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Glen, always great to see you and have you on the show. Wanna start got a big picture, Glen, um, get your take on this housing market of ours because you have very unique line of sight there. Glen, how would you describe the housing market as we sit here today, Glen, and what do you expect ahead?

Slowly responding to lower interest rates. I have never seen buyers respond so sluggishly to low interest rates. So over the past 10 years, every time rates have come down, sales have gone up. But this time, rates went down a month ago and demand was fairly sluggish through the first three weeks of July, only as we approach Labor Day and this week have we seen more people touring homes and writing offers.

Why the lag this time, Glen?

Well, I think it's some of what you already discussed that people are still waiting to see what the Fed is going to do. There's a consumer perception that when the Fed lowers rates, mortgage interest rates will drop further. But mortgages have already priced in at least a quarter point cut. And if that is all that we get, we might actually see mortgage rates increase, whereas if we get a 50 basis point cut, rates will drop further. So I think everyone has been holding his breath about that. And there is still a shortage of listings. So people complain about how much there is to buy. There's been a little bit of a pile up in the market where some homes aren't selling and so you have some stale inventory. But we just got rate relief fairly late in the season when most of the items on the shelf are fairly stale.

And Glen, as we sit here right now, so Mortgage News Daily tells me the 30-year fixed is at 635. Um, is there a level, Glen, that you look for that would jump start, you know, meaningful activity, Glen? You know, is it six, is it 55?

Well, if we go into next year with the rate anywhere near 6%, you're going to see a significant increase from the level of home sales we have today. So I had never thought that you could get below 4 million existing home sales. We hadn't reached that level since the 90s when the population was 25% smaller. So we're going to get some kind of bounce next year because Americans have finally caught a break on affordability. Having rates come down this much takes hundreds of dollars off people's mortgage payments when they're looking at a new house. But to have a real boom, I think you'd have to have rates come down into the low fives so that people who got a 3% or a 4% mortgage actually see some upside in moving up. Right now there's so many folks who don't want to give up that old mortgage because even if they bought the same house, they'd be paying so much more for it with the rate that starts with six.

And Glen, they may be getting more relief on the mortgage front, but they're not getting relief necessarily on the price front, right? I mean, we continue to see prices rising. Is there any change for that on the horizon?

Well, I think it's started to decelerate some, but really we have a structural problem that America has forgotten how to build homes. And so both candidates, Trump and Harris have proposed significant deregulation in the housing market mandated at the federal level. At the local level, there is still such an institutionalized review process, um, that favors people who don't want construction in their backyard. So my hope is that we'll solve this problem by building millions of houses. There's bipartisan consensus that we need to do that. It has now become a national issue since the pandemic forced so many people out of the big cities across the rest of the country. But it still takes years for that to have an effect.

Glen, let's stick with politics for a second, you know, uh, Kamala Harris certainly made headlines when she, uh, talked about this $25,000 tax credit, Glen, to cover, um, the, the down payment costs for first-time home buyers. What did you make of that idea, Glen? Smart, smart strategy?

Well, what I liked about it is that it was paired with this initiative to build 3 million homes. If you stimulate supply without stimulating demand, you're just going to cause home prices to rise so that that subsidy is netted out. I just wish that either candidate, Harris or Trump would also talk about federal lending standards. I know that in 2007 we were doing liar loans and strawberry pickers were buying McMansions in Central California. But still, we have made it so hard to get credit for affordable homes that builders have stopped building affordable homes. Almost all the construction is in the high end because that's where people can qualify for a loan, or when it's at the low end, it's all for rent. But if you really wanted to make a big change, change the lending standards and the supply would come through to match that.

Glen, always great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Josh. Bye, everybody.