Future Predictions for the Real Estate Market with Rick Sharga

Mike Hambright (00:00.888)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with my good friend Rick Sharga. He is the closest thing to a crystal ball reader that I know of in the real estate industry. And I know a lot of folks are wondering where we’re going from here. It’s 2025 now. We have a new president, new administration, lots of moving parts going on. So what the heck does that mean for real estate investors or the real estate market overall? That’s what we’re going to talk about today. So a little bit of a crystal ball. I’m going to get the crystal ball out and see what that might mean for you. So.

Rick, great to see you as always, buddy.

Rick (00:32.671)
Always a pleasure talking to you and your friends, Mike.

Mike Hambright (00:35.404)
Yeah, so, but before we dive in, you’ve been doing this for a long time, you’re really an authority in the space. Maybe tell us a little bit about how you found your way into this space.

Rick (00:46.231)
I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version, Mike, but I think you know this. I refer to myself as an accidental tourist in the real estate and mortgage industry. I spent the first half of my career doing marketing for technology companies right up until the dot com bubble burst when the technology companies stopped doing marketing. And so I was doing a little bit of consulting while I was figuring out what to do next. And one of my consulting clients was this little startup company called RealtyTrack.

which was under new ownership and planning to launch nationally as a foreclosure website for individual investors. And I wound up taking what was supposed to be a six month assignment there and staying there for the better part of a decade and happened to be there when the foreclosure crisis hit.

And so I suddenly had a baptism of fire in the real estate industry, starting in the foreclosure space and working my way back up into short sales, then traditional sales, then the mortgage industry, then economic trends that impacted the mortgage industry and housing. And so it’s been an interesting ride for the last it’s been 25 years now.

But besides RealtyTrack, had a chance to work for a mortgage company, Carrington Mortgage Services, for auction.com for five years. And now I’m doing my own consulting practice again. And I’m working with a number of companies in the real estate and mortgage space, providing them market intelligence that they use for internal analytics or sometimes to take their own products out to market.

Mike Hambright (02:23.79)
Yeah, awesome. So let’s get the crystal ball out here and see like, what do you see ahead? We got a new president in office that’s threatening to make everybody’s life better. And of course there’s limitations on what can happen there. just what are you, yeah, I think on some level, my gut feel is that there’s this like 18 month window where anytime the market shifts a lot, I saw this in 2008 or nine too, is it just takes about 18 months for people.

sellers or buyers, I guess, to kind of come with terms with like, okay, well, I guess this is the new normal, right? And so there’s probably a little bit of that going on too, where people are just like, this is how it is now, like, let’s forget about the kind of quote good old days or whatever. But what are you seeing out there, I guess, in the real estate economy?

Rick (03:09.461)
Yeah, that’s a great way of looking at it, Mike. And I’ve been saying something pretty similar to people that have asked recently. I do think in terms of existing home sales, the number of homes that are being sold, I think we probably did bottom out last year.

If go back to 2021, we sold about 6 million existing homes. We sold 5 million in 2022. We sold a little over 4 million in 2023. We probably came in right at 4 or a little under 4 million last year. But in the last few months of last year, we started to see a trend where we were actually selling more homes than we sold the prior year. And I think that trend will continue into 2025 for a couple of reasons. One is that we’re seeing more homes available for sale.

they’re probably.

At this point, 25 % more listings than there were a year ago at this time. At the trend line, the way it’s working probably by the end of this year, we’re back to pre pandemic levels of inventory, probably a five ish month supply. And when you get to a five month supply of homes available for sale, it creates a sense of equilibrium where it’s not a really strong seller’s market, really strong buyer’s market. So things should get better for buyers over the course of the year.

And the other factor that weighs into this is there’s a ton of pent up demand. We’ve been talking about the millennials coming to market for what seems like the last 100 years or so. But if you look at the number of millennials turning 35 in a given year, and the reason that number is important is that’s the median age of a first time homebuyer. We haven’t seen that wave peak yet. In fact, it won’t peak for another year.

