Mar 30, 2022
Kevin Erdmann is the author of
"Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and
Crippled Our Economy" and "Building from the Ground Up: Reclaiming
the American Housing Boom". His work has appeared in the Wall
Street Journal, Barron's, the National Review, USA Today, and
Politico, and it has been featured on C-SPAN. Some of his papers
and articles published with the support of the Mercatus Center at
George Mason University can be found at https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/kevin-erdmann
. He tweets as @KAErdmann.
In this episode we talked about:
• Kevin`s Bio & Background
• Great Financial Crisis and America’s Housing Boom
• Post Crisis Period in Real Estate
• View on Housing Bubble
• Unlocking Affordable Housing Policy
• “What are Landlords good for?”
• Real Estate Trends 2022
Useful links:
https://twitter.com/kaerdmann
https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2022/03/16-part-series-on-housing-affordability.html
https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/kevin-erdmann
Transcriptions:
Jesse (0s): Welcome to the working capital real estate podcast. My name is Jesper galley. And on this show, we discuss all things real estate with investors and experts in a variety of industries that impact real estate. Whether you're looking at your first investment or raising your first fund, join me and let's build that portfolio one square foot at a time. Ladies and gentlemen, my name's Jessica galley, and you're listening to working capital the real estate podcast. My guest today is Kevin Erdmann. Kevin is a former small businessman and a researcher in hosing monetary policy and financial markets.
In 2015, Kevin began to reconsider a range of evidence contradicting commonly held beliefs about the pre 2007 American housing boom, his first book shutout along with several extensions to his research, which were published with the support of the Mercatus center at George Mason university, where he continued to develop a revolutionary new approach to the practical rules of housing debt and money in recent American trends. I caught the attention or he caught my attention recently reading an article and the article was entitled.
What are landlords good for? And I thought that was an interesting question. So here we are today, Kevin, how you doing?
Kevin (1m 11s): Great. It's great. Thanks for having me.
Jesse (1m 13s): Yeah. Well thank you for coming on. We were talking a little bit before the show, a little bit about your background and kind of that first article that I saw. And I was like, well, you know what? It sounds like something that the listeners would get, get a lot of good information, especially since we kind of tackle real estate from the investor's perspective, but also an economic perspective. So thanks again, I guess, you know, we always start with a little bit of a, a history lesson on our guests are a little bit of a background, so maybe you could kick us off and talk a little bit about, you know, your past roles and how you kind of came into the world, the world of real estate and economics.
Kevin (1m 53s): I, yeah, it really is all sort of an accident. I was a, as you mentioned, I was a small business owner and back around 2010, 2011, I went back to school to get a graduate degree in finance. And I was sort of making my way toward a new career in finance. And in the meantime was just doing sort of personal research. And in, in the process of doing what I thought would be sort of a week or two week or month long dive into home builders and whether they might be a good investment back in 2015, in 2016, you know, sort of background research, I just kept running into oddities and the data that just completely contradicted the conventional wisdom about what had happened leading up to 2008, you know, that were compelling enough that I, you know, turned into two months in three months and really it was six or seven or eight months into the, into that research before I really Paul the, this whole sort of closed access to the idea, whole limited supply problem into the sort of the center of this story.
Originally, the first things were just re you know, finding national data on credit and that sort of thing, just, you know, there, there was, there was no sign in the national data back in that period of, of there being this, they lose of credit going to unqualified homeowners and that sort of thing. And so anyway, just all of this, all of these points kept building up to the point where I just accidentally sort of had this tiger by the tail of this story to tell, but for some reason, nobody else had discovered, and, and the book just comes out of the accident of learning this stuff and realizing it was important enough to, to shares.
So here I am six years into that week-long projects
Jesse (3m 50s): For where you formerly in the research world at that point, you said you were doing a graduate degree with, did that just kind of coincidentally that happened at the same time, or was that prompted by, by your research in, in your graduate degree?
Kevin (4m 3s): Yeah, no, I was just, you know, I managed some personal money and I was just intending to go back and, you know, go into transition away from small business ownership to some sort of career in finance. And just this story was so compelling. It drew me into what really, I suppose now as a career in public policy. So although there definitely are a lot of lessons for it, for investors and homeowners and everybody else.
Jesse (4m 27s): Yeah. We're finding more and more, everything seems to be interrelated. So, you know, for the person taking a look at this from the outside, you hear a million different stories after the great financial crisis after the housing boom in oh six, you know, what was it? Well, I guess, to back up, what is the general perception from your point of view that people had, or the story that they told themselves about that time period? And what were you finding that, you know, was the first telltale to you that there's some contradictions here?
