How AI Could Transform the Real Estate Sector

James Egan: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Jim Egan, co-head of Securitized Products Research at Morgan Stanley.

Jay Bacow: And I'm Jay Bacow, the other co-head of Securitized Products Research at Morgan Stanley. And after getting through last week's blistering hot temperatures, today we're going to talk about what may be a cooling housing market.

It's Monday, June 30th at 2:30pm in New York.

Now, Jim, home prices. We just got another index. They set another record high, but the pace of growth – the acceleration as a physicist in me wants to say – appears to be slowing. What's going on here?

James Egan: The pace of home price growth reported this month was 2.7 percent. That is the lowest that it's been since August of 2023. And in our view, the reason's pretty simple. Supply is increasing, while demand has stalled.

Jay Bacow: But Jim, this was a report for the spring selling season. I know we got it in June, but this is supposed to be the busiest time of the year. People are happy to go around. They're looking at moving over the summer when the kids aren't in school. We should be expecting the supply to increase. Are you saying that it's happening more than it's anticipated?

James Egan: That is what we're saying. Now, we should be expecting inventories today to be higher than they were in, call it January or February. That's exactly the seasonality that you are referring to. But it's the year-over-year growth we're paying attention to here. Homes listed for sale are up year-over-year, 18 months in a row. And that pace, it's been accelerating. Over the past 40 years, the pace of growth from this past month was only eclipsed one time, the Great Financial Crisis.

Jay Bacow: [sighs] I always get a little worried when the housing analyst brings up the Great Financial Crisis. Are you saying that this time the demand isn't responding?

James Egan: That is what we're saying. So, through the first five months of this year, existing home sales are only down about 2 percent versus the first five months of 2024. So they've basically kind of plateaued at these levels. But that also means that we're seeing the fewest number of transactions through May in a calendar year since 2009. And that combination of easing inventory and lackluster demand, it's pushed months of supply back to levels that we haven't seen since the beginning of this pandemic. Call it the fourth quarter of 2019, first quarter of 2020, right before inventory has really plummeted to historic lows.

Jay Bacow: All right, so 2009, another financial crisis reference. But you're also – you're speaking around a national level, and as a housing analyst, I feel like you haven't really spoken about the three most important factors when we think about things which are: Location. Location. And location.

James Egan: Absolutely. And the deceleration that we're seeing in home price growth – and I would point out it is still growth – has been pervasive across the country. Year-over-year, HPA is now decelerating in 100 percent of the top 100 MSAs, for which we have data. In fact, a full quarter of them, 25 percent of these cities are now actually seeing prices decline on a year-over-year basis. And that's up from just 5 percent with declining home prices one year ago.

Jay Bacow: As a homeowner, I do like the home price growth. And is it the same story when you look more narrowly around supply and demand?

James Egan: So, there might be some geographical nuances, but we do think that it largely boils down to that. Local inventory growth has been a very good indicator of weaker home price performance, particularly the level of for-sale inventory today versus that fourth quarter of 2019. If we look at it on a geographic basis, of 14 MSAs that have the highest level of inventory today compared to 2019, 11 of them are in either Florida or Texas. On the other end of the spectrum, the cities where inventory remains furthest away from where it was four and a half years ago, they're in the Northeast, they're in the Midwest.

Jay Bacow: As somebody who lives in the Northeast, I'd like to hear that again. But you're also; you're quoting existing prices, which that's been the outperformer in the housing market. Right?

James Egan: Exactly. New home prices have actually been decreasing year-over-year for the past year and a half at this point. It's actually brought the basis between new home prices, which tend to trade at a little bit of a premium to existing sales; it's brought that basis to its tightest level that we've seen in at least 30 years. And that's before we take into account the fact that home builders have been buying down some of these mortgage rates. But Jay, you've recently done some work trying to size this.

Jay Bacow: Yeah. First it might help to explain what a buydown is.

A home builder might have a new home listed at say, $450,000. And with mortgage rates in the context of about 6.5 percent right now, the home buyer might not be able to afford that, so they offer to pay less. The home builder – often many of them also have an origination arm as well. They'll say, you know what? We'll sell it to you at that $450,000, but we'll give you a lower mortgage rate; instead of 6.5 percent, we'll sell it to you for $450,000 with a 5 percent mortgage rate. Then maybe the home buyer can afford that.

James Egan: And so, new home prices are actually coming down. And by that we're specifically referring to the median price of new home transactions. They're falling despite the fact that these buy downs might be influencing prices a little bit higher.

Jay Bacow: Right. And when we look at how often this is happening, it's a little actually hard to get it from the data [be]cause they don't have to report it. But when we look at the distribution of mortgage rates in a given month – prior to 2022, there were effectively no purchase loans that were originated less than one point below the prevailing mortgage rate for a given month.

However, more recently we're up to about 12 percent of Ginnie Mae purchases, and those are the more credit constrained borrowers that might have a harder time buying a home. And about 5 percent of conventional purchase loans are getting originated with a rate 1 percent below the outstanding market.

James Egan: And so, this might be another sign that we're seeing a little bit of softening in home prices. But what are the implications on the agency mortgage side?