Rick (04:53.655)
So we have another two, three years of increasing demand from millennials who are reaching home buying age and right on their heels are Gen Z hitting the age of 35. And they’re coming in at numbers that are higher than the boomers were. So as the boomers gradually age out, as we see more people moving out of their homes because they need to sell for one reason or another, there was a divorce, there was a marriage, there was a birth in the family, a death in the family, a job loss.

or job transfer or something like that. The market will normalize and I believe we will start to see a gradual improvement in the number of homes sold this year and going forward.

Mike Hambright (05:37.294)
Okay, so maybe share your thoughts on the correlation, I guess, between, I think a lot of what you just shared is kind of maybe more of the retail marketplace versus the investor, the guys like me, right? So how do those things correlate in terms of what’s going on in the market?

Rick (05:54.199)
Well, there’s a short term and long term element of that, Mike, as you know. But one of the things I will say is that the investor activity in today’s housing market has pretty much maintained its level of activity, even as consumer purchases bottomed out. There’s a little bit less investor activity than there had been prior to Covid, but the fall off hasn’t been nearly as much.

And what we’re seeing most recent data I’ve seen through the third quarter of last year is that investors accounted for about 25 % of all home purchases in 2024. And that’s a higher than normal percent. And the bulk of those purchases were by the kind of folks that you’re working with. These are the small to midsize investors. A lot of them either own or buy 10 or fewer properties in a given year. And I think what’s

different about the market today. And this is the short term aspect I was talking about. I think we’re seeing a higher incidence of those investors buy properties and then hold on to them as rentals and a lower percentage of fix and flip purchases. We’re still seeing some and there’s still markets for that across the country. But as your your buyer.

is on the sidelines right now, trying to figure out how to afford to make a purchase. A lot of them are looking to rent instead while market conditions change, while affordability improves. And it should improve over the next couple of years. So I think we’re seeing a little bit more short term activity on the buying rent side. We’re seeing a little bit more short term activity from wholesale investors. We’re seeing a little bit less activity right now in the fix and flip market. But ironically, the research I’ve done

shows that the fix and flip investors have a much more optimistic outlook on the future than the rental investors do. So it’s sometimes hard to make the alignment between what people are thinking and what they’re actually doing.

Mike Hambright (07:57.602)
Yeah, well there’s so much pressure on insurance prices and some of the stuff that’s really impacting, you know, landlords. mean, I’m one of those guys. Taxes.

Rick (08:05.547)
Well, and you as a landlord, you know how hard it’s been to raise your asking rents on a year over year basis across the country through the third quarter. The asking rent for single family homes was only up about one point seven percent year over year. That varies market by market and different property types. But in aggregate, according to CoreLogic, it was only up about one point seven percent year over year. And when inflation is running two and a half percent and you’re only able to increase

Mike Hambright (08:12.557)
Yeah.

Rick (08:35.501)
you’re asking rents by 1.7. It’s certainly something that becomes a stress point for landlords.

Mike Hambright (08:42.05)
Yeah. So what do you think, like at this point, I know you’re more in tune with this than me, the new administration is going to do, what are some levers they’re going to pull to and how, you know, I guess there’s a general.

the general charter is that they’re gonna try to make housing more affordable. I would say with, know, Kamala is like, well, we’re gonna make housing more affordable. We’re gonna give everybody $25,000 to buy the first house. I’m like, what do you think is gonna happen with that? That’s inflation, right? That’s how inflation works. But, you know, from the Trump side, like, what are some things that they’re threatening to do or promising to do that might impact the overall market and how does that impact the kind of main street real estate investor?

Rick (09:25.537)
Well, let’s start with the broadest possible strokes. It would seem that an administration headed up by a lifetime real estate developer would create a more favorable environment for other real estate investors than an administration headed up by career politicians. That we’re talking about national rent control.

limiting the number of rental property somebody could own without losing tax benefits, increase in capital gains taxes, just a lot of things that were decidedly investor unfriendly. So right off the bat, from an investor perspective, you would think we’ll see a more favorable environment. The two things that investors that I’ve spoken with or surveyed that they’ve shared concerns about are two of the primary pillars of the Trump campaign.

