The old adage that history repeats itself can be just as worrisome as it is comforting. But in a time of stress, like a housing crisis, recession or other economic downturn, it’s human nature to string together comparisons to the past as a way to understand the present says Mark Fleming, chief economist with Fortune 500 financial corporation First American.
This fall, the housing market started to seem downright Dickensian to Fannie Mae CEO Priscilla Almodovar, as she described “a tale of two markets” in an interview with MarketWatch. For the holiday season, though, Fleming tells Fortune that there’s another great Dickens tale that’s apt for the current state of things: homebuyers are being haunted, like Ebenezer Scrooge himself, by the ghosts of housing markets past.
Fleming has a surprising analogy for today’s housing market. While the stress and anxiety caused by high mortgage rates and inflation today may feel reminiscent of the rapid housing inflation before the Global Financial Crisis of the 2000s, that’s not the decade to which Fleming turns. Instead, as he first noted in late October, today’s housing market most resembles that of the 1980s—another period that saw high inflation, rising interest rates, and a boom of homebuyers coming of age. As a rough year for homebuyers comes to a close, current market conditions bring to mind nothing like an unwelcome visit of a “housing market of Christmas past,” he tells Fortune.
The 2000s are the ‘antithesis’ of today’s housing market
Despite the familiar feelings of anxiety, today’s housing market really couldn’t be more different from that of the 2000s.
“We were building new homes like crazy back in the building bubble of the early 2000s. We had looser lending standards,” as evidenced with a great portion subprime mortgages, Fleming told Fortune. “And we had highly leveraged homeowners.”
That leverage proved to be a problem during the Global Financial Crisis, when a rash of foreclosures created “contagion effects” that sent prices and sale prices falling, Fleming says. That was quickly followed by the Federal Reserve’s move to cut interest rates to “put a floor underneath the collapsing housing market.”
“That sounds very different to today, doesn’t it?” Fleming asks.
Today, the housing market is facing a major lack of inventory, leaving buyers with fewer and fewer options—yet another glaring difference from the GFC era. What’s more, unlike the GFC, today we have both inflation and rising interest rates (although the Fed has slowed its roll the past four months).
“It’s almost like this downturn is the antithesis of the one in the Global Financial Crisis,” Fleming says.
It’s all relative
To be sure, the recent 8% peak in 30-year mortgage rates doesn’t compare to their level in the early 1980s. Still, there’s an echo, Fleming says, because both times, rates rose at a rapid pace over a relatively short period of time, to the detriment of buyers looking to break into the market.
That’s why Fleming equates today’s 8% mortgage rates to the 18% rates of the 1980s. Between the 1970s and 80s, mortgage rates rose by about 8 to 10 percentage points, for a relative change on par with that seen in the mortgage market of the past two years.
Even though 8% isn’t “particularly high by historic standards,” Fleming says, homeowners are caught up with the much lower rates of a year before—another echo of the 1980s.
“Our response is less to whether it’s 8% or 18%, but how much and how quickly has it changed,” Fleming says. “That’s what drives the behavior. We remember the 3.5% and 3% mortgage rates.”
That’s also why so many Americans are feeling down on the economy, despite its relatively strong performance and low unemployment, according to Fleming.
“One highly believable argument is that it’s not about GDP—it’s about prices,” he says. “I remember when milk was $1.95, not $3.95. I remember when the gallon of gas was $3, not $5. I remember when house prices were 40% less expensive than they are today. That was only a couple of years ago.”
With many buyers longing for the more favorable conditions of a few years back, this holiday season is haunted by the “housing market of Christmas past,” Fleming says.
Echoes of a demographic boom
Another echo of the 1980s comes from today’s demographic changes—the millennial generation, children of the baby boomers, are aging into their prime home-buying years, repeating the cycle of the 1960s and 1970s that expanded the growth of the suburbs. Unlike the 1980s, though, construction isn’t keeping up with population growth.
“We were able to build so much in the late ’70s and ’80s. The suburbs were built to serve the new demand coming online from households being formed by baby boomers,” Fleming says. “But for millennials today, it’s a hard time for us to build enough. We haven’t built enough to serve this new demographic demand.”
There’s also an aspect of generational conflict. “There are some that have argued it’s the baby boomers that are actually hoarding housing from millennials and that’s why prices are also very high,” Fleming says.
While some economists have predicted a “silver tsunami” that would lead millions of baby boomers to sell their homes at once—a good sign for millennial buyers—Fleming believes the process of baby boomer downsizing will happen much more slowly.
Today, only the oldest baby boomers have reached their eighties, the age when we typically see downsizing occur, he explains. Plus, boomers are staying in their homes for much longer than other generations.
“They’re wealthier. They’re healthier,” Fleming says. “It is true that the cycle of the large baby boomer generation aging out will happen, but not yet.”
Plus, demographic changes never happen as suddenly as some may like to believe.
“Demographics are never a tsunami,” he says. The baby boomer generation includes almost two decades of births, so Fleming says the downsizing would also stretch over about two decades.
“There’s a long, long way from aging out yet,” he says. “Demographic trends, they don’t tsunami. They trickle.”
The lock-in effect
One of the major housing themes this year has been the lock-in effect—the phenomenon of homebuyers holding onto their homes for dear life out of fear of losing historically low interest rates they clinched during or before the pandemic.
Inflation has only exacerbated that tendency, Fleming says, because rising prices tend to go hand-in-hand with higher mortgage rates.
“It’s also more difficult and quickly more expensive for the renter to become a homebuyer,” he says. “That transition from renter to buyer in an inflationary period becomes very, very, very challenging because rates go up, mortgages go up.”
Inflation rates also peaked in 1980 at more than 14%, and the bouts of inflation we’re experiencing now are reminiscent of that time period.
“Inflation causes this lock-in effect, which actually exacerbates the haves and have not relationship between the homeowners and renters,” Fleming says. “Homeowners are the largest provider of inventory to the housing market and lock themselves in. They go on strike. That renter who would really love to try and lock in an inflation hedge can’t because there’s nothing to buy.”
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