market that’s going to lead to reduced transactions over time. And that was something that, you know, the mortgage crowd in particular really hated. Now I think some of them have kind of, you know, warmed back up to me over time, but those are the things that will happen.
22:18
Lance: Going back to your question, it was, was your question who the audience is or how I built the audience?
22:23
Sophie: Both who they are, how you connect with them. And my last question, do you feel a sort of responsibility now that you’ve built such a large following?
22:29
Lance: Yeah. So I feel like I have a responsibility to just chase where the story moves. And another part of the audience building is if you look at the content that’s made for housing, there is a lot of, it’s a good time to buy, it’s a bad time to buy, you know, it’s better to rent, it’s better to buy, all this stuff. And every six months, I will tweet this thing out where I say I am not about the good time to buy, bad time to buy journalism because if you go situationally, there is always somebody that it is a good time to buy, and there is always somebody that it is a bad time to buy. And those are very individual-specific. And even if you go into the crash period, there could be some very unique situations, maybe not very many, but where somebody, it might have been good to buy somebody here.
23:11
Patrick: I think one of our Jeremiah Taylor, who is our chief real estate officer, said the best time to buy a house 20 years ago. The next best time is when you can afford the payment and you need shelter. Like, that’s as simple as it is.
23:24
Lance: And so I just try to avoid that side of it. And I’m just like, hey guys, I’m going to follow the market, tell you where rates are, tell you where prices are, how it varies regionally, what’s going on with home building, build for rent, all these different sides and less of like here is what I think you should do. And so just by avoiding that has actually set myself up to where my audience building has a higher ceiling where I can just get a bigger group across the housing sector.
24:01
Patrick: So you started small and you kept adding, and then you were able to grow your audience.
24:05
Lance: But I think the key was at the beginning to know what the audience was that I was going to build and to know that the upside was very high in terms of like how big it would get. So the audience that I’m going to, which is just as many people across the housing sector and stakeholders, buyers and sellers, which is much bigger than I’m even at, is still the audience that I was speaking to when I was very small. So what I was doing when I had 3,000 followers on Twitter and went to like 10,000 is not too different than 10,000, you know, moving up. Yes. And so the consistency and having a vision for who I wanted to write for and just going out and executing consistently.
24:45
Sophie: You take such a regional lens with how you build stories. And I think that’s really interesting. It gets the contrast of mentioned earlier, right? Like Case or home prices or census data or existing homes that was just looking at this like big national thing or even sometimes look at it like regional markets but not really on that like DMA level, zip code level, looking at actual individual cities. Can you kind of talk about why you think that approach is important when looking at data to be really regional, especially with housing data?
25:11
Lance: Yeah, it matters a lot because what is happening across the country can vary so much by market. And so if you look right now at Hartford, Connecticut, active inventory for sale is down 80% from pre-pandemic levels, right? So for every four homes that were available for sale in April 2019, there is now one active home for sale in April 2023. So from 4 to 1, that’s a crazy ratio. And then you go look at places like Austin, you look at places like Tampa, and these are places that are back to pre-pandemic levels. There’s just as many actives today as there was then. Now it doesn’t mean that the market today is the same as the market then because the affordability right now is very different. You know, we just went through a historic overheating of prices, a historic mortgage rate shock. There is still the fact that the insurance and the property tax side of the market is essentially an echo boom. It takes a while to catch up to those initial shocks. And so that’s still working through. But the fact that you can have a market like Tampa, Austin, and you can have a place like Hartford and Rochester where things are still so tight isn’t. And it’s like a question of like, okay, but which direct? Okay, so they are at X point but where are they trending?
26:29
Lance: And so I create these tables where I don’t just have one year change for price or two years, I have three, four down from peak, up from peak, you know, how much it’s up since COVID started. I create all these different columns to where if you look at one of my charts for the first 50 markets, for the 50 largest markets in the country, you can look at them and not just figure out where prices are over the past year, but you can also understand the context. It’s like, oh, Austin’s down 15% for prices, but Austin also went up 60-something percent in the first two years of the pandemic. So it’s like putting the context there. And so that’s why I have this very regional focus, and I put a lot of thought and there’s a lot that’s gone into creating those tables that I create for regional markets.
