Independent Real Estate Market Analyst. Former: Real Estate Agent, Forbes .com Contributor, Int'l Ag Trade Economist at USDA, Ag Attaché U.S. Embassy in Paris
Arizona, USA
Joined September 2009
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Some GREAT life advice from Matt Consalvo.
I've had a sister, an aunt, and an uncle die from ALS, so it's all very real to me.
Exclusive: Matt Consalvo is dying. His message is about living. share.realestatenews.com/exc…
#realestatenews #realestate
John Wake retweeted
Property taxes have the advantage that they can't be gamed. You can't hire an expensive tax lawyer to reduce your taxes like you can with income taxes. In my county, the tax actually paid is online for every house. It's clearly a "fair" tax, if fair is an important attribute.
If you want to lower property taxes on homes, get rid of the agricultural exception where landowners grow alfalfa or whatever so they can pay taxes based on the value of the alfalfa instead of in the value of the property, like home owner property taxes are calculated.
John Wake retweeted
The taxes you pay on your house are based on its fair market value.
Shouldn't the taxes on land also be based on its fair market value?
Why should land owners pay a lower property tax rate than you do?
No, home price appreciation was not 5-6% in 2023, not in Texas. Let's dive in.
Luxury property owners just sold a $4 million estate. Here's the kicker. They were enjoying an effective property tax rate of less than 0.3%!
🤑*Recreational AG* 🤑
County price averages (the one's that will get repeated by typical media mouthpieces) will show average prices in Denton County up by 5% year-over-year in December.
Here's where it gets fun. The real homes that most people buy, your typical single-family home between 1500-3500 square feet. How much did they appreciate in 2023???
Answer: negative 0.1%. Yep, prices for real "homes" in our area were actually negative year-over-year in December.
Local property price appreciation we'll see reported by media types has been driven by the demand for land, and in many cases here in Denton County (across the state really), glorified tax shelters. 😂
John Wake retweeted
"Around one-fifth of SFH [single-family home] purchases made since the pandemic has been by these smaller investors. Small investors benefit from a range of tax breaks for providing rental units, including mortgage interest deductions, 1031 exchanges to defer capital gains taxes, and lower effective property tax rates than owner-occupiers in 23 U.S. states."
– Cameron LaPoint, Yale Insights
insights.som.yale.edu/insigh…
John Wake retweeted
Wales shows us how to make homes more affordable FAST!
The Welsh government gave local governments, "the ability to push council tax [~property taxes] on second homes to 300% the usual rate."
"Gwynedd council used these powers to hike council tax to 150% in April 2023. By the end of 2024, house prices had fallen by 12.4% as second-home owners tried to sell up. In Pembrokeshire, house prices fell by 8.9% after the council increased the council tax to 200% on second homes (though this was reduced to 150% recently)."
theguardian.com/commentisfre…
John Wake retweeted
Minneapolis Fed
How higher property taxes increase home affordability
"Higher property taxes raise ongoing financial burden of homeownership but consequently lower initial home prices"
"Model finds raising property taxes shifts homeownership toward younger families"
minneapolisfed.org/article/2…
John Wake retweeted
nytimes.com/2026/11/01/us/on…
Urban land is where most wealth is and easy to tax. Plus billionaires can’t take it to Florida.
"The most cyclical part of the job market is growing again, not contracting."
John Wake retweeted
One in four people in the world is younger than 15. Just one in ten is 65 or older.
But there are huge differences in this distribution across countries. In the chart, we’ve shown these global figures alongside the country with the largest share of children, the Central African Republic, and the one with the largest share of older people, Japan.
In the Central African Republic, half of the population is under 15. Being over 65 is pretty rare: just 2% of the population.
Japan is the opposite. Being a child or adolescent puts you in the minority. Almost one-third of the population is 65 and older, and that share is growing quickly.
These differences in age distribution matter a lot for a country’s infrastructure, socioeconomic conditions, and public spending — from pensions and healthcare to childcare and education.
(written by @_HannahRitchie)
Brilliant, clear & quick analysis of the Florida real estate market.
Florida’s particularly intense overheating during the Pandemic Housing Boom was the key reason for its post-boom downside pricing vulnerability. While U.S. home prices rose +41% between March 2020 and June 2022, Florida home prices surged +51% over the same period—leaving some parts of the state significantly overvalued. Only, it takes a large enough shift in the supply-demand equilibrium for that vulnerability to manifest into falling prices. Of course, after the boom ended, 5 factors came together to create a supply-demand equilibrium shift large enough to reveal some of that downside risk and push certain pockets of Florida into post-Pandemic Housing Boom corrections.
1. The Pandemic Housing Boom’s migration surge to Florida fizzled out. Indeed, Florida saw net domestic migration of +23K in 2025, compared to +314K in 2022. Without that larger influx of deep-pocketed buyers from up North, Florida home prices have had to rely more on local incomes.