One of which is to hit imports with very high tariffs. So if you’re a fix and flip investor, if you’re an investor who buys properties, fixes them up and rents them a high tariff on Canadian lumber, for example, or on appliances, for example.

Probably not something you’re looking forward to because you know that means you’re out of pocket costs are going to go up in terms of repairs and remodeling and the like. And they’ve already gone up 70 % the last decade. that’s probably not a real positive. The other issue that investors have raised is it’s already difficult enough to find workers, skilled laborers in particular. About a third of construction workers in the residential market are immigrants, fairly high

percentage of them are undocumented. So anything that reduces that labor force is going to make it more difficult to get that work done.

Rick (11:09.591)
So those are the two negative things I’ve heard from investors about the new administration. On the plus side, have talked about the Trump administration has really talked about some things that could be beneficial to both investors and housing at large. For example, right now the estimates are that it costs about 25 % of your construction costs to comply with regulations. So if we loosen up regulations a little bit, we could make construction costs come

down noticeably. There are things like you and I were talking about before we started recording today, like the notion of removing the lifetime insurance cost on an FHA loan prior to the Great Recession. Once you got to 20 percent equity in your FHA loan, you were able to have that insurance premium wiped out. So that that would be helpful. Opening up government lands for development is something that’s been very popular among investors I’ve talked to.

the notion of incenting with taxes municipalities to lighten up regulatory requirements in their areas to permit more construction. A lot of these things that are oriented toward increasing supply. And as you were suggesting when you talked about the Harris proposal to give every first time buyer a $25,000 down payment assistance.

That would have exacerbated the current problem, which is things are too expensive and we have too much demand compared to supply. If instead you can entice people and people to bring more supply to market, that that should slow down price appreciation.

which brings more buyers to market, makes it more affordable for people to buy their homes. And right now, the biggest shortage we have in the market is at the entry level. So anything the administration can do as part of its policies that incent the creation, the development of those starter homes would go a big, big way toward helping the market recover.

Mike Hambright (13:14.838)
Yeah, for sure. That’s awesome. And I’ve heard even rumblings. I think when Trump did win the election, that I didn’t look into this in detail, that stocks of Fannie and Freddie went up quite a bit because the idea that they, you know, I guess he’s threatened to kind of privatize that. I’m a little bit more of a libertarian where I think the government shouldn’t be involved in nearly as much as it is today without getting to the political side of it. Any real chances of that? And what would that look like if that happened?

Rick (13:44.923)
Very good chance of that. one of the main reasons for that is if the government were to spin off Fannie and Freddie as IPOs, estimates are that there’d be somewhere between a net benefit to the government of somewhere between $300 and $500 billion. And for a government that has a $36 trillion national debt, that’s not the worst news you could possibly hear. Fannie and Freddie, though,

Mike Hambright (14:08.046)
Yeah.

Rick (14:13.975)
probably are involved in somewhere north of 60 % of all mortgages.

Last time that President Trump was in office and he had a gentleman named Mark Calabria in charge of FHFA, which is the government body that manages Fannie and Freddie, they were moving toward privatizing the two companies. So it would not be a shock at all to see that happen again. I don’t think it’s an early priority and it would need to be done with great care because if you don’t handle it properly,

you could really disrupt the entire mortgage industry. And at a time when housing is trying to recover, that’s the last thing you want to do. The other concern candidly is that the likelihood is that a private version of Fannie and Freddie, if it doesn’t have an explicit government guarantee on the loans it’s underwriting, could cause…

the risk factor to go up a little bit, which means that mortgage rates might go up a little bit higher. And we saw what happened when mortgage rates went up a couple of years ago. So do I think it could happen during this administration’s term? Yeah, I do. Wouldn’t be at all surprising, but if they do it, they’re going to have to do it thoughtfully. It’ll probably take a couple of years to unwind if they do it right. And they need to do it in a way that doesn’t ultimately penalize home buyers.

