Housing Crash 2026: Your $500K Home Is Now $375K

Hey, what's up, YouTube? Great to be on with you again today. This is one of the craziest days to you know, be talking about real estate. This is one of the worst days in the mortgage market since 2021.

We're seeing rates spike. Definitely going to be above 6.5% mortgage rate by the end of today. Let's dig into what is going on. Let me just share my screen and show you what we're talking about because there's There There's some things that can become really, really bad in real estate, which is a double whammy, which is the stock market's dropping, especially here in Florida because a lot of people use their 401Ks and their cash to go and purchase property.

And then number two, interest rates you know, going up at the same exact time. So, that Both of this is happening today, right? We saw the 10-year Treasury spike today. The CPI came in much higher than than what was expected.

You can see that rates have been moving on the 10-year Treasury from 4 nice little spike of demand when we saw rates, you know, mortgage rates go below 6% and now that they've spiked, you know, the 10-year Treasury just because of Iran war, oil prices moving up, it's really dampening the market and you can see pipelines on the real estate side start to dry up. I'm talking with lenders. I'm talking with real estate brokers. I'm talking with top agents and it's been extremely volatile these past few months.

Now, why do we follow the 10-year Treasury? Just let you know, people stay in their home between 8 to 12 years and that is why that's the average duration of a mortgage and that's why they're tied to the 10-year Treasury. They're correlated. They're connected.

It's not exact science, but that's why you watch the 10-year Treasury. It's one of the most important metrics for the housing market to watch and and um, you know, you don't have to have the pricing system behind the scenes to see where rates are that adjust a few times a day. So, it is a very interesting time to be in real estate, to be a real estate broker owner. Sales here in Northeast Florida have already dropped um, you know, 31.3% which is funny because the National Association of Realtors reached out to me.

I commented on their Facebook post cuz they said Jacksonville's one of the best markets for pending home sales and I put I I shared with them the link that showed that we're down 31.3%. I was like, "Where do you get your data from?" And they said realtor.com and then they were embarrassed. I think they actually deleted the post. Oh, can you guys not hear me?

Uh, Benito, you can't hear None of you can hear me? Let's see. Can you hear me now? I can.

Could you hear me before? Oh, it's just choppy? Okay. Um, interesting.

It's fine on my side. It shows that everything's working right. Uh, thanks for letting me know. Hopefully we can get that figured out.

It's good now? Yeah, no choppy. Okay, cool. So, look, the market's changing really quickly and so if you're a buyer, a seller, an investor, a real estate agent, this channel is really important for you to follow along.

I'm sharing with you what no one else is willing to talk about. The mainstream media won't talk about this. The real estate agents definitely won't talk about it. Either because they don't have the information, they don't know the information.

The lenders definitely won't uh, tell you about this. A lot of lenders I feel are like overly optimistic. They still think that rates will end up down in the fives somehow. The only way we end up in the fives for a long period of time is if we have some sort of, you know, employment crisis with unemployment rising.

Well, then it's like if you don't have a job, you can't buy a house. It's It's an even worse situation for the housing market. But, you know, I just wanted to bring this up. You know, that you got to follow the 10-year Treasury.

I like this to watch obviously see what's happening with oil prices. Massive spike from, you know, just around $65 a share over to about 100 and it and it's continued to stay elevated. Uh, so wait, can you guys hear me or no? There's still people saying that there's no sound.

But, on my end it's good. Can you guys hear me? No sound. I hear it's fine.

No audio. Guys, I it's all connected on my end. You're good? It cut out.

People are saying they're just fine. Just need to close and reopen. They just need to close and reopen. All right.

You guys rock, man. All right. All right. Appreciate you guys.

So, so basically that's what's happening with oil prices. Let's dig into the presentation what's happened this last week. We've had a lot of data come out and it's really important for us to to focus on it. So, let's see if I can pull it over here.

Okay. Let me just stop screening that page and get a different page here. All right. Before I get going here, can you guys hear me and see me?

Just drop a comment. And I appreciate you guys hopping on and and watching with me today. This is again a really good week to be talking about real estate cuz there's a lot of different factors that are going on. Yes.

Okay. Got the green light here. So, let's let's dig in. Housing crisis new sales drop.

So, this was This was the huge thing that happened this week. You saw the new home number basically just crater. So, just to reiterate, can't tell you how bad it is when the rate spike and the stock market decline for housing. It's a double whammy that we're seeing today.

What we saw come out was the January new home sales. And again, this is January. This is before the oil started spiking and rates started spiking. This is before the Iran war.

This is long before all of that happened. December was revised down for new home sales. Non-seasonally adjusted sales were down 14% year-over-year and now we're at 9.7 month supply of new construction inventory. That is already That's already what we're experiencing right now and it's going to get a lot worse.

This is with all of the incentives that these builders are already offering. So, it's pretty impressive. This is the dramatic drop kind of picture that's been circulating around. This is US new one family household annual and you can see that green line there just falling off of a cliff.

You can see, you know, what's happening with, you know, the home the 30-year mortgage rates in blue. So, you can see mortgage rates are moving up and then the new home sales are starting to tank and this is a real problem because when people slash the new home sales prices, it makes it really hard for existing homeowners to compete with the the new home sales that are offering all these massive incentives. So, it's it's going to be a big issue moving forward. So, just to kind of like zoom out a little bit just so you have a big picture view.

Obviously from um, 2000 all the way up to 2007, we had a crazy hot market, okay? And it was just like every single month we're seeing tons of record sales of new construction homes. Then obviously what happened after that is the inventory started to stack and the new construction sales just dropped by basically 60% from the peak and it happened that way all the way through 2016 with all of these new construction listings not selling as well or not selling as many. Then we saw it completely pick up because of mortgage rates, the zero interest rate policy for for such a long period of time and people were just building as much new construction as possible.