Jay Bacow: I would say there's probably two things that we're keeping an eye out on. Because these are homeowners that are getting below market rate, the investors are getting a below market coupon. And because they're getting sold at a discount, they don't want that, but they're going to stay around for a while. So, investors are getting these rates that they don't want for longer.

And then the other thing you think about from the home buyer perspective is, you know, maybe they – it's good for them right now. But if they want to sell that home. Because they're getting a below market mortgage rate, they bought the home for maybe more than other people would've. So, unless they can sell it with that mortgage attached, which is very difficult to do, they probably have to sell it for a lower price than when they bought it.

Now Jim, what does all this mean for home prices going forward?

James Egan: Now, when we think about home prices, we're talking about the home price indices, right? And so those are going to be repeat sales. It’s going to, by definition, look at existing prices and not necessarily the dynamics we're talking in the new home price market.

Jay Bacow: Okay, so all this builder buy down stuff is interesting for what it means for new home prices – but doesn't impact all the HPA indices that you reference.

James Egan: Exactly, and at the national level, despite what we've been talking about on this podcast, we do think that home prices remain more supported than what we are seeing locally. Inventory is increasing, but it also remains near historically low levels. Months of supply that I mentioned at the top of this podcast, it's picked up to the highest level it's been since the beginning of this pandemic. We're also talking about four to four and a half months of supply. Anything below six is a tight environment that has been historically associated with home prices continuing to climb.

That's why our base case is for positive HPA this year. We're at +2 percent. That's slower than where we are now. We think you're going to continue to see deceleration. And because of what we're seeing from a supply and demand perspective, we are a little bit more skewed to the downside in our bear case. Instead of that +2, we're at -3 percent than we are towards the upside in our bull case. Instead of that plus two, we’re at plus 5 percent in the bull case. So slower HPA from here, but still positive.

Jay Bacow: Well, Jim, it's always a pleasure talking to you, particularly when you're highlighting that the home price growth is going to be stronger in the place where I own a home.

James Egan: Pleasure talking to you too, Jay. And to all of you listening, thank you for listening to another episode of Thoughts on the Market.

Please leave a review or a like wherever you get this podcast and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

Jay Bacow: Go smash that subscribe button.

Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Head of Corporate Credit Research at Morgan Stanley.

Today I'm going to talk about how we're trying to simplify the complicated questions of recent geopolitical events.

It's Friday, June 27th at 2pm in London.

Recent U.S. airstrikes against Iran and the ongoing conflict between Iran and Israel have dominated the headlines. The situation is complicated, uncertain, and ever changing. From the time that this episode is recorded to when you listen to it, conditions may very well have changed again.

Geopolitical events such as this one often have a serious human, social and financial cost, but they do not consistently have an impact on markets. As analysis by my colleague, Michael Wilson and his team have shown, over a number of key geopolitical events over the last 30 years, the impact on the S&P 500 has often been either fleeting or somewhat non-existent. Other factors, in short, dominate markets.

So how to deal with this conundrum? How to take current events seriously while respecting that historical precedent that they often can have more limited market impact? How to make a forecast when quite simply few investors feel like they have an edge in predicting where these events will go next?

In our view, the best way to simplify the market's response is to watch oil prices. Oil remains an incredibly important input to the world economy, where changes in price are felt quickly by businesses and consumers.

And so, when we look back at past geopolitical events that did move markets in a more sustained way, a large increase in oil prices often meaning a rise of more than 75 percent year-over-year was often part of the story. So, when we look back at past geopolitical events that did move markets in a more sustained way, a large increase in oil prices, by which we mean a rise of 75 percent or more year-over-year was often part of the story. Such a rise in such an important economic input in such a short period of time increases the risk of recession; something that credit markets and many other markets need to care about. So how can we apply this today?

Well, for all the seriousness and severity of the current conflict, oil prices are actually down about 20 percent relative to a year ago. This simply puts current conditions in a very different category than those other periods be they the 1970s or more recently, Russia's invasion of Ukraine that represented genuine oil price shocks. Why is oil down? Well, as my colleague Martin Rats referred to on an earlier episode of this program, oil markets do have very healthy levels of supply, which is helping to cushion these shocks.

With oil prices actually lower than a year ago, we think the credit will focus on other things. To the positive, we see an alignment of a few short-term positive factors, specifically a pretty good balance of supply and demand in the credit market, low realized volatility, and a historically good window in the very near term for performance. Indeed, over the last 15 years, July has represented the best month of the year for returns in both investment grade and high yield credit in both the U.S. and in Europe.

And what could disrupt this? Well, a significant spike in oil prices could be one culprit, but we think a more likely catalyst is a shift of those favorable conditions, which could happen from August and beyond. From here, Morgan Stanley economists’ forecasts see a worsening mix of growth in inflation in the U.S., while seasonal return patterns to flip from good to bad.

In the meantime, however, we will keep watching oil.

Thank you as always for your time. If you find Thoughts the Market useful, let us know by leaving a review wherever you listen, and also tell a friend or colleague about us today.