Caza Real Estate

Built a Chrome extension that scores every Zillow listing 0-100 on real buyer demand. That 92 "hot deal" isn't a guess. It's reading saves, views, days on market, price cuts, all the stuff Zillow buries. High score means everyone's already circling it. low score means a quiet listing with room to negotiate. Find the deal before you call the agent. Export a clean, customizable, client-ready PDF when you do.

Two lines in this chart get read as one thing and they're not. Home prices +60%. Shelter +35%. Shelter is what it costs to live somewhere. Home prices are what it costs to own it. Those used to move together. They've split by 25 points in seven years. Owning got expensive way faster than housing did.

Price Increases over last 7 years... New Cars: +22% Used Cars: +29% Groceries: +33% Shelter: +35% Family Health Insurance: +38% Restaurants: +39% Transportation: +41% Electricity: +44% Gasoline: +49% Auto Insurance: +51% Gas Utilities: +60% Home Prices: +60% Fuel Oil: +60% Dozen Eggs: +72% Ground Beef: +79% Coffee: +127%

This matters more for mortgage rates than anything the Fed does this year. The 30-year mortgage tracks the long end, not the fed funds rate. People waiting for cuts to bail them out are watching the wrong number. Cuts can come and mortgages can stay right where they are if the long end doesn't cooperate.

JUST IN 🚨: U.S. 30-Year Treasury Yield jumps to 5.1%

@penny_peppers @bankertobuilder Out of touch is right. "Basic job" doing the heavy lifting in that post. Most people hear $160k and picture a normal salary. It's the 90th percentile.

@CazaRealEstate @bankertobuilder Exactly. These people are either out of touch, or not real people 🤖

These starter homes are only $575k Anyone working a basic job making $160k a year can afford this Why don't young people want to buy these?

@justRealGold In a soft market, chasing the price down means you're always priced for last month. You cut, the market drops again, you're still above it. Leverage didn't kill him. Leverage plus no income did. A paycheck was his cash flow, and cash flow is what lets you wait out a bad market.

After losing his $130K a year job, he started driving Uber while relying on his wife’s paycheck… all overwhelmed with more than $1.36 MILLION in debt. His known debts include: - Primary mortgage: $540,000 - Rental property: $453,000 - Rental property: $192,000 - Investment property: $184,000 That’s $1.369 million in mortgage debt alone, excluding his car loan and credit card debt, whose balances weren’t disclosed. He’s trying to sell off his rental properties to get out of debt and asked whether he should keep lowering the asking prices until they sell. Dave Ramsey advised him to sell everything that isn’t essential… including the rental properties and even the car and focus on eliminating debt. He also encouraged him to widen his job search, saying his financial skills can transfer to other industries.

Los Angeles County just voted to give affordable housing nonprofits first dibs on apartment buildings before they hit the market. Everyone's framing it as a landlord-vs-tenant fight. The number nobody's mentioning: the county's own estimate is this touches 30 to 130 sales a year. Out of a county with 10 million people. It won't fix affordability at that scale. But it adds a step to every deal in those zones. And capital routes around friction, it doesn't fight it. What else do they have up their sleeve?

This is the number sidelined buyers keep ignoring. Everyone's waiting for rates to fall. A coin flip on a hike means the next move might go the other way. "I'll wait for 5%" assumes down is the only direction left. Sometimes the wait is the risk. Kalshi's 50% is theirs, cite as theirs. Same caveat: it's not a hike prediction, just that down-only isn't a safe bet anymore.

JUST IN: 50% chance of Fed rate “hike” this year

Built a Chrome extension that scores every Zillow listing 0-100 on real buyer demand. That 92 "hot deal" isn't a guess. It's reading saves, views, days on market, price cuts, all the stuff Zillow buries. High score means everyone's already circling it. low score means a quiet listing with room to negotiate. Find the deal before you call the agent. Export a clean, customizable, client-ready PDF when you do.