They thought all this net migration would continue to move the needle and then, you know, here we are back to square one where it's looking like a 2008 scenario in terms of the number of sales that opened up this January and again, this is before we saw these rate hikes. So, I think um, there's going to be a huge issue with with new construction moving forward, especially in the Sunbelt. It's just stacking up. So, there's this narrative out there of, "Hey, we have a shortage of of properties that are on the market." We don't have a shortage of properties.

We have a shortage of properties in a price point that the next generation can afford. The next generation is hoping for prices to come down. They're not asking for less inflation. They're actually asking for deflation because we accelerated the prices so much of everything that we're even sensitive to just a 2% increase in something now because the price is so elevated.

So, it's important to understand that nuance. The next generation is hoping, "Hey, we hope that everything crashes so we have an opportunity to get in." Whilst the other generations have already built their wealth, they're saying, "I want to keep everything stabilized for as long as humanly possible." Um, did what actually happen or is this clickbait? Uh, Dragon Tamer, go ahead and explain. I'm happy to answer any questions.

So, if you have questions, definitely drop them in the chat. I usually go through the presentation, share what I have going on and then uh, go ahead and um, and I'll answer them at the end after the entire presentation unless it's like a really good question in the making. So, um, Dragon Tamer, just go ahead and ask these questions. I mean, this this is the this is the chart that has been showing, you know, the the number of sales for new homes historically.

So, I think this is a really important chart to kind of, you know, zoom out and look at this information. Now, inventory is already at the Great Financial Crisis level of highs. You can see this, the completed inventory, the under construction is the one that kind of scares me right now. We're still seeing tons of new homes coming onto the market at prices people can't afford uh, in these random areas across our city and they just keep building because once they start the project, it takes two, three, four years to finish the project and the demand is no longer there.

Net migration numbers show we're down 93% for net domestic migration to Florida. We see net, you know, international migration down 70%. So, it's really, really challenging for those folks. So, inventory is already at those levels and simple simple the builders over speculated, over built and built at price points the consumer cannot afford.

And I think this is a great chart to look at for that. Uh, here's another way to look at it. Temporary freeze or deeper chill. New home sales drop sharply in January.

This is month supply skyrocketing and then you see the number of new home sales, you know, going the other direction and I think that uh, this will this trend is likely to continue and this could be the beginning of a trend that, you know, until the builders start slashing the prices where the next generation can afford it, I doubt that they're going to have as many sales. So, I think we're going to have more price cuts. This comes from Lennar from Reventure and Nick. New home prices Lennar has done is down 24% from the peak, which was in late 2022, right?

Their their peak pricing was $491,000 for one of these stick-built houses, which is kind of crazy to me. And now we're below we've gone all the way back to pre-2020 numbers and less for when you consider the incentives as well. So, just to be clear that 24% includes the net of incentives. That means they're paying $50,000 to buy down your interest rate.

Now, here's the truth about it. If you have to buy somebody's interest rate down 50, 60, $70,000 worth to get the rate down to where they can afford the payment, the house is just overpriced. And it's one of the scariest things you could do. One of the the most people who call us who have a short sale situation are people who bought new construction from '22 to 2024 and they got that low rate, but then they had some sort of life event, job loss, relocation, etc.

They try to turn around and rent it, but rents are dropping 10 to 20% as well and they're underwater from the rental side. So, you know, these people are just stuck and that's where we end up seeing all these short sales and they're in new construction communities, but then the builders still cutting phase two, phase three, phase four. I feel horrible for these people, you know, they didn't do the math, they didn't understand the market, they didn't understand where we were. They didn't understand that we had just seen prices just skyrocket from, you know, 389 to to 491 and they basically evaporated that equity that they that they thought they would have.

Everybody thought the market would just continue to move up at this unsustainable rate forever. It's just not possible. The math always comes back. There's always mean reversion.

So, what do you do when you were the one that bought that 491 house in 2022 and now it's only worth 375? This is a real problem. Generally, you either have to wait it out and rent it and start losing money or you do a short sale. You negotiate with the bank.

If you need help with a short sale in Florida, reach out. We have some specialists that, you know, usually only about 30% of short sales get approved. We have specialists who can have like a 80% success rate. So, if you need help on that, you need a top agent to do an analysis on your house and what it's worth now, not what it was worth in 2022.

A lot of people still think that their price is way higher than it is and they they actually believe in this estimate sometimes. These estimates are so wildly wrong, especially right now. It's so far behind on what reality is. They can't adjust for your house is outdated.

They they you know, you need a new roof, you need this. I mean, they can be it can be 100, $200,000 off on on pricing and we see that happen all of the time. And here's another thing that we're noticing is that it's it's a K-shaped economy right now. What we're noticing in in Jacksonville, the luxury stuff that's really unique and expensive is still selling.

And this is because the wealthy people, they continue to consolidate as much wealth as possible and the bottom 90% just continues to go down. I think I saw a stat out this morning showed that you know, the top 20% of equity owners control 87% of equity. So, I mean, that means that you know, the bottom 80% hold 13% of equity. That's horrible.

You need to become an owner of assets and start generating money through businesses or real estate or something or you're going to be completely left behind through this K-shaped economy and I fear that it's likely we're going to see this accelerate moving forward. This is why you start seeing the socialist movements, people getting upset at the system. You know, there's a lot of policy out there that primarily only helps the wealthy and does not help the working class and it's a huge problem that's going to play out in the real estate market as well because obviously if you don't have any money, any assets, it becomes much more challenging to buy a house. The other aspect of it too is, you know, why would you buy a house, you know, and you could buy a $400,000 house and you know, have a three to $4,000 payment depending on the HOA or CDD or etc.

