From CNBC:
Sales of newly built homes tank in April, as prices and interest rates rise
Sales of newly built homes dropped 4.7% in April compared with March, and fell a larger 7.7% from the prior year, the U.S. Census said Thursday.
March sales were also revised significantly lower.
Higher mortgage rates are clearly hampering sales. The monthly reading is based on signed contracts, so it reflects people shopping during the month and inking deals based on current rates.
The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage was in the high 6% range at the end of March, but then shot up to 7.5% during April, cutting into affordability.
Adding to that, the median price of a new home sold in April was $433,500, 4% higher than it was in April 2023. Some of that is due to the mix of homes selling, which is mostly on the higher end of the market. Those buyers are not as influenced by mortgage rates, as they often use all cash.
Builders say they cannot lower prices due to high costs for land, labor and materials. The big production builders have been buying down mortgage rates to help boost sales, but they are able to do that because of their size. D.R. Horton and Toll Brothers reported strong earnings in their latest quarters, beating expectations and citing growing demand due to low supply in the resale market.
“For all the happy talk from the big builders (who are taking market share), the entire new build industry is selling new homes at a pace below the 5 yr average,” noted Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Financial Group and a CNBC contributor.
In the first quarter of 2024, 38% of a median household income nationally was needed to make the mortgage payment on a median-priced new single-family home, according to a new index launched Thursday by the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo. Low-income families, which it defines as those earning just 50% of the area’s median income, would have to spend 77% of their earnings to pay for the same new home.
Prices continue to rise for both new and existing homes due to a lack of supply. There is very little available for sale on the lower end of the resale market. While the number of newly built homes continues to rise, up 12% year over year, new homes come at a price premium and are out of range for lower-income buyers.
“With a nationwide shortage of roughly 1.5 million homes, the lack of housing units is the primary cause of growing housing affordability challenges,” said Robert Dietz, NAHB’s chief economist. “Policymakers at all levels of government need to enact policy changes that will allow builders to construct more homes, such as speeding up permit approval times, providing resources for skilled labor training and fixing building material supply chains.”
Foist!
Government must do more to support new housing! Where have I heard that before? GSEs and the other federal programs aren’t enough, we need the government to fix the supply chains!
Make lumber cheap again!
Hehe
San Diego cop’s unbelievable explanation for accidently locking himself in the back of his cruiser with woman who said ‘I’m down to f*** right now’ before radioing fellow officer to let him out
Officer Anthony Hair arrested a female suspect for allegedly stealing a car
As he drove her to the station, the woman began to proposition Hair for sex
About 20 minutes later, Hair called for help after locking himself in the backseat
A San Diego police officer can been seen on newly-released bodycam locking himself in the backseat of his cruiser with a female suspect who wanted to have sex with him – before calling a colleague to let him out.
“Policymakers at all levels of government need to enact policy changes that will allow builders to construct more homes, such as speeding up permit approval times, providing resources for skilled labor training and fixing building material supply chains.”
Please tell me this statement above is from The Onion or Babylon Bee.
Eddie,
The Chinese have no problem building a buttload housing. In fact, they have built so much half of it is empty.
We should ask them for help. Hehe.
When you want work done, don’t expect an American to do it.
buttload of housing.
When seconds count the police are only a few minutes away. Watching from a distance that is. Hehe.
Victim: Help, help, I’m being raped.
Police: We know, we are watching the whole thing from up above. Smile for the camera!
The Denver Police Department has launched a new program that will have drones respond to 911 calls instead of cops. The agency plans to start deploying them in six to 12 months
Phoenix,
My point is that that statement is ripe with corruption, inefficiency, pie-in-the-sky thinking, delusion, illusion and mirage. Even if all that was stated above came together perfectly, it would take a decade before it produced results. Beyond that, it’s minuscule reason. It’s blanket words that have no meaning. I could go on and list 50 reasons why it wouldn’t, shouldn’t and couldn’t happen. It literally is satire.
“It’s blanket words that have no meaning.”
It’s gaslighting to a populace that has a real need for affordable housing.
That’s what it is.
Then someone needs money, they steal your catalytic converter. But you interrupt them so they do a mag dump into your chest.
One apartment becomes empty, as it’s resident is dead.
One person goes to jail, they now have an “apartment.”
Guess that’s a win-win.
The Chinese have no problem building a buttload housing. In fact, they have built so much half of it is empty.
If we were smart, we’d start sending China a steady stream of American immigrants to start taking up housing, etc.
What makes you think they want or need any Americans? It isn’t in their “creed,” nor do they have a Statue of Liberty where they boast:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
If you are truly American, this is what you believe, isn’t it?
Then there is the other American word: FREE DOM
But you want to censor books, take away TikTok, things like that. America is the land of laws for everything, except for those whose job it is to enforce them. Hey, I’ll bang her in the back of the patrol car. Hehe.
China never said it had FREE DOM. America boasts that it does, but that is not the truth now is it? At least they are honest about it.
Hopefully on Memorial Day someone had at least given a thought to Pat Tillman.