Mike Hambright (15:15.608)
Hmm.

Mike Hambright (15:19.939)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (15:37.036)
Yeah, it’s interesting as a real estate investor and an entrepreneur and like I said, a little more of a libertarian side of me that thinks the government shouldn’t be involved. I hate the government subsidy stuff, but it benefits me as a real estate investor. So it’s just the dichotomy of like, you know, how do I really feel about this? It’s like, I’ve mixed feelings.

Rick (15:50.923)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rick (15:59.763)
And I think that’s just the real world. have our own ideologies and our own belief sets, but you also need to adapt to the reality of whatever is in front of you. And if the government’s offering programs that benefit you as an investor or you as a homeowner, for that matter, you’d be silly not to take advantage of them.

Mike Hambright (16:19.458)
Yeah, and it’s interesting as a real estate investor, mean, markets shift, things change all the time, but there’s always opportunity everywhere. Your cheese moves a little bit, but that doesn’t mean that cheese is gone. You just have to find it or adapt.

Rick (16:30.635)
Well, if you want to talk about cheese moving in a subtle way, and President Trump is known for many things subtly not being one of them, his return to office order for federal workers could be one of those dominoes that kind of changes a lot of things going on in the country. It might embolden other employers to issue those return to office orders.

If that happens, we certainly have a change of what’s going on in the commercial market when it comes to the office sector. But we could also see a slowdown in terms of the number of people migrating from some of the more expensive states to some of the less expensive states. And if if you’re an investor who’s

whose portfolio isn’t comprised of homes just around where you live, but you’re looking at some of these other markets. That’s a trend to keep your eye on because the last thing you want to do is be the last investor to purchase a home in a market where people are no longer moving to. So I’d be keeping an eye on that trend as well.

Mike Hambright (17:34.53)
right.

And there have been quite a few large companies that have called everybody back as well, right? Yeah. I have a lot of virtual staff. I have a bunch of overseas staff too, so I can’t make them come into the office. But for folks that are local, I’ve essentially done something. Someone’s like, I just need you here more often. I just feel like we’re more productive as a team. The culture’s better. There’s a lot of things there. So yeah, that’s interesting.

Rick (17:58.549)
Yeah, and what one of my former bosses used to refer to as MBWA, which is management by walking around. You can be really productive in that lunchroom happenstance meeting where you’re bouncing ideas off a colleague that you just as good as Zoom and teams have gotten at allowing you to stay connected.

It’s just that that random meeting that sometimes generates a great idea that you miss And corporate culture is really difficult to maintain when you’re you’re you’re not together. So I Think we’ll ultimately see some sort of hybrid Solution we’re not everybody’s gonna be have to have to be at the office all the time, but But I think the the work from home movement is probably slowing down significantly right now

Mike Hambright (18:29.346)
Yeah, for sure.

Mike Hambright (18:50.38)
Yeah. So Rick, I know you kind of cut your teeth or a lot of your early work was more around the foreclosure activity in the market. And a lot of that is really dried up. I mean, there’s a lot of people, people have more equity in their houses now than they did last time. The banks find ways to work with people, maybe more than they did in the past. Like, do you see a foreclosure activity increasing and kind of what are some of the changes that we could expect as real estate investors?

Rick (18:55.787)
Yep.

Rick (19:15.179)
I do think with the new administration, of the things that will happen is we’ll see a less

punitive version of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the CFPB. I’ve spoken off the record with a number of mortgage servicers who’ve told me they’re very reluctant to put anybody into foreclosure for fear of the CFPB coming down on them with massive fines if they make any mistakes in the process. I believe that President Trump will probably appoint a new director to the Bureau soon who will take a much less aggressive stance

toward that kind of activity. And because of that, I servicers will feel more at ease about issuing default notices when people simply can no longer afford their properties. The other thing that’s changing is the FHA, which really has the highest percentage of delinquent borrowers right now of any type of loan, has just changed their loss mitigation program. There was a loophole in it.

that would let a borrower go through multiple cycles of loss mitigation almost automatically and regardless of whether or not they could really afford the property. So they’ve recalculated that program and now you can only qualify to be in loss mitigation once every 18 months. So what one of my friends refers to as the wash, rinse, spin cycle of loss mitigation is no longer going to be the case. And people who are currently appearing to be current,

Mike Hambright (20:35.682)
Wow.

