Homebuyers face less housing market competition from investors right now
During the pandemic housing boom, real estate investors rushed in. With home prices and rents soaring—and mortgage rates hovering at historic lows—investor purchases surged. But since mortgage rates spiked in 2022, the investor landscape has shifted dramatically. The easy-money days are gone, and investors are now navigating a much tougher market defined by tighter margins, slower rent growth, and fewer cash-flow opportunities.
To better understand how investors are adapting to the housing market, ResiClub recently teamed up with Stessa, an asset management and accounting software for real estate investors, owned by Roofstock.
Investors who own at least one single-family investment property were eligible to respond to the Stessa-ResiClub Real Estate Investor Survey, fielded between May 20 and June 6, 2025. In total, 239 single-family investors/landlords completed the survey.
Here are some of the findings:
45% of U.S. real estate investors say they plan to grow their portfolios in the near term.
Nearly two-thirds of real estate investors (65%) say the most frustrating part of the buying process is finding deals that generate positive cash flow; that share is even higher among landlords based in the West (78%).
Half of surveyed real estate investors (50%) said they'd accept a mortgage rate up to 7% on their next purchase.
58% of real estate investors say they self-manage their properties.
20% say they first look at off-market deal sources.
When it comes to the search, real estate investors say Zillow is the most helpful platform, with more than 70% considering it 'very helpful' or 'somewhat helpful.'
Big picture: Taking into account home prices, decelerated rent growth, and interest rates, many single-family real estate investors are hard-pressed to find new rental properties that generate enough cash flow in today's market. It takes more work now to find the needed returns.
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Yahoo
3 days ago
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CEO of an $11 billion builder empire warns that these housing markets face a short-term oversupply
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert's ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. He was buried in a mushroom casket. Soon he'll be part of the soil CEO of an $11 billion builder empire warns that these housing markets face a short-term oversupply Lifting the veil on the critical—and oft-times overlooked—factors driving AI growth This year's spring selling season didn't meet expectations, Toll Brothers CEO Douglas Yearley told a group of institutional investors gathered at Bank of America's 2025 Housing Symposium earlier this month. 'The spring selling season, which is really a winter selling season, is when most new homes are sold in this country,' Yearley said. 'This was not a good spring . . . it still was, overall, a soft spring season.' Yearley said February marked the spring season low point, with some improvement in March and April—but not enough to call it a rebound. Regionally, Yearley painted a picture of a highly bifurcated market. The best-performing areas for Toll Brothers include Boston and Northern Virginia, where land is scarce, resale inventory is tight, and competition from large public builders is limited. 'Through the COVID years, you know, the Northeast and Atlantic, all across and down through Northern Virginia, did not fare well, as everybody could go remote and leave—they were chasing the sunshine and chasing a lower cost of living. And so home price appreciation through COVID wasn't as much in Boston and Northern Virginia because demand wasn't as strong. Now that has completely flipped, and our strongest corridor is Boston,' Yearley said. Yearley added: 'There's less competition [in the Northeast]. The big public builders aren't here. There's very little land. So when you get the land, it's gold, and the resale markets are much tighter. I live on the Main Line of Philadelphia, in the suburbs of Philly. There's no inventory [here]. That's not true in Texas and Florida and other places where you have a lot of big public builders and a lot of land. So there's much more supply [in Texas and Florida]. But in the Boston and Northern Virginia corridor, it's very supply-constrained, and we [Toll Brothers] are doing really well [in the Northeast].' On the flip side, Toll Brothers—a publicly traded luxury homebuilder with an $11 billion market capitalization—is seeing the most softness in pandemic-era boomtowns across the Sun Belt, where unsold completed spec inventory has surged. Spec homes—short for speculative homes—are built without a buyer lined up, with the builder betting the home will sell once finished. 'On the softer side, you know, Florida inventories are up . . . parts of Texas inventories are up. Phoenix is still adjusting a bit with high inventories. A lot of that inventory for existing homes is builder spec, because all those markets have a lot of big builders there who are committed to a spec strategy,' Yearley said. Yearley doesn't think this spec overhang in boomtown areas in Arizona, Florida, and Texas will last forever. He's already starting to see some homebuilders pull back. 'As many as a third of the overhang on the resale market right now is actually new unsold spec. That'll clean up [over time] because the builders are starting fewer spec homes in the softer market, and I think that will naturally work its way out,' Yearley said. Despite near-term softness, Yearley remains bullish on the long-term fundamentals driving housing demand. 'We have 4 to 6 million too few homes in this country. We haven't built enough homes in the last 15 years to come close to satisfying demand,' he said. 'The tailwinds for the industry are great, but short-term pressure is real.' This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
Fast Company
3 days ago
- Fast Company
The housing market is shifting—here's where it's happening most rapidly