I did.
grim says:
May 28, 2024 at 8:29 am
The Chinese have no problem building a buttload housing. In fact, they have built so much half of it is empty.
If we were smart, we’d start sending China a steady stream of American immigrants to start taking up housing, etc.
Hackensack YMCA will be redeveloped as luxury rental housing, adding yet another 250 apartments to the hundreds newly constructed or in progress. Speaking of luxury there is a recent development off the side of the GS Pkwy, I believe Clifton/ Garfield, they are offering 2 months free rent. The sign says luxury apartments, I guess being on the side of the GS Pkwy, and looking out over that and the back of the DSW store is luxury.
How many luxury apartments can you build on the site of a Hedge Fund missile attack on Red Lobster?
Hehe.
Why do we need more single family housing with a rapidly declining birth rate, will afford single family housing lead to an increase in the birth rate?
All those Fat Americans at the buffet eating plates and plates of Endless Thai Shrimp till their bellies look like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers.
All that cholesterol clogging their arteries as they troweled down pounds of it into their gullets due to the cheap prices. You know how much Americans like to save money.
No all you can eat burgers at McDonalds, those poor owners have to pay rent to the landowners of their establishments.
Do you own a single family home? Most on here seem to, and most seem to like and prefer it.
That’s why you need it, people want it. It’s the “American Dream,” George Bush Jr. said so. He even made one of the finest backgrounds for his speech, link posted below.
Truly a man of the people for the people.
Notice no apartments/condos in his picture. Hehe.
3b says:
May 28, 2024 at 8:55 am
Why do we need more single family housing with a rapidly declining birth rate, will afford single family housing lead to an increase in the birth rate?
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/12/20031216-9.html
LAX,
Nice state you live in. Had a pleasant vacay over there. All of those electric cars and CNG busses seemed to have solved the smog problem. Had a great view of LA from the top of a hill while hiking.
Oh, met a Ukrainian on the hike. Looked like a young Dolph Lundgren. Not all weaselly like Zelenskyy. Strong, young built, fit. Oh, and he ain’t heading to Ukraine to save his country, he likes LA better.
Guess its up to the old goats in Ukraine to fight the war. The young ones here would rather be at Venice Beach after enjoying a fruit frothy.
Mother Jones tried to warn us a decade ago, before all this nonsense went down.
Pretty much a guarantee that if someone positions something to you as being a luxury product, you are being robbed.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/imported-seafood-shrimp-fda/
Next time you tuck into a Red Lobster “Endless Shrimp” special or score some $7-per-pound salmon at a supermarket, consider this: You’re very likely eating imported seafood raised on a factory-style farm in Asia—and it almost certainly was never inspected by the Food and Drug Administration on its way into the country and onto your plate.
Is that…safe? Big retailers like Walmart and restaurant chains like Darden (owner of Red Lobster) say yes, in part because some of the seafood they buy bears the Best Aquaculture Practices label. Who issues that label? The Global Aquaculture Alliance, an industry endeavor—its board consists of representatives from (you guessed it) Darden, as well as Cargill, the Chilean salmon industry, and a large farmed-shrimp importer called Eastern Fish Company. Not surprisingly, BAP standards for farmed fish placed near the bottom (16 of 20) in a 2012 ranking of aquaculture labels by the University of Victoria’s Seafood Ecology Research Group. (Darden says it independently tests its shrimp for contaminants but declined to share its results; Walmart did not answer our questions about inspections.)
…
And then there’s the drug problem. Like US meat farms, Asia’s shrimp operations rely heavily on antibiotics to control diseases among creatures packed tightly together, and also to make them grow faster. That creates the risk of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the final product. In a 2012 study, FDA scientists tested 330 samples of shrimp farmed in Thailand—the No. 1 US shrimp supplier—and bought in Little Rock, Arkansas, supermarkets. Sixty-seven turned up positive for strains of the bacteria klebsiella that are resistant to a range of antibiotics—32 of them showed resistance to no fewer than eight different antibiotics. The researchers concluded that “imported shrimp is a reservoir for multidrug-resistant Klebsiella,” which can trigger urinary-tract infections and pneumonia.
And it’s not just nasty bugs that can end up in our seafood. Testifying before Congress in 2008, Don Kraemer, then-deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Food Safety, warned of “clear scientific evidence” that drug residues make it into the fish we eat. In 2011, the FDA tested just 0.1 percent of imported seafood products for drug traces. In 2008, the agency tested only 34 shrimp samples for residues of nitrofurans—a class of antibiotics banned because they’re carcinogenic. Six samples tested positive.
…
In an October letter to the FDA, the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a trade group for the US wild-caught shrimp industry, identified three Vietnamese shrimp processors that were ordered to put their products through mandatory testing in Canada after authorities there found traces of fluoroquinolones, a banned antibiotic. Yet all three can still export freely to the United States. Another major Vietnamese shrimp supplier to the US, Soc Trang Seafood Joint Stock Company (which, incidentally, is BAP-certified), had three different shipments turned back by Japan in 2012 due to the presence of banned chemicals—but the United States routinely welcomed its products.
