Get Your Downpayment! -- FTHB Market Update

Well, hello everybody and happy Tuesday. My name is Stephen Meade with Domicile Real Estate where we are on a mission to help California's renters become homeowners. And it looks like the state of California wants to join us in this mission. Something you've probably heard and maybe even on the news, this is getting a lot of news coverage is the California Dream for all program. It is the Shared Equity downpayment program where the state basically will give first time homebuyers have very wide income levels.

So everything from entry level all the way up to, frankly, in Orange County $235,000 of income, they will give you 20% down, and then they will ask for when you go to sell 20% of that value. So they will share in that appreciation. And then that money goes back into replenish the program. We expect this program is going to go quickly. And just a little bit of a commercial, we are doing a 30 minute online info session. There is a link down below if you're watching this on YouTube to sign up for that we actually have a lot of people already signed up. It's this Thursday 5:30pm.

And again, it's just short 30 minutes, but to kind of give you information, will you qualify for this? How do you get it? What do you need to do to get started? Is this right for you. So we're gonna go over that. But now let's get into talking about our entry level market. And what we're seeing out there in the marketplace, if you have the distinct feeling that things are starting to get crazy, you are not wrong, they are starting to get crazy. So let's go ahead and take a look and see why is that happening.

So starting off here with our prices, again, this is our entry level, close prices, these are delayed by a little bit, we see that entry level single family home, the number inching upward. We also see our condo number has come down a bit. But I think that 565 might have been a little premature. If you extrapolate here, kind of looking over time, this goes all the way back to 2018 2018. And then a year ago, you see kind of this arc of prices rising to about May June timeframe, then kind of gently falling and then sort of bouncing with the beginning of the year, even with this condo, and if you discount this high number, you can kind of see a little bit of that same exact trend.

What does this mean? Right, you know, our market has a lot of seasonality to it, not in terms of really how busy the market is. But we do notice that prices tend to go down towards the end of the year no matter what come back up. But this year, they started coming back real early. And I think a lot of that was driven by the reduction in interest rates and also people just frankly, getting use to higher interest rates and consumers acclimating to that. Now if we jump forward, we take a look at what is the payment here, right? Remember, this incorporates interest rates into this, now this picture becomes a lot clearer.

So on our entry level, single family home with 5% down and mortgage insurance taxes, etc. You're 5697 Where were we back in 2018? Well, there we were $3,600. That was a great time. But even if we look as recently as about a year ago, we were really on the same zone like I mean, if you look we've got some ups and downs. But this number really hasn't changed a lot since the spring of last year. Same thing on the condo, side 4284, we can kind of go back here to kind of be in that 4200s range, right? We're not really that far off from where we are in spring of last year. And that's part of the reason why you're seeing some price resiliency is because we're really staying within this kind of zone here. Now, if we look at our minimum household income required, we have dropped below $140,000 at 139 529. for entry level single family home and 1049 awaits.

So right around $100,000 For our entry level condo, do remember this assumes zero other debt, right? So this is kind of again, that minimum household income. Obviously, if you've got car payments, student loans, credit cards, you would need more income than that to make it happen. And of course, this is a household income. So this can be more than one person. This is the number that should be especially concerning to people. Right? If you look through last year, right, once we got into the summer, we were seeing these numbers in the 60s 70s. Right 60s 70s, maybe high 70s. But since the beginning of the year, we have been trending in the 80s and the 90s here in absorption rate.

And what that really means is that we're running an inventory deficit essentially right because not every home that comes in the market even ends up selling so you know, we're I think in a pretty solid inventory deficit, meaning fewer homes are really coming on the market that are disappearing. We are about one for one for homes coming on the market and going into escrow. And you know, some homes will never make it to escrow and get pulled from the market. So, you know, really this tells us kind of a really big problem that we have.

And as it's been the last three years or so it is primarily an inventory problem. And I don't see it changing anytime soon. I don't see there being some deluge of foreclosures coming on the market to add supply. And if we look at our total inventory that corroborates exactly what we are talking about. You can see last year inventory really peaked over the summer, then started falling. But what's really strange is look back here, look at what the curve looks like. Last year, we were rising inventory and look at the way it shaped this year.

Same thing even on our entry level condos, we've got a downward slope instead of at least an even and maybe a rise. And I I just don't see us getting to a big inventory level like we did last summer. I think there's a lot of reasons for that. The biggest is that lock in effect, people who have both low property taxes and low interest rates are low that to move and put their homes on the market. If we look at our still active percentage, we see that our entry level single family home that continues to get more competitive as this number falls, condos have a bout evened out. But again, these numbers are way lower than we had during our peaks.

These are more like our June numbers in terms of market competitiveness. So every time we do one of these updates, the market we're in starts looking a lot more like the spring of 2022. And finally, if we look at our week supply of homes, this is sort of our relative inventory figure. I like this one a lot. It says a lot about sort of that rate of homes flying off the shelves, and really what's out there that we are at, or condos, 5.3 weeks of inventory and for entry level single family all four and a quarter weeks of inventory.

We haven't really seen these kind of numbers, since Gosh, back in May of last year. You know, I mean, this is just really not a lot of relative inventory, you know, about a month worth maybe a little over a month. For condos. It's just again, it's just a very low inventory environment and I don't see a lot changing that. So that's what I've got for you again, check out the link down below for our free 30 minute info session that's online.

You will not have to go on your camera, I promise. But you will learn about this program whether you qualify and have a chance to ask questions, which is probably the most important part. Thank you so much for watching. If you are looking to become a homeowner or you know someone who should be looking to become a homeowner, we would absolutely love to talk to you or them. So definitely hit us up. Don't forget to like subscribe and hit that notification bell and we will see you again real soon.