2. Surfside condo fallout. Following the Surfside condo collapse in June 2021, which killed 98 people, Florida passed new structural safety rules, requiring more inspections and additional funds for repairs to be set aside by the end of 2024. That has led to Florida HOAs issuing sky-high special assessments and monthly HOA fee increases to cover these costs. Following Surfside, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also tightened condo underwriting: stricter reserve requirements, mandatory. This has had a greater impact on older coastal Florida condo buildings.
3. Hurricane Ian spurred a greater SWFL softening. Markets like Cape Coral and Punta Gorda, which were hard-hit by Hurricane Ian in September 2022, saw thousands of damaged homes, and the subsequent need for renovations. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Hurricane Ian caused an estimated $112.9 billion worth of total damage, making Ian the third-costliest U.S. hurricane on record. That event helped create additional softening in SWFL.
4. Supply elasticity. Unlike many housing markets in the Northeast and Midwest, Florida has a higher level of homebuilding, build-to-rent, multifamily construction. As that new supply entered the market in the post-Pandemic Housing Boom affordability-strained environment, builders used bigger affordability adjustments—such as mortgage rate buydowns and rental incentives—where needed to move it. That helped cool the Florida resale market further by drawing buyers who might have otherwise purchased existing homes toward new construction. As a result, this put additional upward pressure on Florida’s resale inventory after the Pandemic Housing Boom ended.
5. Home insurance shocks. In the three years following the boom, the median annual U.S. home insurance premium has jumped around 30%, but Florida homeowners have been hit even harder. The surge in Florida home insurance rates is partly driven by rising replacement costs—home prices and construction costs soared during the boom—and partly by increased hurricane risks and insurance payouts. Florida's sharp rise in insurance costs, combined with one of the biggest home price increases during the Pandemic Housing Boom, has led to one of the biggest housing affordability deteriorations.
Much of this was mean reversion
John Wake retweeted
Homebuilders are floating +20% discounts to institutional SFR landlords—and Invitation Homes is still mostly passing
-> A year ago, Invitation Homes said some homebuilders in weak Sun Belt markets with unsold inventory to move were approaching them with 20% discounts. On Thursday, the landlord said it’s now being offered even bigger discounts from builders.
-> Invitation Homes CEO Dallas Turner: "We actually have a few new builders that have reached out to us for the first time that are people we haven't heard from before."
ResiClub members can read my full report on Invitation Homes (including 10 charts) here: resiclubanalytics.com/p/inst…
John Wake retweeted
The Great Deflection
From 2011 through 2023 (13 years) in metro Phoenix, 265,152 single-family home building permits were issued but only 208,222 single-family homes were built.
Builders had gotten permits to build 56,930 more homes than they built. They had permits to "Build Baby Build" 27% more homes.
Why didn't they build more? New home prices had skyrocketed, builder profit margins were up, and their stock prices had skyrocketed. They were making a ton of money. Why didn't they build more?
The real estate industry party line is that home prices are high because new supply is low because of zoning. Their solution is always to make upzoning of land easier... because upzoning increases the value of their land.
But increased density does NOT equal increased supply. Just because they can build more homes, does not mean they will build more homes, as the Phoenix data shows.
It looks like the industry uses the zoning and NIMBY arguments to deflect attention away from discussing solutions that don't maintain or increase industry profits.
That's natural. Their job is to make money. If building more homes drives down prices on all their future new home sales, they might rationally decide not to build more new homes than they can sell at current (high) prices.
John Wake retweeted
When stocks go down, sentiment gets bearish.
When stocks go up, sentiment is bullish.
Stocks are not a leading indicator.
Trend following is a fine and often successful trading strategy, but it’s not an economic forecasting method.
"... upzoning that allows more building on a given parcel — mostly inflates land values rather than lowering housing costs"
The book directly challenges the now-dominant "just build more housing" account of urban housing crises associated with economist Edward Glaeser and the broader YIMBY policy consensus. Condon's counter-argument is that restrictive zoning is not the primary driver of unaffordability, and that density deregulation — upzoning that allows more building on a given parcel — mostly inflates land values rather than lowering housing costs, because the anticipated development rights are quickly capitalized into the price of the underlying land
progress.org/wiki/condon-bro…
John Wake retweeted
Brazilians have reportedly been spending 6.5% more on staple foods since sports betting was banned in the country.
A month ago, Lula signed an order banning fixed-odds sports betting, a move he said was designed to tackle the problem of families falling into debt.
Now the President of the Brazilian Supermarket Association says that since the ban, sales of essential foods such as rice, oil, coffee, and noodles have grown by 6.5%.
John Wake retweeted
The @nytimes has been reporting a housing crisis since at least 1856. I joined @profgalloway and @kylascan on The Prof G Pod to talk about why housing is still so expensive. Links below.