Markets & Cycles
Is now a good time to buy?
The most frequently asked question in real estate, and the one where the honest answer is least satisfying.
Markets & Cycles
Supply, migration, rates and how markets actually turn.
Markets & Cycles
Demographics and the next twenty years of housing demand
The slowest-moving variable in real estate is also the most predictable, which makes it unusually useful and easy to overrate.
Markets & Cycles
Office, retail and industrial: what happened and what it means
Three commercial sectors that moved in completely different directions over the same period, for reasons worth understanding even if you never buy one.
Markets & Cycles
Single-family versus small multifamily
Two entry points with genuinely different economics, risk profiles and exit markets, frequently compared on cash flow alone.
Markets & Cycles
Rent regulation: what exists and where it is heading
A politically charged subject with a real evidence base, and a regulatory trend that belongs in market selection whatever you think of it.
Markets & Cycles
Insurance costs are now a market variable
Premiums used to be a rounding error in underwriting. In several regions they have become a determinant of whether property is viable at all.
Markets & Cycles
Class A, B and C, and why the letters matter
The classification is informal and imprecise, and it predicts more about your experience as an owner than almost any other single descriptor.
Markets & Cycles
Migration data and what it does not tell you
People moving to a metro is a demand signal. It is not the same as people who can pay your rent.
Markets & Cycles
Interest rates and property prices: the actual relationship
Rates matter enormously and the mechanism is more specific, and slower, than the headlines suggest.
Markets & Cycles
What actually happens when a market turns
Downturns in property do not look like downturns in stocks. They are slower, quieter, and the volume moves before the price does.
Markets & Cycles
Reading a market without believing the brochure
Every market has a story, most stories are true at some scale, and the scale is usually wrong.
Markets & Cycles
Supply, not demand, is what usually moves a market
Population growth gets the headlines, and permit data tells you more about where rents are going.