This episode of The MovotoMic Podcast dives into the latest housing market headlines, unpacking 2025 real estate forecasts, affordability challenges, and shifting trends driven by climate risks. Featuring insights from real estate veteran Jerimiah Taylor, we explore the evolving dynamics of home prices, mortgage rates, and the role of Baby Boomers in inventory trends.

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Sophie 0:09: Hello and welcome to the Movoto Mic, the official podcast of movoto.com, the largest privately owned real estate search platform in the US. I’m your host, Sophie Brandeis and I’m here with my co-host Jenna Housson. 

Jenna 0:23: Hey, Sophie. Well, we’re here for season two and we’re shaking things up a little bit each episode, we are bringing you the top headlines for all things real estate and we’re going to have experts weigh in with their insights. So it’ll be just like we are reading the housing market news to you with an expert. 

Sophie 0:39: All right, to kick off this episode, we have a repeat guest, Jerimiah Taylor, we call him JT. JT has been around the block when it comes to real estate with over two decades in the industry.  JT,  Welcome to the mic. 

 JT 0:53: Thanks Sophie.Thanks Jenna.  Excited to be here with you all today.  Awesome. 

Sophie  0:56: All right. You ready to kick us off with the first headline, let’s do it. 

HEADLINE: Fannie Mae Lowers 2025 Housing Market Expectations
AUTHOR: Candyd Mendoza
PUBLICATION: Mortgage Professional America
LINK: Read the article here

Sophie 1:00: So the headline reads, Fannie Mae lowers 2025 housing market expectations. The main quote here is affordability is expected to remain the primary constraint on housing activity through our forecast horizon. Any initial thoughts. 

JT:  1:18: Yeah. Like, it’s funny, I think I was saying this in like June or July that, like we’re in a very real hire for longer, kind of scenario. If the economy doesn’t slow down, you know, post election, we got like a huge bang in equities. Things are going really well. Bond traders want more yield. Guess what that means, mortgage interest rates will be higher for longer. 

JT  1:43: Tariff stuff comes in could be a little inflationary. That means we could be higher for longer, higher for longer. Just means houses are more expensive for longer, just really still not enough inventory to push prices down except for at the very tippy top of the market and some pockets like Austin. And so yeah, they’re revising it down. They’re saying like we’re, they’re still saying we’re gonna grow 24 to 25. It’ll be like 4% of more home sales, not 15 or 20% more like they had originally forecasted, right? 

 Sophie 2:13: So a question I had is as I was reading up on this, I noticed some articles saying how the economy is expected to grow faster than the housing market. Is that true? Do you have a reason why? 

JT  2:26: Yeah, I mean, look, you’re with the administration that is coming in, you’re getting a very business friendly, very regulation, like very M and A VC friendly administration coming in. And so all that means like you should see a really strong economy in the US. There’s some question marks around policy, especially around tariffs and things like that and how that will impact inflation and affordability for Americans. But overall, you know, housing prices have been kind of flat because they got real high, real fast and then rates climbed real high real fast.  And you have this double whammy that kind of decreased people’s affordability substantially from 2020 to 2024.  And wages just haven’t quite caught up. Now, if we get a super strong economy, wages start to accelerate a little bit more housing prices stay kind of flat or slow because which there’s, they’re not going backwards, they’re still going up, they’re just going up slower in most places. There’s a world where houses become more affordable just because incomes outpace house price growth. 

HEADLINE: Home Prices May Fall 20%, Potentially Mobilizing Baby Boomers
AUTHOR: Theron Mohamed
PUBLICATION: Business Insider
LINK: Read the article here

Jenna 3:31: I’m, I’m interested to hear your feedback on this one.  So this headline reads that home prices may fall 20% potentially mobilizing baby boomers.  Let me read you the main quote from the from the author here, it says you have to have rates cut down, but you also have to have home prices come down.  One doesn’t work on their own. So what they’re essentially talking about is, you know, for a healthier housing market, both declining home prices and lower interest rates are necessary to address the affordability crisis and to essentially revive the activity. What are your thoughts on this?  What’s your feedback? 