Kevin (5m 0s): I mean, the first things that I found were, again, like I said, just that there really is very little evidence, you know, for instance, the typical, the median home homeowner in 2005 or six had a higher relative income compared to renters than they had had in say 1995, there wasn't this surge of unqualified homeowners, their average homeowner in 2005 and six had, you know, tended to have like education was becoming a more important factor.
So ownership among high school graduates was relatively level or declining in homeownership, you know, among college graduates and people with professional degrees and that's where home ownership was rising. So those were the initial sort of data points. But eventually what I realized is, you know, really what we have is a supply problem. There's key cities, which I call the closed access to these, which mainly is Boston, New York city San now LA those, those metropolitan areas that, you know, the character of our economy is basically becoming dominated by the fact that those cities aren't willing and able to grow as fast as the economy should grow.
And so what happens anytime there's any sort of growth, whether it's growth in credit access or just incomes, just productivity, there's this increasing bidding war to get into these limited locations. And so what happens is the price of housing skyrockets as a result of that. And so looking at that, there seems to be just an, for some reason, a bias toward blaming demand side factors on that too much money, too much credit speculators.
You know, today we we've sort of killed the marginal home buyer market. So today we blame private equity and foreign buyers and corporate buyers and corporate landlords. And, but all along, it's just not enough supply price can go up for two reasons, not enough supply or too much demand and all along, even back then, the problem is not enough. And instead we have this recurring intuition to say, oh, everyone else has too much money. And that's why I can't afford important things anymore.
And, and so, yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's a simple story thing. The houses are expensive because we don't have enough of them and you just have to look at it. You know, it's not hard to understand. You just have to look at it and accept that as a potential conclusion. And then the rest, the rest of the story sort of tells itself.
Jesse (7m 43s): So at the time, or even ex post the, you know, after, after the, the crisis years after we, you have movies coming out, you have people, you know, writing articles specifically on this writing books, you know, a lot of what the, I would say the general public was told was there was a lot of available credit. There was access to a lot of money. The money was very cheap, you know, somewhat similar to what we're hearing right now, fast forward this many years, but there was also this, this conversation or this theme that there was excess building, that there was an oversupply of housing.
And, you know, what was it about this story that was so compelling for people to adopt? If, if you know, you're saying the cases, the data just does, did not, or does not bear it out.
Kevin (8m 36s): I mean, it's a, it's a good question. I, I mean, today, you know, to me, it's getting, it's been, it's sort of easy for me to tell the story as time passes, because to continue holding onto that conventional wisdom gets harder and harder over time, right? Like I made today, we're in this weird political environment where, you know, mortgage growth growth has actually been, you know, dead for a decade and barely has started growing again in the last couple quarters.
And so how exactly are lower are low mortgage rates, you know, the, the, to blame for rising home prices, it's cashed by like everybody knows this, you see papers or stories in every paper about cash buyers coming in and 20 bids over asking and all this stuff. And so people with mortgages can't even get in on the process because they, they can't get an appraisal high enough to get their mortgage funded. So, you know, at some points that it just becomes absurd to, to blame credit for it.
You know, it's not quite as absurd back then, but effectively the same disconnects are, are in play and in the newer, but building from the ground at that, I know some of the data about, you know, for instance, in a, in a market like Arizona, which was, you know, a poster child was sort of a bubble city. You know, the, the conventional story is there was all this money flooding into housing through the credit channels that led to a bunch of excess building, or actually first that led to prices skyrocketing because of all this credit.
And then that led to overbuilding too many housing, too many houses. And then that all collapsed of its own weight. But it, it happened in the opposite order of that. The first thing that happened was there was a lot of new building because Phoenix was taking in all these people that didn't have houses in LA that would have preferred to live in LA. So the first thing that happened is there's a bunch of new building in Phoenix, but then they, they sort of reached their local limit. So then you see prices start to sky rocket and Phoenix in 2004 and five borrowing, you know, per capita debt in Arizona is still pretty normal until late 2005.
And then finally, when house prices in starts peaked at the end of 2005, then you finally start to see debt start to raise. So everything happens in the opposite order of what, you know, what the stories seemed to tell, you know, the conventional wisdom says, but you know, it, you have to sort of dig into the numbers a little bit and, and, you know, to sort of see that come out, you know, one of the problems is there's not really a national housing market.