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert's ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. A few days after I launched ResiClub in October 2023, I wrote an article titled 'The key housing market metric heading into 2024.' In it, I reaffirmed a point I had also made at Fortune in 2022: that some traditional rules of thumb—i.e., months-of-supply thresholds for what constitutes a buyers' market versus a sellers' market—could struggle in this post–Pandemic Housing Boom environment, where there's downward pressure on prices. For the time being, I suggested that an easy-to-create and useful metric for housing stakeholders to follow—one that helps gauge short-term pricing momentum and whether downside risk might manifest—is a local market's level of active inventory compared to that same market's inventory level in the same month of pre-pandemic 2019. The thinking was that markets where active inventory remains well below 2019 levels would still exhibit some tightness, while those where inventory has surged back to or above pre-pandemic 2019 levels would experience a shift in the supply-demand equilibrium more in favor of homebuyers. Heading into 2025, I recreated that analysis showing the dynamic was still holding true. Fast-forward to today, and this particular data cut still proves useful (overtime ResiClub believes its usefulness will diminish—just not right now). Generally speaking, housing markets where active housing inventory for sale has surged above pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced weaker or softer home price growth (or even outright home price declines) over the past 36 months. Conversely, housing markets where active housing inventory for sale remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 36 months. Indeed, just look at the scatter plot below showing 'Shift in home prices since their local 2022 peak' Vs. 'active inventory for sale now compared to the same month in 2019' for the nation's 250 largest metro area housing markets. Below is the same scatter plot as the one above, only its color scheme is adjusted to show which markets have LESS active inventory now than in 2019 (BROWN) and which markets have MORE active inventory right now than in 2019 (GREEN). Click here for an interactive version of the scatter plot below. To see if this data cut still proves useful, let's swap out 'home price since their local 2022 peak' for 'year-over-year home price shift.' The answer is yes—the trend still holds. (Recently, both the Wall Street Journal and John Burns Research and Consulting created their own versions of this longtime ResiClub scatter plot.) Below is the same scatter plot as the one above, only its color scheme is adjusted to show which markets have LESS active inventory now than in 2019 (BROWN) and which markets have MORE active inventory right now than in 2019 (GREEN). The current regional bifurcation—greater weakness in Sun Belt and Mountain West boomtowns and greater resiliency in the Northeast and Midwest—shouldn't be surprising to ResiClub readers. Given that we cover that regional bifurcation frequently, we're not going to spend time in this piece discussing what's driving that bifurcation. Instead, let's discuss why this particular data cut is useful right now, and why overtime it could become less useful. This data cut's usefulness—right now—explained During the Pandemic Housing Boom, housing demand surged rapidly amid ultralow interest rates, stimulus, and the remote work boom—which increased demand for space and unlocked 'WFH arbitrage' as high earners were able to keep their income from a job in, say, NYC or L.A., and buy in, say, Austin or Tampa. Federal Reserve researchers estimate 'new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand.' Unlike housing demand, housing stock supply isn't as elastic and can't ramp up as quickly. As a result, the heightened pandemic era demand drained the market of active inventory and overheated home prices, with U.S. home prices rising a staggering +43.2% between March 2020 and June 2022. At the height of the Pandemic Housing Boom in spring 2022, most of the country had 60% to 75% less active inventory than in 2019. Once mortgage rates spiked, national housing demand cooled off. While many commentators view active inventory and months of supply simply as measures of 'supply,' ResiClub sees them more as proxies for the supply-demand equilibrium. Large swings in active inventory or months of supply are usually driven by shifts in housing demand. For example, during the Pandemic Housing Boom, surging demand caused homes to sell faster—pushing active inventory down, even as new listings remained steady. Conversely, in recent years, weakening demand has led to slower sales, causing active inventory to rise in many markets—even as new listings fell below trend. For a market like Austin or Punta Gorda to surge from historically low active inventory levels in spring 2022 to now well above pre-pandemic 2019 levels, it has taken a significant shift in the balance of power—from sellers to buyers. That shift has also coincided with those markets experiencing outright home price corrections. Conversely, despite the affordability shock, markets like Syracuse and Milwaukee still have active inventory levels well below 2019 levels and continue to see slightly positive year-over-year home price growth. Inventory wasn't historically 'high' back in 2019—so why does climbing back to 2019 levels matter? During the Pandemic Housing Boom, housing demand overwhelmed the Denver metro housing market—pushing active housing inventory for sale down to just 2,288 homes by May 2021, down 69% from the 7,490 listings in May 2019. Since the Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out, and mortgage rates spiked, active inventory for sale in Denver has spiked up to 12,354 active listings as of May 2025—65% above pre-pandemic May 2019 levels. While active inventory for sale in Denver today isn't necessarily that high by historical comparison, the sharp jump from 2022 inventory levels to 2025 levels in such a short window reflects a pretty big shift in the supply-demand equilibrium. On the ground that shift should feel jarring. That greater active inventory bounce up in Denver has coincided with a greater house price softening/weakening. Indeed, Denver metro area home prices as measured by ResiClub analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index are down 1.7% year-over-year, and down 7.3% since their 2022 peak. Why, over time, this data cut could prove less useful One of the common pushbacks I hear when comparing today's active inventory for sale