JT  4:08: My feedback is like somebody wrote an article that wanted a lot of people to click on it. The reality is real estate is a hyper local thing. What happens in Austin doesn’t happen in San Diego doesn’t happen in Arizona. It doesn’t happen in Florida and even what happens in Florida doesn’t happen in Tempe. And in Miami, the same way real estate is hyper local. If you look at Austin, Texas, right? Austin was the center of this massive central Texas housing boom. It was part of a tech movement. Home prices went crazy in Austin and in the last two years, home prices are down like almost 20% in Austin.  Well, the reason home prices are down so much in Austin is because a ton of builders came in and started building and actually made up the inventory shortfall with new construction and it made that new construction more appealing than existing inventory. And so you had a lot of inventory growth. 

JT 5:01: There’s something like 11,000 homes on the market in Austin today, which represents something like five months of supply. Well, that is getting into a traditional buyer’s market and so like the realities of supply and demand ring true even in 2025. And so it’s all comes down to to, to supply and demand and inventory.   And so in markets that are landlocked, like you take San Diego, right? San Diego, you have Mexico to the south, you have the mountains to the east and then you have a marine base to the north. There is very little buildable land in San Diego. So I wouldn’t expect home prices to come down, right?  Like homes will go vertical prices will go. 

Sophie 5:46: This article is talking a lot about how baby boomers are being encouraged to sell, which increases inventory and accessibility for younger buyers. Is this trend just sort of like how the real estate industry works or do you think we’re going to see more mobility in baby boomers this next few years? 

JT 6:03: I think you see, I actually think you’re seeing the opposite. I think you’re seeing more boomers age in place than any previous generation. They’ve got crazy low debt, crazy low cost debt on their properties.  They have tons of equity and then across the country, you have a number of local policies that have incentivized that person not to sell because they can’t take their tax base with them. And so I actually think you have more people aging in place.  I don’t think you’re gonna see like this huge influx of inventory until you have mortality issues with the baby boomers. And that’s where you’ll start to see inventory pick up. 

 

HEADLINE: The Fight Over Hidden Home Listings Could Transform Real Estate
AUTHOR: James Rodriguez
PUBLICATION: Business Insider
LINK: Read the article here

 Sophie 6:37: So this next article was written by James Rodriguez. He was actually on the Movoto mic two or three episodes ago and the headline here is the fight over hidden home listings could transform real estate. So the main quote here is a shake up could mean a more fractured market forcing buyers to comb through various brokerages websites instead of centralized platforms like Zillow. And the main point here is removing the centralized MLS policy risks creating a fragmented housing market, complicating access for buyers while bolstering large brokerage firms control over inventory. I know that clear cooper operation policy has been in the news a lot, so I would love your thoughts on this. 

 JT 7:22: So let’s just get the ground truth out of what clear Cooper operation is what it says is that if you’re a member of the local MLS, that basically you agree that any property that you make publicly available for sale must be put in the MLS within some period of time. I think it’s 24 or 48 hours. I don’t recall it specifically. Generally that’s the way the world works anyways, ok? Like most agents and most reasonably competent sellers understand that more exposure equals more demand equals more money, right? However, there are times when it does not work in the seller’s favor to put their property in MLS. 

JT  8:04: Let me give you an example if you have a very high end home that has an extremely limited pool of buyers and that home is going to be hard to sell and it could take a year, two years, three years to sell that property and you’re forced to put that property in the MLS guess what, it’s gonna age and it’s gonna end up as a stigmatized property in the MLS where people are like, well, what’s wrong with this house? Why has it been on the market for two years?  Well, because it’s 99% more expensive than anything else in the area and there’s 12 people in the US that could buy it and it never should have been on the MLS anyways. That’s Robert Rifkin’s argument from compass and some of these other luxury boutique brokerages is that you don’t need celebrity homes, athlete homes, et cetera on the MLS.  And they should get to play by their own set of rules. 