And I think that's where there should, there could be a national housing market, but because these supply constraints were so localized, it's very difficult to just certain information. You have to be careful about this serving information by looking at national numbers, because the market in Nashville or Omaha was much different than marketing San Francisco. And you throw all those numbers into one big basket, you know, the, the noise ends up hiding the information. So that's, that's one, you know, if you look at the national numbers, it does look like mortgages and prices were all sort of going up together.
But you know, most of the countries didn't have either a price, boom, or as construction, boom, most of you know, cities like Atlanta and Omaha and all those cities were building houses about the same rate as they have been, you know, for several years, the housing boom is in, was in places like LA that were building so few houses that even a relative boom is still an it pitiful on absolute members. And then you had a boom in places like Phoenix that are overwhelmed by the people looking for affordable place to live.
Jesse (12m 42s): And with that story, I assume, when you looked at different cities was the same story of that causality, just being exactly the opposite of what people had thought it was that, you know, interest rates, you know, if those were a factor, it was almost like gasoline at the very end to, to kind of keep fueling what had already started prior.
Kevin (13m 1s): Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, really when you get to 2007, you have what we have is a housing market or in an economy, or let's say you go back to 2005, really in 2005, the fed was, you know, pretty much, you know, we were about on target in terms of nominal GDP growth inflation. The thing we were a little out of whack on was that rent inflation had been high since the mid nineties and was still a little high, but was finally actually coming down where rent inflation was about the same as normal inflation.
So, so in 2005, what we really had was in the economy where the fed was doing their job, that we could use a few more homes, but the conventional wisdom was so powerfully sort of on the opposite side of the F you know, in the belief that we had overbuilt that there was, you know, the high prices were because of demand side stuff. So that must mean we're doing too much. And so, you know, the funny thing is housing started started to collapse in 2006.
The first thing that happened in 2006 and seven is rent inflation shoots back up again. So actually we, one of the things I go in to, in the building from the ground up narrative is it's sort of parallel to the seventies where you had inflation, but you had these oil shocks that the fed was reacting to really in 2006 and seven, what we had was a housing shock, just like the oil shocks. We got a housing supply shock because the fed itself had, had slowed down construction.
And then when rent inflation rared up in the face of this housing supply shock, the fed reacted to the inflation and say, oh, it's our job to keep inflation low. And we do that by lowering incomes. And so by 2006 and seven, we get in this vicious cycle where they're actually reacting to the shock they had. They had started, you know, instead of, instead of seeing what was happening and thinking, oh, we've gone too far. Every time they Ratched it up, you know, slow down the economy more and rent, inflation was high and housing starts kept collapsing.
Then they looked at that and they said, oh, we, we were wrong. You know, our critics were right in 2005, we must have, we must have induced too much home building because now it's 2007. And when we try to correct things, home housing starts are collapsing even more than what we thought they would. So we must've been doing too much in 2005. And what happens is by the end of 2007, they're convinced that they had made mistakes in 2005. That by now it was too late to fix. They actually solved some sort of crisis coming and they just came to believe that they couldn't do anything about it.
Really, if they had flooded the market with liquidity in 2007, that what we needed is a fed aggressive enough for housing starts to recover in 2007. And then none, none of us would be talking about any of this today and what we we'd still be blaming the banks for. Hi, we'd be having the conversation they have in Canada about housing, right? We'd still be blaming whatever for home prices and probably blaming the fed for them, not knowing that we had escaped the worst economic calamity intergeneration.
Jesse (16m 14s): So what, what policy mechanisms, so back then, we'll, we'll fast forward today in a little bit, but what policy mechanism at that point, are you going to be able to use to encourage that or discourage the, what you were talking about with Arizona, where you hit your cap, you know, very similar to Toronto or New York LA very strict laws on, you know, how much can be built, what can be built. So is it, is it are the mechanisms left at the local level rather than at the federal level? You know, what do you do at that point where you're trying to encourage, you're trying to encourage building and, and we're, we're conceding that it is a supply issue.
Kevin (16m 53s): Exactly. Yeah. So that's, you know, that's the difficult question is optimal policies aren't available. So, you know, really, it's just the case that we have these cities that are unwilling to grow at the rate that our economy should be growing. And so anytime anything good happens, you know, if things get good enough, then there's this inevitable segregation by financial means by, you know, segregation by income, you know, the people that can, you know, now there's a bidding war for those, these limited locations.
So anything that eventually leads to just a nice economy that you'd like to have is going to lead to a segregation at this inter metropolitan or area migration. And the way that migration works is housing gets more and more expensive in those cities until somebody hurts enough that they give up on living in the city, they want lived to move to these other cities. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's sort of a weird, you know, th the second best optimal solution in that context is to slow the economy down enough, to like limit the pain of that segregation process.