Type of fees when you could rent that same house for $2,500 and sit and pocket the extra $1,500 and buy equities and not have to deal with the headache of owning the house. So, buyers are getting smart and that's why they're sitting on the sidelines because the math broke and it no longer made sense. It didn't make sense in October of 2022, which is when I started selling out of all of my real estate and I noticed the math didn't make any sense and it's just a matter of time before that plays out. But, for the first time the oldest Americans 70-plus years old held a larger share of real estate wealth than middle-aged Americans 40 to 54.

This is also partially because people are living longer, right? So, they they keep that money themselves before they pass away sadly and it goes into the estate, but this is a huge problem because people are starting their wealth building at a much later period of time than the prior generation. So, they're not going to have access to the compounding that these prior folks have and this will play out in a really dangerous way in real estate over the next few years. So, you you know, we believe that demographics is destiny and unfortunately the birth rates are declining, which I think is really sad.

I think that's a symptom of an affordability crisis in this country and it's going to play out especially in areas like Florida where we have this huge baby boomer population, but we also have these young young population who are holding off having kids and buying their first house. And you have to ask yourself in 20 years, who's going to be the next buyer? In 30 years, who's going to be next buyer? Because you're going to have all this inventory.

Charles Schwab says that, you know, these baby boomers pass away you know, 70% of the time if there's a house in there that goes to the estate, it's sold, right? So, then you have to find who's going to be the buyer for that property. Well, 15% of boomers also have multiple properties. So, we could see over the next 10 to 20 years this massive supply of inventory come on every single year that's completely unaffordable at today's rates.

That's why I'm saying prices need to come down and I think they will. I think, you know, just the dynamic of supply and demand, there's not much more to do on manipulating the the treasuries and the mortgage-backed securities that the government hasn't already done. Maybe the Fed steps in and starts buying mortgage-backed securities and treasuries again. I don't see that QE happening when we have you know, already you know, such high level of of pricing and inflation concerns, but this is a graph that you really need to be thinking about as a real estate investor and a seller in regards to if I want to hold real estate for the next, you know, 15 to 20 years, who's going to be that next buyer that's going to cash me out at the price I'm at or would it make more sense to find other asset classes, right?

Because real estate just like every other asset class goes through a cycle. I personally believe in the Sunbelt that we're at the end of a cycle that, you know, is accelerated by this massive new construction boom, which really is the the main issue and the net migration going down because it's no longer affordable, right? A lot of people moved to the Sunbelt areas because it was affordable compared to what the wages were. Now it's kind of flip-flopped and now people are moving to the Midwest and I think that change will will um um will continue moving forward.

So, this is a big conversation and thank you guys in the chat. So, again, I will answer these questions that you have in the chat. I'm just trying to get through the presentation first. So, definitely if you have questions just when it pops in your head, drop them below.

I'd love to hear where you where you're listening in from too. So, drop where you're where you're where you are and what you're seeing on the ground. Now, this is the the big thing that kind of terrifies me in the market is that the private credit defaults have hit the highest level since 2008, right? So, again, we're not exactly like 2008.

The back up the backdrop is not the same, but there's a lot of things that are rhyming and there's a lot of stress underneath the surface that does take time for it to play out. You know, I I was talking with you know, another real estate agent earlier and it's just people are have distress on the rental properties and basically they shovel money in until they don't have any money left and then they get into distress. So, that process can take two to three years for that to play out. And you know, it doesn't happen all at once either.

It's a slow, steady liquid asset that every single month there's more listings and less demand, things like that. But, this is something that could really crack the markets is these defaults going high. I mean, 40 to 50% of private credit is is directly or indirectly tied to real estate and where are these loans? I mean, they're all over all over the place.

They're in commercial real estate, they're in single-family homes. We see this all you know, all across the boards. People are getting these private loans from from the shadow banking you know, type of system and I think this is going to be something that's really going to if it cracks the way that it looks like it is right now, if it if it it continues to accelerate, we are going to see some massive losses on the real estate side and that will start to show up. Fear is contagious.

So, once the fear goes viral and people start talking about it, starts going to more headlines, people back off. Like same same idea. Like we saw rates come down below below 6% and we saw this pop of demand. Well, now we're seeing rates pop up, but if people start losing their jobs or you know, their their credit starts to disappear, they start to lose money on their investments, they're not going to go out there and buy the largest investment, you know, in their life unless they get they feel like they're getting an incredible deal.

And most people right now do not feel like they're getting an incredible deal. So, this is the part of the the live video that I do where I just talk about uh you know, some of the tweets that I put out there on X. So, you can follow me on X @JohnBrooks. I do about 10 to 15 tweets per day.

I'm very active on there. I really like the engaging conversations. I learn from a lot of you. I don't know everything.

I make mistakes. Sometimes I post things and people correct it. I love that, guys. I'm here to learn.

I'm not perfect. I'm a real estate operator here in Jacksonville, Florida. We do about 1,700 transactions per year through a real estate brokerage. I give money to agents for private fix and flips.

I built that portfolio up to 5 million lending out fund money in great business by the way. The problem is the deals became so challenging to get to go through that I decided to pull back. So I've pulled back and and moved my funds out of that and moved it actually into cash and into dollar cost averaging into the VOO and QQQ just to change the direction on things. But that's who I am.

I used to be a Wall Street investment banker for real estate. I was called a financial engineer and I would securitize loans for single-family rental aggregators like American Homes 4 Rent, Progress Homes, Invitation Homes, First Key, all those folks. And then I'd tranche out those loans, rate them with the rating agencies, and we'd sell them internationally generally, and that would refresh the the warehouse line that these aggregators were using. So that's my background.

So I've I've underwritten more than $2 billion worth of real estate. I've sold through my companies $3.5 billion worth of real estate. I've owned more than 200 units myself personally. This is what I love to do.