JT  8:57: I actually don’t disagree with that. I think there are times when it can work against the seller to put a property in the MLS at the higher end of the market. Now, the, the other thing here is you have to look at incentives. Why would a Coldwell banker encompass a large real estate enterprise not want to be required to put their properties in the MLS because they want to win the Google game. They wanna put it on their website, they want the sco and they want the consumer to find it on their, their property search before it’s found on any of the search portals. If you have enough scale, maybe that makes sense at the end of the day as broken or whatever you wanna call it as it is the MLS system. And the, the thought of like the way that we sell real estate in the US, it’s the most functional system in the world.  It remains the most functional system in the world.  It’s one of the most cost optimized systems in the world. And I think he gets, I think it kind of gets a bad rap and it’s giving a bit of a shake up. But I think the place that we end up is likely more consolidation than less opponents argue its removal would empower pocket listings.  

Sophie 10:00: What, what’s a pocket listing for people who don’t know? And do you think it is gonna fracture the, the market to that extent? 

JT 10:15: Yeah, the same a pocket listing is something that’s really simple. It’s a, it’s like think about a friend that, you know, that has a house that they would sell or a car or whatever, but like they don’t really want to advertise it and deal with the public coming and looking at it.  But you know that for the right price, they would sell it. That’s a pocket listing. So pocket listing is some is simply like a somebody that, you know, typically there’s a contract involved that says, hey, I’m gonna try to sell your house, but we’re not gonna advertise it on the MLS. And through traditional methods, there’s a number of reasons that a seller could want that today if they list for the realtor member. 

JT 10:50: They can’t have that.  And I actually,, I am very pro I wanna put all my listings on the MLS. Every listing we take, I’ve sold a lot of houses personally.  I like putting them on the MLS. Now, what I will tell you is if my client says Jerimiah, I wanna list with you, but I don’t want my house on the MLS. I have my reasons, whatever they are. I had actually sold the house in the night in the early two thousands. The guy was an undercover cop.  He did not want his house on the MLS with Clear Cooper operation.  I often tell him, hey, sorry, I’m gonna get fined $5000 if I don’t put your house on the MLS. 

JT 11:29: So we need to make a decision between like your family safety and me following NAR’s rules. That’s why I think these blanket rules kind of like in the thing before where it’s like, oh, home prices are gonna fall by 20% nationally.  It’s not the way it works, right? Like there’s always exceptions. And I think that’s the fundamental problem with clear cooper operation is that it doesn’t recognize that real estate is local. Every house is different and every seller situation is different.  So I’m a huge fan of the house should go in the MLS unless the seller specifically directs that it should not. 

Jenna 12:03: That’s an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing that. 

JT 12:07: And, and here’s, the other interesting thing is like, it’s up to you like all rules that nar comes up with, it’s up to the local association to enforce it. And so depending on what MLS, you’re a part of, they may not even enforce it at the local level. So it’s a, it’s a very interesting thing, I think at the end of the day, it really should be a, the seller and the agent should decide the best way to market their home. Generally, the answer to that is gonna be expose it with professional photos to the largest audience possible by using the MLS.  But if the seller and the agent collectively decide that that’s not the best course of action, they should be allowed to make that decision. I think the the like impetus for this was there are some number of bad actors where the agent was like, hey, if I don’t put it on the MLS, I can like take that opportunity to find a buyer and maybe I can make more commission because I’m representing more people. 

JT  13:03: That’s a wholly separate issue.  And you don’t, you don’t solve bad actors by creating bad policies, right? You solve bad actors by getting rid of the individual, bad actor. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see the way that takes shape, moving forward. 

HEADLINE: Dramatic Downward Revisions for Projected 2025 Home Sales: Fannie Mae
AUTHOR: Matt Carter
PUBLICATION: Inman
LINK: Read the article here

Jenna 13:20: The, the next headline I want to read to you was published by Inman and it reads dramatic downward revision for projected 2025 home sales. Fannie Mae, and so the quote here we looked at says we expect affordability to remain the primary constraint on housing activity through our forecast horizon. So essentially what this is saying, Fannie Mae has revised its home sales forecast for 2025 downward, citing persistent affordability challenges due to high mortgage rates.  And so now rates are expected to remain above 6% until 2026 which maintains the pressure on inventory and limits sales recovery. And so the market then will be grappling with this lock in effect where homeowners hold on to low rate mortgages and therefore reducing supply.  Do you think that this is something we expect to see happen? 