That's not, you know, we need those cities to fix their problems. That's not, that's not a second best solution. You want your national economic figures to be aiming for. Right. But, but yeah, that's essentially, that's what happened is that process of segregation because of a lack of housing got so accelerated so much and became so painful that it started, you know, bleeding out into these, the cities that I call the contagion cities, which are the Phoenix, is in Florida and Arizona and Nevada and inland California, that we're taking in all these people coming out of the coastal metropolises.
And so what happened is the fed slowed down the economy enough to, to ease those segregation pressures. And then, but then, you know, instead of sort of stopping one thing I say in the band building from the ground up is they actually did succeed by mid 2007 at creating a soft landing, as good as they ever could have planned for. And that was the least satisfying, you know, conclude, you know, in expat they could get at, nobody was satisfied with that.
And so they kept pushing and pushing it to all that bad debt actually happens well past the peak of the housing boom of people in places like Arizona and Florida, that now are early entrance into this coming crisis, because they've said that, you know, for decades, they've been growing two or two and a half percent a year. And then as that as, as the economic growth in the two thousands ratcheted up and people were moving there to find affordable housing, now they're going and more like 3% a year.
And it's so much that that's adding stress to their local economies. And then suddenly from 2006 to 2008 or nine, it goes to zebra, like suddenly decades, long migration, just flattens. And so, although, you know, so many of those mortgages taking, taken out in Arizona and Florida in 2006 and seven were actually just households dealing with the financial crisis that hit them before it hit everyone else.
And instead of reacting to that with generosity, with, with the name towards stability, we just took everything that happened as a, this is another thing that's happening because of this, because of the excesses from 2005, and really for people to learn their lesson, people need to suffer those losses. You know, that was the mentality. And so, you know, that 2008 crisis was really a popular crisis that happened because nobody would for anything less damaging than that.
Jesse (20m 50s): So just on this point, I want to talk a little bit about affordable housing and policy perspective, but just before we do on that, the, the idea, you know, we're, we're in a housing bubble or, you know, we're, we're currently in a housing bubble or back then we were in a housing bubble. I know, you know, you can take the very strict in every time I would do little bit of research on this. You'd get, you know, the famous Eugene Fama and, you know, he would talk about it's, he would have such a strict definition of what a bubble could possibly be that it's like, well, it's always priced in, but this idea that asset prices are untenably high was, is that the framework that you looked at, oh 7 0 8 or even today, or do you have a different, different view on what that, that term means to you?
Kevin (21m 37s): Again, this is a great example of how looking at national numbers versus desegregated numbers is, you know, it gives you two different stories. So you can look at national numbers and, you know, from the mid nineties, till 2005 price to rent ratios, you know, take the national aggregate value of homes and divided by the national rental value of homes and priced rate ratios went up. And so it's a very easy story to tell yourself that, oh, there's all this credit it's, you know, prices are rising and, you know, all the official documents on this, like the financial crisis, that agree commission, the 500 books on the shelf at the bookstore about the crisis.
I mean, they all, they all, they all very briefly point that out and it becomes the presumption of everything to follow, you know, like the big short, like, you know, in the book, in building from the ground up, I say, you know, the big, there's nothing wrong in the big short, it's just a story about an, a growing crisis that started in 2006. And it just takes us the presumption that that crisis was inevitable or that these things happening in 2006, have anything to do with what happened in 2003 or four or five.
And so it's just that, you know, that, that presumption that, oh, prices went up for no reason. And they so surely they must have to come back down. Right. But if you desegregate by city, you know, re prices were going up where rents were going up, prices were going up where there aren't any vacancies, you know, so if you, if you do a cross sectional and regression across cities, then it's the stories reversed, but prices are totally being driven by fundamentals.
And it is funny in, in the financial crisis inquiry commission report, you know, they take, they do literally take a single paragraph to dismiss rents is an important factor in rising prices. And it, you know, with this, this logic that price to rent ratios have gone up well, the, they have three or four cities, examples of where priced rent ratios, you know, had doubled or more at which, you know, surely is so outrageous that it shows the prices are too high to those cities where LA in New York city.
So, you know, to me, the, you know, sort of reorienting the way we look at this story, imagine writing a 500 page review of the financial crisis. And based on the idea that rent is an unimportant factor in high-end housing costs in Los Angeles and New York city, right? The reason price to rent ratios are so high. Ironically, the reason price to rent ratios were so high and had gone up so much, is that the main factor that increases price to rent ratios is high rents.
