New Jersey Real Estate Report

From the NYT:

Something Has to Give in the Housing Market. Or Does It?

Two years into the pandemic, rundown bungalows command bidding wars, buyers keep snatching up places they’ve never seen, and homebuilders can’t find enough cabinet doors for everyone who wants a new home. The median price for an American home is up nearly 20 percent in a year. The for-sale inventory is at a new low. And the hopeful buyers left on the sidelines have helped drive up rents instead.

All of this may feel unsustainable — the tight inventory, the wild price growth, the dwindling affordability. Surely something’s got to give.

But what if that’s not exactly true? Or, at least, not true anytime soon for renters locked out of homeownership today or anyone worried about housing affordability. There’s probably no quick reprieve coming, no rollback in stratospheric home prices if you can just wait a little longer to jump in.

“It’s not a bubble, it really is about the fundamentals,” said Jenny Schuetz, a housing researcher at the Brookings Institution. “It really is about supply and demand — not enough houses, and huge numbers of people wanting homes.”

Neither side of that ledger has a quick fix. More than six million existing homes sold in 2021, the highest number since 2006, according to data published Thursday by the National Association of Realtors. But that was still well short of satisfying demand. And there’s little evidence to suggest the nation is in a hurry to correct the imbalance between supply and demand.

“My pessimistic view is that the economy is perfectly capable of running with unaffordable housing,” said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin. This was evident over the last decade, she said, when affordability worsened even as the economy continued to grow. And that reality has enabled politicians and the public to largely neglect the issue of housing affordability.

From Insider:

1980s millennials are finally recovering from the Great Recession

Nearly 15 years after the Great Recession hit, the eldest millennials are finally doing alright.

Graduating into a blighted job market put them on a rocky road to building both their career and wealth, which was only further hampered by massive student debt and soaring living costs for things like homes and health care. But data over the past year has revealed that the cohort is making a comeback from their economic challenges in the job market and in their bank accounts.

Research shows that those who graduate during a recession could see stagnation in financial growth for up to 15 years. The St. Louis Fed previously deemed millennials born in the 1980s at risk of becoming a “lost generation” for wealth accumulation. As of 2016, their median wealth levels were 34% below older generations when they were a similar age, making them the slowest cohort to recover from the Great Recession.

“Not only is their wealth shortfall in 2016 very large in percentage terms, but the typical 1980s family actually lost ground in relative terms between 2010 and 2016, a period of rapidly rising asset values that buoyed the wealth of all older cohorts,” the St. Louis Fed report read.

But a follow-up report last year found “millennials may not be as ‘lost’ as we once thought.” It revealed that the cohort made serious ground in building wealth. As of 2019, they had narrowed their wealth deficit to 11%. Of course, this doesn’t take into consideration effects from coronavirus recession, as full data for this period isn’t yet available.

From NJ1015:

Why do more workers plan to jump ship from their jobs in 2022?

Job optimism is high as 41% of workers plan to look for a new job in the first six months of 2022, according to Robert Half’s biannual job optimism report, which surveyed more than 2,400 employees.

That’s up from 32% six months ago, said regional director Dora Onyschak. She added that the top reasons why workers are quitting include salary boost (54%), better benefits and perks (38%), and the ability to work remotely permanently (34%).

Surprisingly, the report also found that 28% of workers would quit their current job without even having another job lined up.

“Professionals know that they are in demand in the market, so my guess would be is that they’re not as concerned as they perhaps have been in prior years,” Onyschak said.

The report also found that 66% of the Gen Z professionals felt that their careers have stalled since the start of the pandemic. These younger workers want to be challenged so they are the ones who would typically start to look for a new job if they’re unsatisfied, she said.

About 49% of employees who have been with their company for two to four years and 47% of technology workers are also most likely to start job searching in the first half of this year.