JT 14:13: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s super similar to the first point we talked about, right? It’s, there’s a there what ultimately determines mortgage backed securities prices, right? Is there’s a group of people that they buy and sell these mortgage backed securities and the people that are trading these, they’re simply looking at the other options in the market that they could use, you know, as investment vehicles in the, the, the better that these other options in the market look as investment vehicles, the more of a premium they’re gonna want to buy these mortgage backed securities, which means interest rates are higher. 

JT 14:48: So it’s like when the market, when the economy is doing good and people are feeling really positive, you’re gonna mortgage rates are gonna be at a premium when the economy is doing less well and there’s less good other options. People like to trade in the SS because there, it’s a fairly secure thing. And so it’s like if you’re kind of trading on the upswing, you always know you’re gonna pay a premium in mortgage rates when the economy turns over and it feels like things are getting worse and yields are going down, then people will pay will take a lower rate of yield on those mortgage backed securities because they’re locking in a fixed rate for 30 years. So, if the market’s going away from you up, right. Well, I need a premium because I’m giving away future yield. If the market’s going down, I’ll take a discount because I’m locking in current yield because it’s going away from. Does that make sense? 

HEADLINE: Low-Risk Homes Appreciate as Climate Concerns Shift the Market
AUTHOR: Richelle Hammiel
PUBLICATION: Inman
LINK: Read the article here

Sophie 15:39: Yeah, totally. This next headline is pretty timely coming off of these two hurricanes that we just saw in Florida. The headline is low risk homes appreciate as climate concerns shift the market. Main quote here is with climate catastrophes becoming increasingly frequent. Many people have decided they don’t want to live in risky areas. 

JT 16:02: Yeah, there’s actually a really interesting subtext to this. You know, I personally, I’ve never lived in like an area where you get hurricanes, right. But I’ve, I’ve gone to do clean up. I went after hurricane Harvey to Houston and I remember hearing these stories from these people where they’re like, oh, this is the third time my house is flooded and then like instant question, my head is like, why do you still live here? Like move? And it’s like just this generation, all these people grew up in these neighborhoods, this is their neighborhood. It’s their house. We will rebuild and they’re gonna keep rebuilding. There are some people that are like, yeah, no, I’m not. I’m moving that to me. Seems like common sense. 

JT  16:41: But the subtext I was talking about is actually the cost of homeowners insurance, whether you believe in climate change or not. The reality is the actuaries that try to forecast the losses for homeowners insurance have been grossly wrong. Because of the, the increase in the number of natural disasters and the increase in the magnitude of this natural disasters. And so what’s happened is that if you’re in like a named storms coverage area, which is like most of central Texas, you know, down across the Gulf, the Gulf, like into Florida, et cetera, right? you may have just seen your homeowners insurance double or triple.  If you’re in California, you’re in a wildfire zone, you may not even be able to get homeowners insurance unless you’re in the state subsidized plans. And I think that actually is like a triple whammy to affordability where if you look at places like Arizona Homeowners insurance rates are kind of flat here, which has allowed our prices to continue to rise a little faster than some other parts of the country. 

JT 17:44: And so I don’t really like common sense would tell you people run away from these storms and things. I don’t know that I actually see that happening or if I do, like, I, maybe I don’t have a at, I grasp on that data but I do really see the impact as we’re talking to people about doing loans and the cost of insurance and moreover, just that, you know, you can see the insurers getting more conservative. You’re seeing people with, you know, they’ve never had a claim on their insurance, get their insurance policy canceled simply because like it got re risks rated or their flood zone changed. And, and I think there’s a lot of risk for our industry coming from the insurance industry. 

Sophie: 18:26: Do you think the insurance industry, the home insurance industry has the potential to reshape market dynamics and where people are moving? 