I just cry across time across cities, within cities, anywhere where you compare rents and prices, price to rent ratios are always highest where rents are Heights. And I'm sure all your investor listeners understand that, you know, they're, they're not out by, you know, getting investment properties in the wealthy suburbs of the metropolitan areas, because the cause the returns on their investment are much lower there. You know, the, the investors are buying at the low end where your, where your cap rates, where your, your, your yields are higher.
It's just a systematic thing that happens across the board. So again, it's this weird, you can understand how they would make that mistake. It seems like they give price to rent ratio is a doubled over a decade that, that, that, you know, you know, you don't have it. Doesn't take a lot of analysis to say, oh yeah, the prices must be rising in spite of rinse. But the irony is actually those, you know, you go again, you go to an Omaha or a St.
Louis Price ratios hadn't changed very much at all in those cities. Now, if it was households with low incomes, getting, getting mortgages, they weren't qualified for those would be the cities you do. You think you'd see a bit of a jump in the price to rent ratios they heard, right. But no re their prices were highly throughout this entire period from the mid nineties tilts today, rent has continually become a more and more important factor determining the relative price of, of any particular house.
Jesse (26m 3s): So for the, I mean, to me, that analysis, you, you almost, it's easier to accept the former because it just, one thing is easily. You can say, okay, that follows where the other one, you have to do a little bit more digging. So for instance, if you see, especially, you know, Toronto Vancouver, where we were, where we are very similar to San Francisco LA New York, where you could from the outside valuations have gone up like crazy interest rates aside from very recently have remained very low.
And for the foreseeable future, that's the way it looked like it was going to go and rents were going up, but not at the same rate, that values were going up. And if you just looked at it, just statically that, then you could kind of see that argument. But, you know, even, you know, for where we live, we've this year, we're going to have record immigration. And I re I don't remember a law firm economics class, but I remember, you know, what moves, not just what goes up and down the supply curve, but what actually shifts the supply curve and, you know, technological innovation or immigration, where those are things that maybe they're not necessarily seen right from the outset.
But those coupled with lack of building could create this mismatch. I'm curious, the, the actual from the perspective, and then we can dive into affordable housing here from the perspective of, of affordable housing. I think in, you know, in many cities in north America, there, there is housing that is left, locked because of regulations and, you know, basement, walkouts, accessory apartments, different zoning regulation.
Is that a, is that a large portion of where you think that we could unlock affordable housing? Would that be a policy tool that, that, you know, would be at the top of the list?
Kevin (27m 48s): I think we definitely, it, it's not a situation now where there are just tons of empty units. I don't think, I mean, I think there's a lot of locked, you know, unbuilt units and some of my colleagues at Mercatus, you know, work on that, they call it the missing middle sort of, you know, there was this historically there was a, there used to be a lot more of, you know, say a family, building a duplex or triplex and living in one of the units or building a unit in the backyard, or, you know, that may be a grandparent lives in to begin with and eventually becomes a rental or whatever.
So that sort of building just hasn't been happening for decades because it was regulated away. And, but vacancies have really, you know, we really put, turn the screws tightly on mortgage lending after 2007. And so I really, what I say is there's a donut hole in the American housing market. Now, there are, you know, we're sort of maxing out our multiunit building, which is really largely limited by regulatory obstacles.
And then that the pristine credit borrowers at the high end are, are buying as much house as they want because they can get low rates. And they, you know, so they they're basically unconstrained in how much housing they went. And then there's this middle millions of households that used to be able to get mortgages that can't today. And so it's that entry level, new housing market that we just basically, you know, any given year before say 2006, the new homes built for sale at, at less than a $200,000 price point in the United States.
There were, there would be more than a half a million a year built by the last couple of years. That's down to like 70,000 a year. Now, you know, there's some inflation, it's a little bit hard to control for that, but, you know, for most of that time, home prices were lower than they had been in 2005. So, so really we, we just made it impossible for those entry level owners to induce new supply themselves. So that's the irony today is now today because there's a, you know, everyone blames demand side stuff, you know, for high home prices what's happened is because we have this donut hole in the middle of the American housing market.