So I like to share my experiences here on this group on this channel and then also on X. You can follow me on all the all the channels now. I'm basically posting everywhere. So I appreciate you guys looking out.

But here's here's what I'm in I'm in a bunch of different groups for multi-family and in in office and commercial real estate. So I'm having phone calls in a Facebook group of guys invested in commercial real estate, retail, multi-family. They're losing millions. They've lost their purpose.

They've fallen out of love with real estate. There's a lot of fraud going on. You know, obviously in the boom years, this is probably what's going to happen on the private credit side. Bad deal, same thing.

Tenants moving out, insurance skyrocketing, taxes skyrocketing. It's just a matter of time until this shows up everywhere. So people are having these conversations behind the scenes on the commercial side. They're not having these obviously publicly.

They don't want people to know about it. But the distress is there. It's just not being picked up by the mainstream. And these of course are all, you know, millionaires, multi-millionaires who are in this are in this situation.

But you know, they have big businesses and when they're down, they start cutting expenses. They start cutting workers, you know, W-2 employees, things like that. So this all does have a multiplier effect when the housing market goes down. And so I think it's something really important to think about.

This is absolutely true and I I believe this to my core. We're living through one of the largest artificially inflated real estate bubbles in history. Now, why is this? Because we had a zero interest rate policy for a very long period of time that just blew up speculators to the maximum.

This is pretty similar to what we saw in the speculation in 2008. Just people were speculating. There are also people out there who are buying houses with 3.5% saying it was a primary house as a as a and then immediately turned around and sold it like an Airbnb. We call this occupation fraud and the New York Fed came out with a study showing that you know, they think like 33% of loans were occupation fraud from 2020 to 2022 or something like that.

There's a there's an interesting study on that. But it's driven by policy. The Federal Reserve allowed this to happen. It was massive speculation caused by low interest rates.

It was not driven by fundamentals, right? And and and that's a huge thing to be concerned about. Like if if you saw the market was getting better because people are having more kids, we have more migration, we have more immigration, we have all of this population and they need a place to live and wages are skyrocketing, that would be a reason why you would say, oh, like things are going to look good for real estate. That's not what's happening.

It was driven by policy, leverage, and stimulus. And mean reversion isn't optional. It eventually happens. You can see in this chart that it goes up and it goes down.

Okay? This is not a real estate is not a straight line. And so I like this chart because it puts things in perspective. You know, it's either a bull market or a bear market.

I think we're just tipping over the edge right now. And I think, you know, a lot of people are saying, well, prices are already down 10, 20% in some areas of Florida. It's time to buy. It's time to buy.

It's time to buy. No, like that we're in like the first inning of this type of correction. The numbers are getting worse every single month. Obviously with oil spiking and rates moving, it could and it could accelerate things.

If credit cracks, it can accelerate things. But I think this is a factual statement. The the reason why again is long a long period of time of zero interest rate causes this type of mass speculation. And of course psychologically if you see prices start to go negative and you're a homebuyer, you're incentivized to just wait.

Why would you buy if you think next year's going to be less? You can buy it for less and you can rent for less. So until the numbers start to make sense. Like it it it made sense when we were off by about $100 to buy versus rent.

But now if you're talking 600, 700, 800 dollars or even 1,500 dollars the difference between buying renting, there's no way. There's no way these folks are going to buy a house. They get this payment shock ultimately and they get they are submitting their application like, nope, now I guess I'll wait till next year. We'll wait till the prices come down.

And if enough people hold off on the sidelines for that to happen, yes, we are going to start seeing the sellers give up and start reducing the prices and we're already seeing that across the board. I don't know if I have this chart in here or if it's posting tomorrow on X, but I looked up last night. I saw it 30% of properties in Jacksonville, Florida got a price improvement or price reduction in the last week. Which is crazy.

Those numbers are absolutely crazy. So you know, I think we're probably the second worst market or third worst market in the country. Obviously Austin is leading the fight on that regard because there is just massive speculation, massive overbuilding there. It's similar to Jacksonville, similar to Tampa, Orlando areas.

But Florida and the Sunbelt areas are definitely the ones that are going to be hit the hardest. Obviously the number of home buyers is starting to is continuing to decline. Again, this data is coming out before the oil, you know, situation and the sellers are declining. So why are sellers declining?

It's the rage quitting. It's the seller getting upset. They can't sell their house. They pull their house off the market.

They don't need to actually sell. They have their low rates. They can't get the amount of equity out of the house that they want. I'm just going to take it out.

And that's called the rage quitting plus the lock-in effect. And then of course the buyers are just continuing to be priced out by affordability. So we could see this divide continue to move forward. I think you know, we could easily see the difference be a million.

I think this is a cool chart that comes out from Redfin and and is definitely one that gives you a gauge of where the market's at today. Of course demand is at, you know, near record lows even worse than the 08 crisis in terms of Reventure's Housing Demand Index. I brought this one up on the last live. It's pending sales, mortgage apps, internet searches for home and buyer sentiment all combined in one chart and this is really helpful.

And the oil spike is making it worse. The stock market is making it worse, right? I think we're off 7, 8% on the S&P 500 for the year. You know, when people see assets falling, they're not going to to go ahead and start buying the largest asset.

So I'd love to hear from you. So that's my presentation. I'm going to get into questions. Any question that you have, I mean I'm here for another half hour.

I can answer anything that you have. If you have a personal situation you want me to go over, you can you put it in the chat. If you need to shoot me an email, drop my email. I respond to every email.

So cool. I probably got last week after my live about 40 emails. I responded to every single one. It wasn't within 24 hours, but a lot of people are asking, hey, you know, a lot of real estate agents just lie to me and try to sell me a house.