I bet this story makes it to film, well, or at least netflix:
The Prawn Predicament?
Crustacean Conspiracy?
https://nypost.com/2024/05/25/us-news/former-red-lobster-execs-describe-miserable-work-environment-thai-companys-overhaul-before-bankruptcy-filing/
https://www.thaiunion.com/en/newsroom/press-release/1675/thai-union-group-announces-intention-to-pursue-exit-of-minority-investment-in-red-lobster
https://www.businessinsider.com/red-lobster-owner-never-eating-lobster-ever-again-2024-5
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13459173/Red-Lobster-staff-toxic-work-thai-union-shrimp.html
https://fortune.com/2024/05/21/shrimp-denies-role-brouhaha-red-lobster/
https://www.reuters.com/business/red-lobster-probes-endless-shrimp-losses-after-bankruptcy-filing-2024-05-20/
If it wasn’t already, it’s going to be the IHOP or Dennys of seafood.
The video. Then when he cries for help, his buddy turns off his body camera as well.
Enjoy the show.
https://youtu.be/vyBLb1Uj9CE
Phoenix
That Dan Diego cop already resigned. lol.
HMB,
Resigned, will work somewhere else in a week.
His buddy who turned off his camera- still employed.
Some animals are more equal than others. And when this chick sues claiming she was under arrest and raped, taxpayer gonna pay.
Pony up taxpayers, you have unlimited cash to spend. Hehe.
Phoenix
Here’s something to cheer you up.
Your bias is hosting a travel show. She’s pretending to be a YouTuber called seibja but she gets recognized almost instantly by all the guests on the show. She goes windsurfing around 12 minutes into it.
https://youtu.be/aQV7VUPZBmw?si=XhFu1rGaO0mEyrSB
9:14 golf clap
Phoenix,
What country would you want to live in, assuming you want to live at all?
Phoenix wants to return to his homeland of Dickheadistan.
A major study on homelessness in California, released last year by UC San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI), includes two notable findings: 48% of all unhoused single adults in the state are 50 or older and 41% of unhoused older adults became homeless for the first time after age 50.
Now a follow-up study from BHHI researchers dives further into that alarming trend, which they note is expected to continue as “the proportion of people age 65 and older experiencing homelessness in the United States [is] expected to triple between 2017 and 2030.”
2:00
I doubt he wants you to be his prime minister
GOP opposes regulation of Big Food. Boomers get socialist universal healthcare once they get cancer
grim says:
May 28, 2024 at 9:16 am
Mother Jones tried to warn us a decade ago, before all this nonsense went down.
Housing market alive and well in Essex co..
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5-Randolph-Pl-Verona-NJ-07044/38735275_zpid/
Found it,
This is LAX’s life on the left coast. Is also what Fat Eddie dreams off.
https://youtu.be/WLFvTg11kdQ?si=nKlKEl20N2Yh8rva
I presume this is Libturd or Grim’s experience with the Health System
https://youtu.be/VAfy26xs6e0?si=jDp6v4f-k6ZoPuxi
100% accurate
Pretty close.
In other news: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/funds/cathie-wood-ark-invest-wealth-destroyed-tech-stocks-morningstar-arkk-2024-2#:~:text=Bello/Getty%20Images-,Cathie%20Wood%27s%20Ark%20Invest%20has
They touched on one very important strategy in that clip. The requirement to fax back completed documents.
Insurance companies 100% realize that this creates incredible friction in the process. Nobody owns a fax machine. Nobody even works in an office where there is a fax machine. In some cases, your local office supply store might not even have a fax machine anymore. I mean hell, a physical fax machine doesn’t even work if you don’t have a copper phone line, which most of America doesn’t even have anymore. There are plenty of very easy ways to replace this requirement with easier, lower friction options.
They will not. As long as there is 1 fax machine left on the planet earth they will require you to use it.
In fact, they go out of their way to do this. This isn’t some legacy option that just happened to have some staying power due to efficiency. The hardware necessary to execute this at scale, the software to manage mass fax. You could replace this with online portal or emailing scanned docs at 1/10th the operating cost for them. Meaning, it would SAVE the insurance companies to not use faxes.
But the rub is, the cost of supporting this is far less than the cost of the claims that people don’t submit because of the friction. They could easily put a solution in place and radically cut the processing cost and time, but the resultant increase in claims makes it incredibly unappealing.
Insurance companies are not your friends, they are not looking out for you, their spiel is complete bullshit.
I’m shocked they haven’t gone to the point of requiring notary acknowledgement of claims appeals. Though I’m sure there is some Ivy League business consultant in there suggesting it right now. You know, to reduce the potential for claims fraud, so that they can more effectively deliver quality care to those who need it.
Regarding South park, wife and I went to the infamous College of Insurance, 30 years with Pru/Met healthcare etc, wife worked on various claims systems, actually comes in handy when following on claims.
Hint: Always indicate that you will and do file complaint with State Insurance Commissioner, know the name. Only claims expediated are those that came through as in that pile.
Interesting. Thanks Condo!