1. Former WaMu CEO sees a housing bubble forming due to Fed is hooked on low rate and let asset bubbles to run wild before they popped;
2. Zillow April report showing rent gain of 3% YOY to $1704/m, rent rose fastest in Sunbelt and Inland empire, with Riverside and Phoenix both > 13% YOY, only mayor gateway metros remains negative rent vs last year, SFR rent climbed to highest since 2006, up 4.3% vs March, lead by AZ market per CoreLogic ;
3. Shelter inflation could create more long lasting inflationary pressure per Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. GS model expects shelter inflation to grow 3.8% in 2022 and 4% 2023, such numbers could lead boarder inflation to normalized >2% CPI target set by the Fed;
4. SFH housing starts dropped 13% in April per US Census, 15% of builders are slowing down their construction due to material supply constrain and labor shortage;
5. By end of 2020, tappable home equity value built up to record $7.3T per Black Knight, but many lenders are tightened their HELOC standards, with avg rate offered at 4.86%, not cheap. But lenders are losening their lending standard in April per MBA Mortgage Credit Availability Index;
6. Upwork is going against grain by uprooting its HQ in Santa Clara to move to SF, albeit a much smaller in size.
But another day another bad news on SF office market: Airbnb is subleasing additional 287K sf of space in SF HQ, after it took $113M write down last Q for unneeded office space. There are still close to 10M sf of vacant sublease office space available in SF, vs 1M sf subleasing in normal year before Covid;
7. Suburban office/flex office model are poised to serve the new hybrid work model, WeWork boss said current demand for WeWork offices surpass the pre Covid level;
8. Gullup poll of several thousands remote workers indicated on avg 52% of all workers now WFH for April, including 72% for white color jobs and 14% for blue colors, 35% prefers to WFH permanently if given a choice;
9. Green Street report that even though nonperforming CRE loans are 2X now vs beginning of 2020, 0.86% vs 0.41%, but this is still very tiny <1/10 of 8.6% nonperforming in 2010 subprime crisis, only $17.5B of loans are in trouble, $12.2B belong to nonresidential CRE loans, but still very healthy vs $1.78T in total portfolio;
10. Per CAR, median home price in CA had a huge gain of 34%. Austin market however, is totally insane and crazy[Chuckle][Tongue]: per Austin Board of Realtor Apr data: median home price gained 42% YOY for Austin MSA, Williamson county 45%, inventory at 0.5month, normally 1% gain/month is very hot, but Austin has 8.8% gain in April alone;
11. Just as reference, nationwide median home price gained 17.2% per Realtor.com, after Austin 40% gain, next are LA/Riverside/Atlanta/Charlotte at half the pace of the gain.