Do you have anybody good in my area who I can work with who's a top agent that'll help me through this process. And I just want to be clear on one thing. Every market is so micro. So like one agent thought that prices was going to fall in Idaho, you know, 30, 40%.

It's it's like, no. Like that's not going to it's the Sunbelt area that's primarily going to get hit because they're overbuilt. It's not going to be everywhere. Okay?

It's not going to be everywhere at the same magnitude at the same timing. Every market is so micro. The areas that are going to get hit the hardest, please hear me on this, are the areas with new construction. Okay?

So you can't go around Oh, and and also don't find a realtor and be like, hey, I want you to shoot lowball offers out for 30, you know, for 30% less than their market price right now. Realtors don't want to destroy their reputation in the marketplace by doing that. Okay? So you got to start thinking You know, I think it's probably why you watch the channel.

It's like, hey, this is this is why you don't do that. That's why realtors don't want to work with you. They they feel like you're being unreasonable on the price. Well, don't take this information and then go in Idaho and then try to buy a house at you know, 70 cents on the dollar.

It's not it's not going to happen. If they're going to find stuff that's off market that that's good, they're either they're probably going to buy it for themselves if the market isn't tanking. But the Florida market again is is very unique. The Texas market is very unique.

So love to hear what you think is going to happen next in 2026. Obviously you know, I'm a bull sorry, a bear. I used to be a bull from 2014 to 2022. So I'm not a permabear.

I love real estate. It's how I've grown my wealth, my personal net worth. And it's the one thing that I've been studying since 2009. So it's the thing that I love to do.

The the real estate market and the Fed are the two things that I'm obsessed with. And how how will you play the game, right? Are you getting cash ready? Are you getting lean?

Are you getting a second job? Are you preparing? Are you you know, what are you doing to you know, find success in 2026? And what are you seeing on the ground in your market?

Are you seeing more for sale signs? Are you people are you seeing people rage quit? So I'd love to hear from you in the chat. So I'm going to scroll up in the chat now.

I'll start reading your questions one by one and then I'll get back to uh Let's see. And then I'll get back to each one of you. So let's see. Going to the top.

This is just a lot of people saying you can't hear me. So by the way, appreciate the support for the for the channel. If you can give me a thumbs up, that helps me a lot. Love hearing the more comments from you guys, more more interactions from you guys, that helps the channel.

So, just give me a thumbs up and and hit the subscribe button. Uh, I do two videos a week, one on Tuesday and then I either do one on Thursday or Friday. And so, next week I'll do a live video. I'll be uh, actually in another state and I'll give you an update on that as well.

So, let's see. Yeah, give me some love. Thank you, Ty. Did this actually happen to click?

I've been interested in watching the housing market closely, but I'm just joining. Okay, cool. All right, thanks, Dragon Team. What what action do you recommend for buyers?

I've no idea what happened to this land. Will you please share your insights from meeting with Melody? Yeah, so Melody Melody's great. And you know, we don't see eye to eye on absolutely everything, of course you shouldn't.

But what what I love about her is what she was describing even before I met her and I saw her on media was you know, hey, we're seeing these trends go in this direction. And I was already seeing all of those trends happen in my local market, but nobody was talking about it. That's why I started the channel. So, some of the trends are, you know, we're seeing a lot more distress under the surface, people aren't talking about it, the servicing data is looking bad, people are starting to default, the consumer is maxed out.

But the insights from I mean, she's just a wonderful person. I think that, you know, she has the ability because she drives the cities, she talks with the top players in each city. I think it's very different when you're an operator or you're going to look for yourself than if you're sitting in an ivory tower and you're just believing whatever the news is putting out there. It's it could not be more night and day.

I think the news is generally 6 to 8 to 12 months behind. Melody's out there doing this today day-to-day. I'm out there doing that day-to-day. And so, people say, oh, you guys are just doomers or you're early or whatever.

Oh, first off, for me, I can only speak for myself, I only started speaking about the real estate market, you know, May of last year on YouTube and I started on X in November and I was pretty much negative on the market in 2022, but I did after the Fed started raising, you know, interest rates in March of 2022. But I did not become, you know, a formal bear publicly basically until mid-2025, where I said, hey guys, things are things are really changing, you need to start thinking about your portfolios and you think start thinking about your investments a little bit differently. But the insights from Melody is she's just a wonderful person again. I think when you can get to you can get information from individual people who don't have a stake like Melody's not making money on this stuff, guys.

Look at her X account. Like she's not making money by posting all this stuff. Okay, so she all she's trying to do is get out what's actually happening. It's not because the title company's sponsoring her, a mortgage company's sponsoring her, you know, the home builders are sponsoring.

Same with me. I actually have a negative like I probably shouldn't be saying any of this. Like I'm the owner of a real estate brokerage. I'm doing this because I think you want to be the trusted voice in the marketplace and the way that you do that is by telling the truth and not lying to your customers and you get a bigger base that way.

And I think Melody is that way, too. So, it's something I learned from her and I think that's really important thing. So, the clown listings will not stop there. So, I don't know what that means.

In Austin, Texas, that is far from the truth. Zillow had daily notifications of 800k one-bedroom condos which were bought for 490 back in 2021. Sellers are refusing to cut prices. Prices are coming down in Austin.

Timothy, I'm not sure where you're talking about, but Austin's probably one of the best markets I know outside of Jacksonville and I have a lot of friends in the ground there who are, you know, top sales agents. They are cutting prices. They're completely overbuilt, especially in the suburbs. They're seeing, you know, even stuff that used to was were built and being sold for 300,000 is now selling for 180 in the suburbs.

I don't know what condos you're talking about, but it does take sellers time to cut the price because they are still living in 2022. So, just understand that stuff isn't going to happen overnight. This is going to take years. This could take 3 to 5 years for these areas to really play out and you know, that's just that's just how it is.

