Are Foreign Investors Fleeing U.S. Assets?

Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I’m Ron Kamdem, Head of Morgan Stanley’s U.S. Real Estate Investment Trusts and Commercial Real Estate research. Today I’ll talk about the ways GenAI is disrupting the real estate industry.

It’s Tuesday, July 1st, at 10am in New York.

What if the future of real estate isn’t about location, location, location – but automation, automation, automation?

While it may be too soon to say exactly how AI will affect demand for real estate, what we can say is that it is transforming the business of real estate, namely by making operations more efficient. If you’re a customer dealing with a real estate company, you can now expect to interact with virtual leasing assistants. And when it comes to drafting your lease documents, AI can help you do this in minutes rather than hours – or even days.

In fact, our recent work suggests that GenAI could automate nearly 40 percent of tasks across half a million occupations in the real estate investment trusts industry – or REITs. Indeed, across 162 public REITs and commercial real estate services companies or CRE with $92 billion of total labor costs, the financial impact may be $34 billion, or over 15 percent of operating cash flow. Our proprietary job posting database suggests the top four occupations with automation potential are management – so think about middle management, sales, office and administrative support, and installation maintenance and repairs.

Certain sub-sectors within REITs and CRE services stand to gain more than others. For instance, lodging and resorts, along with brokers and services, and healthcare REITs could see more than 15 percent improvement in operating cash flow due to labor automation. On the other hand, sectors like gaming, triple net, self-storage, malls, even shopping centers might see less than a 5 percent benefit, which suggests a varied impact across the industry.

Brokers and services, in particular, show the highest potential for automation gains, with nearly 34 percent increase in operating cash flow. These companies may be the furthest along in adopting GenAI tools at scale. In our view, they should benefit not only from the labor cost savings but also from enhanced revenue opportunities through productivity improvement and data center transactions facilitated by GenAI tools.

Lodging and resorts have the second highest potential upside from automating occupations, with an estimated 23 percent boost in operating cash flow. The integration of AI in these businesses not only streamline operations but also opens new avenues for return on investments, and mergers and acquisitions.

Some companies are already using AI in their operations. For example, some self-storage companies have integrated AI into their digital platforms, where 85 percent of customer interactions now occur through self-selected digital options. As a result, they have reduced on-property labor hours by about 30 percent through AI-powered staffing optimization. Similarly, some apartment companies have reduced their full-time staff by about 15 percent since 2021 through AI-driven customer interactions and operational efficiencies.

Meanwhile, this increased application of AI is driving new revenue to AI-enablers. Businesses like data centers, specialty, CRE services could see significant upside from the infrastructure buildout from GenAI. Advanced revenue management systems, customer acquisition tools, predictive analytics are just a few areas where GenAI can add value, potentially enhancing the $290 billion of revenue stream in the REIT and CRE services space.

However, the broader economic impact of GenAI on labor markets remains hotly debated. Job growth is the key driver of real estate demand and the impact of AI on the 164 million jobs in the U.S. economy remains to be determined. If significant job losses materialize and the labor force shrinks, then the real estate industry may face top-line pressure with potentially disproportionate impact on office and lodging. While AI-related job losses are legitimate concerns, our economists argue that the productivity effects of GenAI could ultimately lead to net positive job growth, albeit with a significant need for re-skilling.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

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.