to 2019 levels is that some markets—like Austin and Punta Gorda—have larger populations now than they did back in 2019. It's true that some of the markets with higher inventory today compared to 2019 are also the ones that have experienced notable population growth in recent years. However, that actual population growth—i.e., a larger population base—isn't the sole reason inventory has jumped so quickly in places like Austin and Punta Gorda. Rather, it's because those markets have experienced a sharper weakening in their for-sale market since the Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out. And that has helped push up unsold inventory in those markets. That said, over time, changes in market size—specifically population and total households—will naturally affect what constitutes a 'normal' level of active inventory. By 2035, for example, comparing active inventory to 2019 levels will be far less meaningful than it has been in 2021-2025. Some traditional rules of thumb have fallen short this cycle A rule of thumb in real estate is that anything below a six-month supply of inventory is considered a 'seller's market,' while anything above a six-month supply is a 'buyer's market.' However, that hasn't always held true this cycle, and ResiClub's view is that this rule of thumb is a bit outdated. In many housing markets, including Austin's metro area, where house prices began to decline in June 2022 with only 2.1 months of inventory, that rule hasn't applied effectively. In fact, even though Austin's inventory only peaked at 5.2 months as of April 2025, according to Texas A&M University's Texas Real Estate Research Center, home prices in the Austin metro have already fallen 22.8% from their 2022 peak, based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index. A better measure of this incoming pricing weakness was the abrupt active inventory jump that occurred in Austin in spring/summer 2022 (going from 0.4 months of inventory in February 2022 to 2.1 in June 2022), which quickly pushed active listings near/above pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Big picture: In today's post-Pandemic Housing Boom landscape, comparing a market's current level of active inventory to its same-month 2019 baseline remains a useful gauge for the shift in the supply-demand balance. While imperfect, this simple metric captures the degree of tightness or softening better than some traditional measures. Markets where inventory has surged well above 2019 levels—like Austin or Punta Gorda—are typically the ones that have seen demand weaken most, restoring buyer leverage and, in some cases, producing home price corrections. Meanwhile, markets where inventory remains far below 2019 levels continue to exhibit greater pricing resiliency.
Fast Company
4 days ago
- Fast Company
CEO of an $11 billion builder empire warns that these housing markets face a short-term oversupply
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert's ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. This year's spring selling season didn't meet expectations, Toll Brothers CEO Douglas Yearley told a group of institutional investors gathered at Bank of America's 2025 Housing Symposium earlier this month. 'The spring selling season, which is really a winter selling season, is when most new homes are sold in this country,' Yearley said. 'This was not a good spring . . . it still was, overall, a soft spring season.' Yearley said February marked the spring season low point, with some improvement in March and April—but not enough to call it a rebound. Regionally, Yearley painted a picture of a highly bifurcated market. The best-performing areas for Toll Brothers include Boston and Northern Virginia, where land is scarce, resale inventory is tight, and competition from large public builders is limited. 'Through the COVID years, you know, the Northeast and Atlantic, all across and down through Northern Virginia, did not fare well, as everybody could go remote and leave—they were chasing the sunshine and chasing a lower cost of living. And so home price appreciation through COVID wasn't as much in Boston and Northern Virginia because demand wasn't as strong. Now that has completely flipped, and our strongest corridor is Boston,' Yearley said. Yearley added: 'There's less competition [in the Northeast]. The big public builders aren't here. There's very little land. So when you get the land, it's gold, and the resale markets are much tighter. I live on the Main Line of Philadelphia, in the suburbs of Philly. There's no inventory [here]. That's not true in Texas and Florida and other places where you have a lot of big public builders and a lot of land. So there's much more supply [in Texas and Florida]. But in the Boston and Northern Virginia corridor, it's very supply-constrained, and we [Toll Brothers] are doing really well [in the Northeast].' On the flip side, Toll Brothers—a publicly traded luxury homebuilder with an $11 billion market capitalization—is seeing the most softness in pandemic-era boomtowns across the Sun Belt, where unsold completed spec inventory has surged. Spec homes—short for speculative homes—are built without a buyer lined up, with the builder betting the home will sell once finished. 'On the softer side, you know, Florida inventories are up . . . parts of Texas inventories are up. Phoenix is still adjusting a bit with high inventories. A lot of that inventory for existing homes is builder spec, because all those markets have a lot of big builders there who are committed to a spec strategy,' Yearley said. Yearley doesn't think this spec overhang in boomtown areas in Arizona, Florida, and Texas will last forever. He's already starting to see some homebuilders pull back. 'As many as a third of the overhang on the resale market right now is actually new unsold spec. That'll clean up [over time] because the builders are starting fewer spec homes in the softer market, and I think that will naturally work its way out,' Yearley said. Despite near-term softness, Yearley remains bullish on the long-term fundamentals driving housing demand. 'We have 4 to 6 million too few homes in this country. We haven't built enough homes in the last 15 years to come close to satisfying demand,' he said. 'The tailwinds for the industry are great, but short-term pressure is real.'