It's an illiquid asset. Can you connect this to the private credit soon-to-be crisis? Is it unrelated? I think I addressed that in maybe in a question before that.

If you'd like to see the status of real estate up here in northeast, check out this address. Thanks, Benito, for sharing. So, the northeast is is interesting. I think obviously Connecticut and New York are a little bit different, but there's other areas that are really hurting that are overbuilt and they have young people who are moving out of the northeast because it is too expensive.

So, they're going to have very similar demographic problems. Plus, you know, a lot of their inventory is very old cuz they weren't allowed to build. So, that's another thing about the northeast and they're having some insurance problems, too. My 375k house is still 375.

Yeah, well, John Doe, tell us where you're at. I'd love to hear from you. Just because my sellers refuse to lower price doesn't mean that buyers will buy yet. The the houses will just sit and stack.

That's what we're seeing or they'll come off the market and then come back on the market and they'll be begging buyers to to pay. So, my 750k house is still 700. Millennials and Gen Z's were kids in 2009 and now market sellers know this and keep prices high. Yeah, I think sellers are just going to start giving up.

People are broke. Yeah, people Yeah, people are broke. The financial status of the majority of Americans is way worse than any of you could ever imagine. Even wealthy people, like the doctors, they're completely loaded up with debt.

They spend every dollar. They maximize everything that they possibly can to increase their lifestyle, keep up with the Joneses and then boom, something like this will happen in the market and it'll go down and they'll lose everything and have to start over. We see it. It's just like time and time again, people think that cycles aren't real and they're just going to be up in up cycle forever.

It's just not possible. When you think about it, since 2000, you know, let's just say 2010, we're you know, 16 years away from that. Like we're we're due for a correction here in the marketplace. I'm looking to purchase a waterfront property in New Port Richey.

Should I wait till next year? Jason Huff, shoot me a email about that. Happy to happy to talk to you about it. Dave Ramsey has proven correct in 2022 his video why prices will not crash and will continue to rise, albeit slowly.

So, again, Timothy, nationally it's going to be completely different than what's happening in the Sunbelt. But please also understand the number of transactions that occur, the most amount of real estate that trades hands is in the Sunbelt. But every area is going to be completely different. There's still some areas that are going up in price like Rochester, New York, which is where one of my best friends live and I visit him.

It's completely different. They don't have the construction. There's like zero new construction. Maybe a little bit and it's all just slow, steady-eddy market.

So, you know, when you look at things nationally, it's really hard to price these things. It's just a guess. That's why you really want to focus on micro. Jacksonville's the largest city by landmass.

So, even in our little city here, there's five markets in one and every market is completely different based on where the new construction is, whether it's, you know, waterfront, it's luxury and there's nowhere left to build. All of these factors play into it. So, it's really hard to be a generalist and go out there and say, hey, this is what's going on generally. So, I don't, you know, again, I don't like looking at the macro data as much.

I'm trying to figure out what is happening in this specific market and that's why you need a top agent in your specific market to guide you who is actually market-driven. The problem is that people aggressively ignore this stuff. I'm going to post about this on Reddit cuz people in New Jersey are still overbidding. They get angry and fight with you.

They want to overpay. I mean, if they have the money to burn, Tom, just let them burn it. Honestly, it's it's unfortunate. I think people will will start kicking themselves.

They'll start seeing that the 2022 to 2026 time period was one of the worst times in history to buy a house in terms of the in terms of where we are in the cycle. Now, of course, if you hold the property for 30 years, it doesn't matter. But most people don't hold the house for 30 years. They hold it for 10.

And holding it for 10, you might not even break even at this point in the market cycle. Most likely not in my opinion from from where I'm sitting right now. When you turn into what are the buying and selling costs of a house, it's about 10% round trip. It's very expensive to transact.

You know, and you're paying interest the most over the first, you know, 10 years due to the amortization schedule. Fix and flips aren't fixes anymore. They take normal houses, throw a vinyl flooring. Yeah, it's lipstick on a pig.

There's a lot of people who did that in 2020 to 2021 and then sold them to the hedge funds. I haven't seen a home sold above 22 prices in my area. Flash dumper, go ahead and share where where you're coming from. I think resale inventory is going to see pain.

Younger buyers want nothing to do with older homes. They want new builds. Yeah, well, they want they want new homes. The problem with new homes, they build them so poorly and then they stack them so close together.

You have like zero lot lines. You have this tiny little backyard. I think eventually it's going to be seen as like a luxury to own a whole one of these older, larger houses you know, because you're just going to have a little bit more privacy. I think it's kind of weird to be so close to each other.

I also don't like it because they build them on the outskirts and there's nothing around there. There's no jobs. So, I think that's another issue that people are going to see is like, where are these jobs? Why are they building all these homes in areas where there's no jobs that's going to be able to support these prices, especially as people return to office.

Las Vegas, fewer homes record on sold, probably lower than 1920s as there are 650 homes here. Yeah, Las Vegas has got huge huge issues and I know a lot of people are losing their jobs at the casinos. People are just out of money and they're not going to go gamble if they ran out. Your face picture is blocking the right side of the chart.

Yeah, uh I don't know how to get around that on on YouTube. So, if you have a way, Charlie Boy, let me know. Austin's so much cheaper to rent. Yes, exactly.

And rents are down 20, 30% in a lot of areas of Austin already. We're we're seeing actually pre-2020 numbers for rents. All right, let's see if I can keep going. I just want to miss anybody's questions here.

Thanks for your research and data. Keep it up. We're waiting to buy right now. Let's see how the the housing market goes.