People are, they're just underwriting it completely differently than 2021. The buy-for-cash-flow-on-day-one math is basically dead at these rates. Who's still buying: people betting on rent growth, forced appreciation through renovation, or just parking cash in a hard asset they'll hold ten years. Negative or breakeven cash flow at the start doesn't scare that buyer. If you need it to cash flow month one, yeah, today's brutal.

is anyone out there still purchasing rental properties in today's climate? it just doesn't seem profitable anymore.

First drop in consumer credit since late 2024 lines up with what housing is showing too. People stopped stretching. June home sales dipped, mortgage demand is soft, and now households are pulling back on credit across the board. Same story in different data. Nobody's forced into anything right now, so they're just waiting.

BREAKING: U.S. consumer credit drops $182 million in May, marking the first monthly decline since November 2024

Home prices just hit an all-time high in June. Sounds like a crash warning. Except affordability actually got better this year, not worse. Wages grew faster than prices, so the affordability index climbed to 102 from 95 a year ago. Record prices and improving affordability at the same time. That's not the story anyone's telling, but it's what the June numbers say.

20% of entry-level supply from one seller is enough to actually set the price in that tier. This is why national averages lie. VineBrook barely moves the needle in Atlanta at 3.6%, but in Cincinnati they basically are the entry-level market right now. The story isn't "institutions are selling." It's where they're concentrated.

@CazaRealEstate What's interesting when they sell off like this is they can account for a meaningful share of the entire for sale supply. When we wrote our piece on this mid June, they accounted for 20% of the entry level listings for all of Cincinnati metro.

DEVELOPING STORY: As of this evening, VineBrook Homes, one of the largest institutional single-family rental owners in the nation, now has a staggering $300 million worth of homes for sale. They have just under 2,000 homes for sale today, up from 53 at the start of the year. That's nearly 10% of their entire national portfolio now on the market. And they've already marked down over $18.4 million in price cuts across those listings, trying to find buyers. The chart below is a daily snapshot of VineBrook's for-sale portfolio: total dollar value of homes listed, and total dollar value of markdowns on those homes each day.

Rates is the popular answer. History says something more boring. The gap usually closes sideways. Prices go flat and just sit there for years while incomes grind up underneath them. Happened after 2006, happened in the 90s stretch you're pointing at. Nobody wants "nothing happens for five years" but that's the most common way this resolves.

Housing demand today is roughly back to 1995 levels. But prices are near all-time highs. That gap doesn’t close without: • rates falling • prices falling • or incomes rising Guess which one usually moves first.

Boise makes sense when you think about what those owners lived through. That market roughly doubled between 2020 and 2022. Everyone who bought or refinanced in that window anchored to the top. Sellers everywhere price off the number they remember, not the number the market's at now. Boise just had a bigger gap between the two.

I’ve sold real estate in nearly every major city across the country. And there’s one city where owners consistently think their property is worth more than anywhere else... Boise, Idaho.

I track these listings every week and a crash is just not showing up in the numbers. Median's around $954k, down maybe 3% from last year. Homes still going in about three weeks. And there's way less on the market than a year ago, inventory's down around 12%. That's not a crash. Nobody's being forced to sell, so prices just aren't moving much. redfin.com/city/16904/CA/…

San Diego's real estate is in a complete free fall. These are the worst numbers in recorded history. Your taxes were automatically increased on July 1st to pay for the 1,000 illegal aliens on @CityofSanDiego payroll collecting $100,000 annually, pension benefits, free health care, and 0% Home Loans. 💁🏻‍♂️

A few Fed officials now want to raise rates, not cut them. That's the part the housing market isn't pricing in. Everyone buying a home this year is doing it on the assumption that mortgage rates drift down from here. What if the next move is up. The people waiting for 5% might be waiting for a number that isn't coming back.

@pepemoonboy Choppy and uncertain is where the returns actually get made. Calm markets are already priced.

The market is tanking. These are the worst market conditions I’ve ever invested in. Extremely choppy, massive swings every other day, geopolitical uncertainty… I’m tired.