No, city's been able to build enough at the Metro area level to have adequate supply over the last 12 years. And so in every city rents at the low end are going up just like Vincent. The low ended have been going up in San Francisco, in New York city for, for, you know, years before then. And now that's drawing in institutional investors. And now the narrative is, oh, institutional investors are pricing out, you know, traditional home buyers. Well, you know, we we've excluded traditional home buyers from that market 12, 13 years ago that, you know, any, anybody that can get a mortgage in those sort of markets could lower their monthly housing costs by becoming an owner versus a renter in most cities today, it becomes the low end.
The yields are very good. So, you know, especially compared to mortgage rates. So it's, it's, they're not being priced out of the market. They're being regulated out of the market. And it's good. Finally, we have institutions coming in with enough interest that it's actually inducing home builders to build entry-level units and these new build for rent neighborhoods. Now, those shouldn't be being bought by the families that are gonna live in them, but it's not the institutions that are keeping them out.
It's the, it's the FHF and the consumer finance protection bureau that are keeping them from being owners.
Jesse (31m 47s): So you talked, I mean, we started at the outset of this, basically this article that you wrote that kind of ties in here and it was called what are landlords good for? And I just wanted to, we talked a little bit about this, but I hope, hope that you can expand a little bit and I'll just quote this part here. So to understand why housing affordability policies should primarily consider rent and why the U S focus on price has proven disastrous. We need to understand the roles and incentives of three key parties, landlords financeers and tenants and quote at this particular article article was about the three services that landlords provide transactional capital and diversification as kind of the spotlight for this, this concept.
You know, you don't have to go into super granular detail here, but could you talk a little bit about what you, you know, what the aim of that article was and why the focus on, on landlords in this particular way?
Kevin (32m 45s): Yeah, well, maybe, I don't know if this is coming directly from the same point of that article, but, but I do think one of the things, you know, on that idea of focusing on rents as the core affordability issue and not prices, I think we, there's a lot of bad habits in housing analysis that I wish we could, we could move past. And one of them is treating the homeowner market as if it's a different thing than the renter market, you know, and a lot of times you get these sort of implications in the way people talk about housing as if, when somebody buys a house that, you know, somehow that's adding demand for housing as if they were living under a bridge when they weren't an owner, or, you know, when an institution buys a house that takes away supply, or, you know, as if, you know, they tear it down after they buy it.
Right. And, and another thing which I think these, these cities with the lack of supply of sort of fed into another notion, which is that either you get these outstanding, you know, excess returns, like somebody that bought a house in LA or San Francisco twenty-five years ago, that somehow that's like the goal of being a homeowner and that somebody that bought a house for 120,000 to Detroit twenty-five years ago, that may be only worth 150,000 today somehow missed out.
Or somehow that was a bad investment use. You've seen this phrase a lot that housing can be affordable, or it could investment, but can't be both. It's like, you know, the, Y w people acting wise will say this, you know, you know, sort of impart their wisdom on everyone. And it's a terrible, it's totally wrong, you know, and it, nobody goes to the stock market and says, oh, I'm only going to buy the most expensive stocks because you know, it's not, can be expensive, they're affordable or a good investment, but not both, but of course the best affordable house is the cheap house.
And you shouldn't expect to make a million dollars on it. If you sit on it for, that's the thing that's wrong, that's the thing that's out of whack. And so I think there's been way too much focus on the idea that buying a house gives you access to capital gains. And in fact, the main value to being a homeowner is that you're, that you're getting a job as a landlord, as a management company, and you have the best tenants anyone could ever ask for that never disagreed, you know, that never have any disagreements with you about how to manage the property, right?
They, if you take two years to fix the leaky window, they never complain, right. If you, if you can't afford to upgrade the kitchen exactly. When they went to, they're not going to move out on, they, they understand, you know, you have to wait until you, so they, you know, there's principal agent problems that make a landlord tenant situation, actually, you know, but by, by making the tenant and the landlord, the same person you get rid of all those costs, there's the problem with that, of that.
You can't diversify there. Now, you own this big giant asset, and that's a cost of that. But clearly for most people, the getting rid of the agency costs is, is more valuable than the lack of diversification. And so, again, that, to me, that's why the whole thing about institutions, pricing people out institutions, can't price people out. If somebody has access to credit, they will, they can outbid the institutions. It's the access to credit. That's a, and it's not that institutions have too much credit it's that we've prevented people from getting the credit that they need in order to get rid of these agency costs and be their own landlord.
So, you know, the thing is home ownership, the value of home ownership actually should be this really boring thing that it's, you know, amounts to a couple thousand dollars a year of, of being able to, you know, sort of earn the rental value of that a landlord would earn because they have to take the risk of having bad tenants, and you can earn that income without taking that risk on. And so, you know, you should be able to, you know, you should expect to be able to buy a cheap house in the city.