JT 18:35: Yeah, I mean, when you look at, when you, when you actually look at the cost of some of these insurance policies, like we have AAA client right now in California that is buying a property and in the property is literally, I think like six doors down from his current house and he and similar and features side of the street, everything, right? So it’s generally the same. The homeowners insurance is like $3000 a year more than his current homeowners policy. Which is, the current policy is only like 2500 a year. So it’s like more than double the cost simply because it’s a new risk and not a renewal of an existing risk.  I think that that’s what you’re seeing is, it’s like that’s $300 a month in mortgage payment, right?  And that, that can be the difference between somebody qualifying and not qualifying in a lot of cases. 

HEADLINE: Why Real Estate Is Struggling to Keep Up With a Rising US Economy
AUTHOR: Daniel Houston
PUBLICATION: Inman
LINK: Read the article here

Jenna 19:23: The next one I want to read to you Jerimiah is why real estate is struggling to keep up with a rising US economy. This was posted in Inman and the main quote here says real estate’s contraction since 2022 has been twice as steep as the broader economic boom as someone with decades of experience in the real estate industry. What do you hear whenever this is read to you? 

 JT 19:49: Yeah, I mean it’s the the real estate contraction is a double whammy and the reason is that the the majority of people that buy homes in the US use, you know, traditional financing vehicles, right? And so meaning they’re taking mortgage debt. So from 2020 to 2022 you had homes appreciate by double digit percentages every year. So you got like 15% 12% back to back years. So the home got ostensibly 25% more expensive right on the raw price side. While at the same time in the beginning of 2022 the average 30 year fixed mortgage rate was like 3.25%. By the end of the year in 2022 it was 7.75%. So let me contextualize that for you for every 1% point that that how that that interest rate moves. 

JT  20:46: That is the same net effect on monthly payment affordability as the house becoming 10% more expensive. So year over year 2021 to 2022 the house actually became 12% more expensive, but then the debt added another 40% on top of that.  So inside of a 12 month cycle, the same house became 50% more expensive.  It’s the same as like a 400,000 $400,000 house becoming a $600,000 house in a year that is gonna put like the full blown brakes on that market and it’s gonna take a minute for that to catch up and unlock.  So when you look at the contraction, it’s entirely affordability based. 

 Jenna: 21:31: That’s steep. 

HEADLINE: Fix-and-Flip Investors Discouraged by Mortgage Rates and Home Prices
AUTHOR: Kennedy Edgerton
PUBLICATION: HousingWire
LINK: Read the article here

 Sophie: 21:34: All right. One last one for you, fix and flip investors discouraged by mortgage rates and home prices. I read this in housing wire and I flagged this because I feel like I don’t know, two or three years ago was all over tiktok, all over social media. These fix it flippers.  And now this article is saying that we’re going to start to see a decline in that. The main point that I have flagged here is elevated costs and declining resale values are pressuring short term investment though optimism remains for improved conditions in the coming year. 

JT  22:06: Like everybody is a genius when Bitcoin goes up by $65,000 inside of 12 months, right? Like my dad’s texting me about Bitcoin now, Bitcoin is flat or trading down or whatever.  Nobody talks about Bitcoin and this is the exact same thing, right? Like when houses were appreciating by double digits every year, you can kind of buy whatever and it didn’t really matter. You would make money, you would do, ok on it unless you were just grossly wrong. Now if the house price is, you know, relatively flat year over year, you really have to have a sharp pencil about your rehab numbers, your carry numbers and you need to know what you’re doing. And so I think between that and then also there has been a very real change in labor and material costs ever since the pandemic. Like it feels like we just still haven’t caught up. It’s just harder to make money in that world. 

JT  23:03: And, and, and also there’s fewer transactions happening, right? And so you have more professional wholesales, wholesalers and professional homebuyers entering that market fighting over fewer transactions with less margin. Yeah, there’s less people that are like tiktok flipper geniuses, right? 

Sophie 23:22: I’m honestly kind of sad to see those, those videos go. I loved watching them. All right. Well, that’s all we got for you today. Thanks for reading the news with us. 

JT  23:29: Awesome. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It’s always fun. Let’s do it again.

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