Episode Details

As the confidence level of homebuilders building new homes is increasing, will home sales go along with it? Jim Egan and Jay Bacow, Co-Heads of U.S. Securitized Products Research discuss.

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Jim Egan: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jim Egan, Co-Head of U.S. Securitized Products Research here at Morgan Stanley. 

Jay Bacow: And I'm Jay Bacow, the other Co-Head of U.S. Securitized Products Research. 

Jim Egan: And on this episode of the podcast, we'll be discussing the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. It's Tuesday, May 23rd at 2 p.m. in New York. 

Jay Bacow: It's been a while since we talked about the state of the U.S. housing market. And it seems like if I look at least some portions of the data, things are getting better. In particular, the NAHB confidence just showed for the fifth consecutive month that homebuilders are feeling better about building a house, and we're now finally at the point where they say it is a good time to build a house. When you take a step back and just look at the state of the housing market, do you agree? 

Jim Egan: I think it's a great question. Housing statistics are going in a whole number of different directions right now. So, yeah, let me take a step back. We've talked a lot about affordability on this podcast and it's still challenging. We've talked a lot about supply and it remains very tight, and all of this has really fueled that bifurcation narrative that we've talked about, protected home prices, weaker activity. But if we think about how the lock in effect and that's the fact that all of these current homeowners who have mortgages well below the prevailing mortgage rate just are not going to be incentivized to list their home for sale, then kind of a logical next step from a housing statistics perspective is that new home sales are probably going to increase as a percentage of total home sales. And that's exactly what we're seeing, new home sales in the first quarter of this year, they were roughly 20% of the total single unit sales volumes. That's the largest share of transactions in any quarter since 2006. And this dynamic was actually quoted by the National Association of Homebuilders when describing the increase in homebuilder confidence that you quoted Jay.    

Jay Bacow: Okay, but when I think about that percentage, aren't building volumes in aggregate coming down? 

Jim Egan: They are, though, as a caveat, I would say that if we look at that seasonally adjusted annualized rate, it did increase sequentially a little bit, month-over-month in April. What I would point to here is that from the peak in single unit housing starts, and we think the peak in the cycle was April of 2022, those starts are down 22%. Now, that's finally started to make a dent in the backlog of homes under construction. Now, as a reminder, again, this is something we've talked about here, there are a number of factors from supply chain issues to labor shortages, that we're really serving to elongate, build timelines in the months and years after the onset of COVID. And all of those things caused a real backlog in the number of homes under construction, so homes were getting started, but they weren't really getting finished. We see the number of single unit homes under construction is now down 130,000 units from that peak. Now, don't get me wrong, that number is still elevated versus where we'd expected to be, given the sheer number of housing starts that we've seen over the past year. But this is a first step towards turning more positive on housing starts. And again, homebuilder confidence Jay, as you said, it's climbed higher every single month this year. 

Jay Bacow: Okay, but you said this is a first step