That's still going to be cheap in 20 years and be very happy with that investment. And in fact, that investment, as I was saying, price to rent ratios are systematically higher. The more expensive the market is. So the people were locking out of the market as homeowners. They're the people for whom being a homeowner is the most valuable that the yield on their unit is much better. You know, somebody that would love to get a mortgage to buy $150,000 house in Atlanta, that's paying, you know, they're paying 1500 a month in rent today and they could get a mortgage for 800 a month.
And the CFPB says, I don't think you're qualified for that. Right. You know, they we're preventing them from being a landlord for them is very lucrative. Like it's several hundred dollars a month in value they get from that. And so, yeah, we were basically locking out the people that, you know, the person that owns the half million dollar house in Atlanta that they're not getting as good a deal. It's still a good deal to be a homeowner for them, but it's not as good a deal as it is for the person that would like the $150,000 house.
Jesse (38m 15s): It's a compelling argument. When you say the, the, you know, when people are saying these institutional purchasers are pricing people out, they can't price people out. You know, for me, it crystallizes when I think about our industry and commercial real estate, when we have a multiple bid situation with commercial property, the nine times out of 10, it is the owner that is going to be able to pay the most for it. And it is essentially the same thing in, in, I mean, in a sense where they are purchasing and leasing back to their own company.
And it is this idea that they have all the mechanisms to be the one that can pay the most. So to your point, it kind of has a similar thread of, you know, comparing the institution that they can do everything that you are doing as the purchaser, but they can't eliminate every single tree. They can have scale, but they can eliminate every single transaction costs.
Kevin (39m 5s): Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it is very similar there. They can decide if you're, if you own it and they're the tenant, they, they have their own reasons for whether they would close the store down and, and not renew the lease or whatever. They don't care if that's a cost to you, but, but if they're their own landlord, well, now you can account for all the costs and maybe they'd stay a few more years and yeah, exactly. It's and so we, we basically regulated a bunch of American households out of being able to make that decision on the March.
Jesse (39m 39s): So we're coming up to the end of the, the time here. I think we, we definitely have to get you back on Kevin re I'm. Sure we could talk a little bit more about your book and the current situation or current, you know, place that we're in economically, but before we do, you know, give people direction on where they can go to reach out to you, maybe we talk a little bit about, you know, where you see trends are going right now with, you know, we're in the beginning and of Q1 20, 22, you know, is there anything that people should be looking out for from real estate or economics point of view that you'd like to touch on?
Kevin (40m 16s): I'd say it's a little bit the same in a little bit different than what was happening in 2004 and five. Again, it's, it's the same story in that rents are what's driving prices in a way that's much more connected and important that people are giving group credit for it. And in fact, I, one of the things I think is sort of funny about the, all these sort of public conversations happening is you get a conversation over here, you know, oh, you know, rent inflation is really high. And you know, the CPI rent inflation is lagging, but you know, the, the indexes that follow, you know, market rents on new units, they're up double digits.
And so these across the country, right? So you have that conversation that, oh, rents are through the roof. And so that conversation tends to be about oh, inflation and monetary policy. So we need to, we need to slow down the economy because people have too much money. Then there's this other conversation that, oh, prices are through the roof. And it, and it's because mortgage rates are too low. And so people are overpaying for houses and, and it's a whole totally different conversation.
But it's based on this idea that the fed controls, the interest rate, which they don't, the fed couldn't make mortgage rates 6%. If they, they, we would be trade. We would be bartering seashells for things before they could get Margaret trace to 5%, they'd have to suck every dollar out of the fact, that's what happened in 2008, they literally would have had to suck every dollar out of the economy to hit their 2% rate a target in 2008. And, and they couldn't, and they ended up creating a financial crisis.
So, but there's this idea that the fed controls that rate. And so now they have to raise rates to S to lower those prices because the prices, well, those things are related. High prices are high because rents are high and they're both high because we don't have enough supply. And, but the thing that makes it different in 2005 is that back then, it was very localized. That prices were going up in these, in these individual metropolitan areas that, that were, that specifically have local supply problems.
When we put this donut hole in the middle of the American housing buyer market. Now we've created a supply crisis in every city in the country. So rents are going up everywhere. Like they had been only going up in the coastal metropolises and those, those housing costs take on a, in fact, I got some papers that I'm, that we'll be publishing pretty soon. I've been working on this, this idea that when there's limited supply in a city, it takes a very peculiar picture.