Rick (20:47.511)
But really have never caught up on their loans will probably find themselves in distress a little bit sooner. So it’s not going to create a wave of foreclosure activity. A lot of these bar were still have a lot of equity and many of them are deciding to sell their home when they get into financial trouble rather than risk losing all that equity at a foreclosure auction. So right now the message is still for investors interested.

Find those borrowers who are in the early stage of foreclosure and reach out to them directly. Don’t wait for the lenders to repossess these properties and try and buy them from the banks because there’s just not a lot of those around and there won’t be for at least another year. But we will see a gradual return in overall foreclosure activity back to pre pandemic numbers.

probably by the end of this year, maybe by early next year. So not a foreclosure tsunami, not a huge, huge increase, but a gradual return to what feels like a more normal market over the next 12 to 18 months.

Mike Hambright (21:48.974)
Okay, okay. And Rick, I know you know a lot of the institutional players that have been really kind of on the sidelines a little bit here, probably chomping at the bit to jump back in. mean, what do you see, like the Main Street investor is glad that those guys are gone, right? But they’re probably not gone forever. So what do you see from the institutional type buyers that might be bouncing back into the marketplace that might impact more of the Main Street type investor?

Rick (22:18.613)
Well, one of the potential downsides of this more investor friendly environment I mentioned is you might see the institutional folks a little more emboldened with the Trump administration than they were with the Biden administration or they would have been with the Harris presidency. So they might start coming back. But I will tell you, Mike, I’ve seen what I think is a sea change in the methods being deployed by these institutions. I’m seeing a lot more movement

toward toward built to rent. So ground up construction rather than going in and competing with smaller investors on a property by property basis. And if I were an institutional investor.

That’s probably what I would be doing more of much more price control over what you’re building, much more quality control over the assets that you’re going to have and the ability to have a centralized management rather than managing 28 properties all over the metro area. So I see more of that. I do think we’ll see some of them come into market. But interestingly, at least over the last year so, we’ve been seeing them sell almost as many properties as they

been buying. And I know that some smaller investors have been participating on both sides of those transactions. So I don’t see the institutions coming back and gobbling up everything, but they’ll probably be more active than they’ve been over the last year or so.

Mike Hambright (23:45.038)
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it comes out in the form of products that benefit real estate investors. Like, you know, if I go back to 2008, 2009, 10, 11, in that realm, like, there weren’t the huge national lenders that were competing on price, the drive down prices of lending. I mean, it was just the local guys that were charging 14 and four and stuff like that. I mean, there’s some things that have been, and those were the institutional players that just had institutional money behind them. So there are some things that benefit the mainstream investor as well.

Rick (24:11.979)
Well, the fact that that’s gone from being called hard money to being called private lending, sometimes you can tell in a name what’s going on. you’re right. It’s a very different financing environment. And there’s a lot of things like property management tools, inspection tools.

Mike Hambright (24:21.482)
Hahaha

Rick (24:31.371)
photography that you can get on properties that are kind of in outlying areas. You can get those photos almost instantaneously. A lot of those tools, a lot of those services didn’t exist before the institutions got involved. So in some ways, it’s a better market environment for a lot of investors today than it was before those big guys got into the market.

Mike Hambright (24:53.934)
Well everybody there you have it. That is what’s going on in the marketplace in the good old USA. So Rick, thanks for spending some time with us today.

Rick (25:02.081)
Thanks for having me, Mike. I’ll have to do it again soon.

Mike Hambright (25:04.204)
Yeah, always great to see you. Everybody, thanks so much for joining us today. We’ll see you on the next show.