Yeah, I think waiting in most circumstances makes a lot of sense if especially if you can rent and the opportunity cost is to rent Palm Beach County." If you have cash offer, how much should you undercut a price having a strong buyer hand? Would you do cash? Would you buy cash or take that pending possible recession? It's a little early to start doing cash off I'll tell you what I'm I'm not doing any of that.

I have my money on the sidelines right now just earning, you know, interest. So, I don't think right now depending on where you are is the right time to really go big, but I mean if you have an an insane deal obviously I'd capitalize on it. A good deal is a good deal. You just need to, you know, price in some margin in case prices really go crazy.

I don't like the idea of loading up with that at this point in the cycle. I think it's really risky uh because we already know that things are turning pretty quickly. Don't use realtor with new builds when shopping. You can lowball them yourself.

It's a bit more work, but also a lot more efficient. Flash number, this might be true for some people if you know what you're doing. I can tell you the agents at my company, we negotiate off. We know what to negotiate.

They pay way more than the 3% commission that they're paid. They're worth tons. But if you go in with an agent that's like brand new, 80% of agents suck. They don't know what they're doing.

Yeah, they definitely they're not worth the 3%. But if you get in with one of the top agents that is going to fight for you, I mean they they're going to pay more than pay for themselves. If you need an agent like that, reach out to me. I'm happy to get you in touch with them.

We connect with top agents across the country and it's really important. You know, again, there's it's the divide between the part-time crappy agents and the top agents could not be greater especially in a market like today. So, if you want to get in touch with the top agent again, email me. Thanks to live video.

I'm located in DFW. Our trajectory will follow Austin's. Yes, that's right. Our boom started later.

It's just about to play out. Also, there's much more attractive inventory that's being built. Yes, absolutely Dallas will will be impacted by this. Located in SoCal, greater LA area.

LA is interesting. So, there's areas of California that are really benefiting from the, you know, stock options that are vesting and they're using that money to go out there and buy luxury real estate with cash. And so, there's certain areas that are doing really well, but ultimately it is slowing down across the board. There is lots of charts out there that show that California is not doing as well as people think.

And again, it takes 6 to 8 months for people to get it through their heads and finally be like, "Oh, yeah, it's not doing as well as I thought it was." I think price will price will correct down further. Um the move-in ready homes will move fast if if they price the move-in ready homes and they give them all the incentives, yes, they'll continue to move. Hello from northern New Jersey. Up here it'll probably be the job market that kicks off more inventory.

We sit at 5.4 unemployment and we're getting warn notices are going by the minute. I think AI is going to And Aaron, thanks for the note. I think AI is going to replace a lot of people. You're going to have one person who's going to be able to do the job of, you know, four or five 10 people and I think that's going to be a massive shift.

People just won't be able to hire as won't have to hire as many white-collar workers. And those people will lose their jobs. Well, where what are they going to do? What are they going to do with their time?

And I think um unemployment will start to move up. And I know people say, "Well, that's like another doomer thing." It's just like I just know it's true because I run my company that way. I use AI every single day. I use virtual assistants.

I don't hire um you know, a lot of people in the United States. It's like the employment taxes are everything is just so expensive here. Um the work ethic is also unfortunately not as strong. I feel like other people from other countries have a much more clear work ethic, work gratitude for work and all this other kind of stuff.

You know, Americans unfortunately, not all of them. There's some people who are just phenomenal, but I'm saying I'm just saying what I've noticed is they're kind of there's a level of entitlement that I don't think is uh is good and I think that's going to be a reason why you're starting to see all these massive layoffs. You know, Meta was just saying 20% layoffs. Um I think I just think it's I just think it's going to expand pretty rapidly over the next decade.

I don't think it's going to be something that happens overnight, but people are going to get more efficient with their companies. More So, I think businesses will make more money, but workers will make less or you're going to have super workers who are going to make a ton and the 80% who don't adopt AI or don't have the skill sets to be able to really maximize, they're going to they're going to have to find something else to do and I don't know what they're actually going to go do. So, I live in PA. Why buy a house right now?

My rent is only 2K per month and I save 50% 6% of my income. Yeah, don't. Uh Jose Claro, don't buy. >> >> Why would why would you buy?

I mean, unless you can buy a house and that same house and it costs less, you know, maybe $1,700 per month, it would make sense for you to to buy the house. But in a lot of case you buy that same house, it's going to cost you 3 to 4K a month. I don't think it makes sense. Take an old home over the new crap they're building.

Why install not install appliances? Paint colors you want. Uh I never have done new construction personally. I've always bought existing homes because I I prefer to live in a great area and most of the, you know, most of the new construction is out in the suburbs at least here in Florida.

Large backyards nowadays are also big expenses. Not cheap to finish it. Uh back I cannot tell you flash number people. I do think that people when you have kids, you want a larger backyard for activities, for hosting people over.

I do think it's really important, but you know, if they're building these houses where you just have a dog and you just need them to go outside and go to the bathroom and have a small backyard, it's like I understand that, but um I do think having a big backyard is a huge huge plus and especially if it's private. Do you think a first-time homebuyer in Chicago suburb pursue suited buy home now or wait for a few more months? Infinite Minds, shoot me a message and I'll let you know based on your circumstance. We don't have enough information to go over that, but you need to do the math versus buying versus renting and and what you can afford and then what is happening in your specific area of town and whether it's new construction or existing.

Just like I was saying in my market, it's across the board. You could say there's not like should I buy or not buy? It's like let's do the math and figure that out because there's some areas of Jacksonville where it still makes sense to buy, but there's a lot of areas of Jacksonville where 80% of the time it doesn't make any sense to buy when you're looking at what you could rent that same exact house for. And it might make sense, you know, especially cuz prices are coming down.

You just need to you just need to math it out. Hey, what happens if prices come down 10%? Does that actually matter because you know, there's going to be a recovery at some point and we don't know when that'll be. We just need we just need to math it out.