27:28
Patrick: This is just a very small aside. But like a year ago, I was living in Austin looking to move back to the northeast. And my wife and I were looking in like the Albany, Troy, Schenectady DMA where she’s from originally. And you had a tweet that was like the best inventory growth in any market in the country right now is in Austin, Texas. And the worst is in the Albany DMA. And I was like, this feels like a personal attack, Lance. Leaving Austin to go try to buy a house in the Albany area where it’s like, you know, minus 96% inventory and month supply inventory or something.
28:03
Lance: And you could still work remotely?
28:05
Patrick: Yes, we thankfully have a pretty flexible working arrangement here.
28:08
Lance: One of the biggest stories that we’re seeing in the housing market right now is what I would call a run on affordability where you still have a lot of this work from home hybrid stuff. So there’s been more of a push into, you know, people going back to where they’re from. Like I went back to Cincinnati, my wife and I are both here. You go to Albany, people going deeper into the exurbs, that still happens. And what we’ve seen less of perhaps is that initial pandemic migration, which was really focused on those hot boom towns of Austin, Boise, Tampa. Now it’s kind of like, you know, those places, the affordability is not as great. And so it’s some of these other places where people maybe have ties to where affordability is still better, that are still fairly tight for resale housing inventory because there’s just still that demand where people are kind of, you know, running for that affordability still. So yeah, that’s what I want to be able to tell, those types of stories. And that’s always happening and it’s always shifting across housing.
29:01
Sophie: So maybe to cap this off, we already talked a lot about Resi Club. But what is your North Star vision? What do you want to create?
29:08
Lance: Yeah, so Resi Club is the thing that I see myself for the next 10 plus years or maybe it’s 15 longer. You can never say too long because you never know what happens. But as of right now, the goal is to build this very unique hybrid company that’s a news company and a research company as well in the residential real estate space where we’re both writing a lot of articles for people to help them digest the data, what’s happening across the market, and then also doing research. You know, if companies or individuals come to us and they want to find out like, you know, hey, let’s run a survey together, we can do stuff like that, building deeper ties throughout the, you know, real estate data community to kind of help them also tell their stories because there’s so much real estate data out there. But there’s still a need for good data storytelling and helping take that from the enormous amount of people that work in the industry, the enormous amount of people who buy, the enormous amount of people who sell, and just the enormous amount of people who own real estate. It is the largest, residential real estate is the largest asset class in the country according to CoreLogic. And so I really just want to build this super niche news and research company that’s focused on that asset class.
30:17
Sophie: So to end the podcast, we play a game called Let’s Get Real. We’re going to ask you three questions. You’ve got to answer as fast as you can. Are you ready? You get one last article to write about real estate. What’s the headline?
30:27
Lance: Oh, wow. See, these are supposed to, it’s supposed to be fast.
30:31
Sophie: It’s supposed to be fast.
30:33
Lance: Oh boy. I would want to look at a historical analysis of home prices through some type of lens. I don’t know what it would be, but if it’s my last piece I’m going way back. I’m not even focusing on the current market because that last piece, if I make some prediction, you know, it’s probably going to not last very long. So I’m doing some like deeper historical analysis at some time period. I don’t know. To me, if you told me that tomorrow would be my last vacation, I might be less upset about that than to say I can never write an article again. That’s a pretty tough one for me.
31:03
Patrick: I love it. A true journalist there. What do you think the biggest common misconception you hear about the housing market is?
31:10
Lance: The biggest misconception of the housing market? I think just because being on Twitter every once in a while, you will see somebody say that Wall Street firms have bought up like 50% of the homes over the past year. And there was an increase in the number of homes bought by institutional buyers, those owning over 1,000 homes during the pandemic during that easy money period. But the highest quarter was still 2.2%, and we decelerated to 0.4% as of the second quarter of 2023. So, you know, and that’s a very touchy subject and I don’t have an opinion one way or the other on that, but I just want to give people the actual numbers. So I would say that that is probably the biggest misconception over the past 24-36 months.
31:55
Sophie: Last question. It’s 2014. You’re working at the Chronicle of Higher Education. What advice are you telling yourself?
32:02
Lance: I wouldn’t tell myself anything because if you give yourself advice, you give yourself a North Star, you lose out on all the learning experiences that helped you to realize that stuff. So I don’t think I would give myself any advice necessarily.
32:21
Sophie: So no advice can be good advice because sometimes you just gotta bump through things and figure them out.
32:26
Lance: I think that’s a great place to end it. Thank you for coming on the show, Lance.
32:29
Patrick: Loved it. Thank you for having me.
32:31
Lance: Happy to come on any time.
32:32
Sophie: Appreciate it. Thanks, Lance.