It's the low end of the city where prices and rents get ratcheted up by that lack of supply. Because at th at the high end, people can substitute down. Like if, if you're making $200,000 a year in San Francisco, you're not going to buy the same house. You'd buy in Phoenix. What you're going to do a substitute down to a neighborhood that should, the people that live in that neighborhood should be able to making 70,000 a year, but you're taking one of their houses because you, because you're not going to spend the money. Right. So all that pressure gets pushed down, down, down and down in the market.
So all the, all the cost pressure ends up getting, getting loaded at the low end until finally somebody making $50,000 a year moves out of town because they just can't take the cost anymore, but you can see this. So for instance, in the last five or six years, rent inflation is through the roof in every city, but it's very income specific in the, in, in the neighborhoods, in a city where incomes are low, every city is seeing double digit inflation rents at the high end are pretty stable. So you get this weird market where yeah.
Prices are going up at the high end of every city. And yeah, those are, you know, somewhat related to low interest rates. So there is some, there is a little bit of, of price to rent ratio expansion at the top end, which is, you know, it's still a fundamental it's rates are low and they're low for fundamental reasons at the low end prices are going up more than that. Then they are at the high end, but it's purely a rent function. It's purely because rents are going up so much more than women.
So the irony is, yeah, there is some, some expansion in the ratios, but the, the homes where the homes whose prices have gone up the most are the homes where ratio expansion is the least important fact. It's, it's rents that are driving the places that are going up the most. That's not going to reverse overnight. Like we need to build millions of homes to stop that process. Now, I, I see again, you know, where it's second best alternatives.
We should be building a bunch of condos in New York city in LA, and we're not. So the best, second best alternative is to build whatever we can everywhere else. So, you know, we have second best, you know, we start with the second best, you know, we should be building homes or condos in LA and San Francisco. We can't. So we built, so we try to build them everywhere else. You know, that means a lot of people would be building a lot of single family homes in the suburbs and all these other cities. Now we won't let it that a lot of them do it.
So now it's like the best alternative is to let institutions build them and rent them out. So, you know, if that's the only solution we allow for ourselves, then that's the only way we're going to bring down rents and that's going to be a long drawn out process. But I certainly don't take any, Hey, I don't think anybody needs to worry about mortgage rates going to 7%, all of a sudden, and be even if mortgage rates go up a little, I don't think low rates are really what's driving the market.
So housing, I think, and real estate, General's a very interesting sector now because it really is sort of both offensive defense. You know, there's, the rents are going to keep rising until we meet the demand with adequate supply. And so there's going to be a natural continuing price appreciation. And the only way that that's going to stop is for the home builders and the, and the private equity, you know, multiunit built companies to, to do what they do and do more of it.
And so to me, there's nothing, but you know, nothing but growth ahead, either in supply or in prices. And yeah, so, you know, I'm shocked at the, you know, I think there's so much worry in the market about reliving 2008. To me, you look at some of the valuations on home builders. It's, it's just insanity. They're trading at legitimate PE ratios of two or three points on forward PE ratios. And, you know, I don't see any legitimate reason to think their earnings are going anywhere.
Jesse (47m 19s): Well, we definitely need to delve into, I guess, the, the state of the economy now and, and what we see coming down the pike, because I think it's, it's another conversation Kevin, for individuals that want to, you know, get in contact, or just want to get exposed to some of the writings that you, that you're doing. And you mentioned a couple of papers as well. I work in working people, working, you send them to online.
Kevin (47m 45s): I have my Twitter handle is K Erdman and you can see the, the papers that'll be coming out will be Mercatus papers. And so my, my scholar page at Mercatus is probably a good spot to, to dig into. And including that, that the, the post you referenced was from, was it, I forget how many parts were in that say it was a long series. I did back a couple of years ago on housing affordability.
And so that you would find in that series, that the murkiness and scholar page.
Jesse (48m 19s): Yeah. We'll put a link up to that. And we'll, we'll link the, the two books on Amazon building from the ground up and shut out. So we'll have links. If anybody's interested there, just check out the show notes
Kevin (48m 33s): In my DMS are open at Twitter. If anybody wants to home,
Jesse (48m 38s): My guest today has been Kevin Erdman. Kevin, thank you for being part of working capital.
Kevin (48m 43s): Thanks.
Jesse (48m 51s): Thank you so much for listening to working capital the real estate podcast. I'm your host, Jesse, for galley. If you liked the episode, head on to iTunes and leave us a five star review and share on social media, it really helps us out. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, Jesse for galley, F R a G a L E, have a good one take care.