I know you say it could take a while, but Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Orlando, do you believe there should be a significant drop in prices by July, August? You know, I don't know. All I know is that the stress is showing up.

I can't tell you when it's going to happen. It's SWLC5555. I I don't know. There's so many factors.

Like just earlier this year when rates got below 6%, we were celebrating. There was this huge pop of demand. Buyers were super sensitive and we could see it, you know, if if rates went all the way down to 5%, we could see a market that could start to come back, but now we're going the other direction and that was, you know, just 2 months ago, a month ago that we were feeling a little bit differently. Now we're much more negative on the market because of what's going on with the oil prices and, you know, the spiking of mortgage interest rates.

So, we don't know. Nobody can tell you. If they can if they say they can tell you when it's going to happen, they they're just going to be wrong. They're just going to be wrong because there's so many moving variables especially day to day, week to week at this point in the market cycle.

I'd be really careful. So, I, you know, um I think that inventory will continue to stack. That's what we're currently seeing. We're seeing new construction struggle and slash prices, but, you know, will it impact existing homes?

I don't know. You know, it's it's what's the lock-in effect? What if we see some sort of random net migration increase to Florida? That's why I'm just reporting what's happening right now.

My projections are negative period for the future, but, you know, I'm going to if I if there's good news, I'm going to tell you. Right now I can't see any of it, but I don't know when it's going to happen and especially won't be able to tell you by July, August. I know going into the end of the year because real estate is very cyclical. The most of 70% of real estate transacts between March and September.

It's because it's when, you know, the school system and and when we get our tax refunds back, that's pretty much why those time periods are, you know, when it you know, people in February they get their tax refunds back, they go use that to buy a house. School starts, you know, and then basically it's, you know, in August and it basically drops off of a cliff and it drops about 50% number of closed sales going into November because there's all these holidays as well and then December we see a little jump in the number of sales because of um because, you know, for tax purposes people are selling their house. So, the timing of when this stuff can happen at All I know is that busy season is busy season. It's a real thing.

You always want to list your house on a Thursday. The best month to list your house is May and that's usually when prices are highest for the year. And then during these other months is when we start to see distress. So, do I think prices will be lower by November than they are right now?

Yes, I do in Florida specifically. I do. Um and that would be like pretty much only thing, but specific months I wouldn't be able to tell you. Let's see.

Where am I left off here? Uh see, I might live in Michigan. I'm 26. Me, fiance, and I holding off on buying for now because we're seeing an increase in foreclosures and a ton of new builds in my area.

Yeah, Konzi E, yeah, I would I would Those are red flags for sure especially if rent is cheaper. So, I do think that makes sense. There will be more foreclosures going into the end of this year especially here in Florida, but it will be across the the nation because they had these workout programs. They basically allowed to be open for way longer than they should have from 2020 all the way up to basically 2025 October of last year.

They just made it more difficult to jump through the hoops to get these workouts to go through which are FHA and VA. They're still available, but you just can't extend and pretend these loans that people haven't been paying for months. So, these properties will eventually cycle through and go through foreclosure. They'll either be sold off as a note to a hedge fund or they'll be eventually come to the market, but either way they're going to come to the market and and the person who has it will be kicked out and that will bring supply on.

We bought 30-year-old fully brick ranch and have been fixing it up over the last 4 years. We're doing as much of the work we can do ourselves. I do think doing the work yourself is good. Okay, so what do you think of Orange County?

Jake, I don't know, but I have a friend in Orange County. So if you need to email me, let me know. I'm going to drop my email here. I'm dot com.

Any final questions, drop them here. I've got about 5 more minutes. If you if you want to ask any question. Any questions?

I wonder about the communities and HOAs. I keeps hearing people say they're never going to buy an HOA, never live in HOA again. It depends on the HOA. So there's some that are overbearing.

I'm in an overbearing HOA personally. I mean, they're like emailing you like three times per week. There's voting, there's meetings, there's all this other kind of stuff. You got to keep up your lawn.

They'll ping you about literally everything and anything. They're also you know, it does HOAs do make the home prices generally higher because there is a basic standard for the community. So I'm not against HOAs. I just think that they want it There's certain homeowners that volunteer for it that have zero skills and they're really dumb.

And somehow these people get in charge of the HOAs and they mismanage the funds. They give the referrals to their friends. I don't know, maybe they're getting a kickback or something like that. I just don't like the way that HOAs are structured because they're just not professionally managed and the property managers don't get paid enough to care in a lot of circumstances.

So they just like do the bare minimum and then so you're paying a lot of money basically for very little results. So I'm not really, you know, I'm not a huge fan of HOAs, but I understand the the thought process behind it. It's just how do you create an enforcement mechanism that's reasonable versus just letting humans and their emotions get out of control with power. And it's a really bad thing.

Price cuts are rampant where I am in North Georgia. Yeah, Georgia is getting crushed. But especially areas around Atlanta from what I hear. So with that, you know, my next video will come out on Tuesday next week.

If you need any help, drop me an email, send me a message. I'm on X, I'm on Threads, I'm on Instagram at I am John Brooks. Happy to connect with you and share, you know, I love when you guys reach out. I'm learning a lot from each one of you just like I'm here sharing what I have going on.

So if you need anything, definitely reach out and I will see you next week. And as always, you can subscribe to my Substack. It's johnbrooks.substack.com and I give out two piece of information per week. It's generally geared towards real estate agents, real estate investors, real estate brokers that are looking to grow their business, but a lot of personal stories about how we became financially successful through real estate, what we did with our real estate, why we made those decisions and it might help you make your your decisions on what you see out there as well.

So thank you again for watching. Give me a thumbs up. Give me a subscribe. Love working with you guys and thanks for supporting the channel.

See you later.