Google Searches For Housing Bubble

First time home buyers hit the panic button big time in the spring of 2022, and Google showed a HUGE spike in the search for “housing bubble” in March of 2022. In this episode, David Sidoni dives into the good, the bad, and the ugly, ugly, WRONGNESS that the internet is offering as the answer to the question – is this a housing bubble ready to pop?

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Google Searches For “Housing Bubble” Has Been Spiking

Is This A Housing Bubble And Should First Time Home Buyers Be Worried

Realtors of TikTok have become a slur meaning greedy, slimy, and scummy salespeople trying to convince all the struggling renters to buy a home with them. Most of them are brand spanking new, so they can get a sale and force the renters into buying a home that they can’t afford. Sadly, I tend to agree with this portrayal and judgment partially. This slur, unfortunately, has in many ways been earned. Who do you believe? Is it the opinions in the comments about the slimy realtors at TikTok or a Google search on the best times to buy in the potential housing bubble? Is there option three? Let’s talk about it.

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There’s a lot to get into on our topic. Let’s dive right in. For first-time buyers out there, things are getting more expensive every day. You see prices continue to rise and also, those pesky mortgage interest rates go up, which increases your projected monthly payments. Lots of people are looking for answers on the potential of a housing bubble partially because it seems inevitable the way things are going and let’s face it, some of you are pissed off. It sucks. You want a bubble to happen so you finally feel like you can afford a house again.

Bubble Talk

Social media is being bombarded with realtors. Many of them are brand new to the business. They are so thirsty to try to become the next realtor influencer trying to go viral or many of them are trying to make a sale to validate the decision to quit their job and jump over to the real estate. It’s that old job, the one they trained for and knew what they were doing instead of the real estate. Bubble talk is all the rage on social media. There are lots of new realtors making quick, snappy videos to tell you it’s not a bubble. They’re on Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, Discord, and Facebook.

That’s where all the older realtors feel comfy. We’re seeing a ton of them posting videos on TikTok. Some of them, I’m sure, are reading so they can find information for their next piece of content. What happens to you, the potential first-time buyer, if you are going to be googling, looking at TikTok, and seeing all this information? Where do you get unbiased information? Is there a bubble or no bubble? You need the information to figure out what’s going on in this great debate.

I’ve done the research and I can tell you that a ton of the TikTok realtors are trying to give information on these suck zesty cheeseballs. They’re helping to perpetuate and grow the stereotype and the slur on TikTok realtors as greedy scumbags. I’m very sorry about that. It’s not all of them. There are many others that have their hearts in the right place because they’re telling you some correct information. The problem is their messaging is so cringy. It comes off as maybe slimy or untrustworthy. I understand why you feel the way you do. Let me give you facts and data to help you find a trusted source.

This is not information to sell you. I’m not seeking for you to be my client, nor am I claiming to be an expert forecaster so that you will buy my Secrets of the Market seminar. I just regurgitate to you as much data as I can so you can make an informed choice because I read it, study it all, and live it all every single day. Instead of sitting in my bed scrolling through TikTok to get the information, I’ve spent all day and apparently halfway into the night reading, writing, and hashing over tons of reports, data, and metrics to give the information to you because you want to know.

The Haters

How do I know that? This is the leading show geared directly to first-time homebuyers. You hit me up with questions all the time. Also, the data shows that people are searching for this information. Google searches for the housing bubble hit a gigantic spike in the spring of 2022. We’re going to get into that. Social media is doing its part to stir the conversation often in the most cringy and salesy way possible. One big trend that I am seeing is haters in the comments. Before you call me old, I am very well aware that we all know that haters live in the comments.

Many of you folks out there are half my age. The math is legit. You need to know that my generation has been on YouTube as adults since it began. I, like many other folks my age, used to wait 15 minutes for a 3-minute video to download. At age 35, way back in 2005, that’s when I got deep into YouTube. A whole bunch of us did. Here was one of the major things that got us back into YouTube in 2005. It was led by a hilarious digital short from SNL called Lazy Sunday with Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell. This blew up YouTube.

[bctt tweet=”Trust and verify. Don’t let the headlines drive you to Google to find out that the sky is falling.” via=”no”]

My video producer here, who is closer to your age, said to me that it is the first viral video. I saw an SNL special where they were talking about it. They were like, “What’s YouTube?” They didn’t even know, “The chronic (what?) les of Narnia.” It’s awesome. It was making viral videos. That’s what I’m talking about. I know all this and understand. As an adult, I’ve been to YouTube. I know the haters are under the comments. The problem is that lots of people out there are starting to side with the haters since many of the posters are cringe-worthy. It’s real easy to jump on board and bag on them.

I am going to sound old again. I don’t know what to say, except some of the posters are lame. That’s what they are. They’re lame. The haters come out in force. I know that some of you are starting to believe them because the minute I or any other realtor or lender posts anywhere on social media that is not a bubble this time, the comments get filled with angry people saying that the poster, whoever it is, is a greedy liar trying to get a sale and wants people to buy a home so they can make more money on commissions.

I hear you, I empathize with you, and I understand that you would think that because A) Sometimes it does happen exactly that way and B) The information given is bite-sized and so easy to dispute without the data behind it. Maybe they have the right intentions at heart and they’re giving you the right data but it doesn’t right when it’s a little blip of a video. On Google, the housing bubble has spiked like crazy. Everyone wants to know what’s going on.

Episode 47 and Episode 48 from August 2021, Episode 68 from January 2022 or the big bubble one, Episode 74 in February 2022, Episode 89, Episode 92, and Episode 93 are jampacked with unbiased data and a bit too much for me to copy and paste and put in the comments to reply to the haters. It’s a little bit too much because it’s sourced, researched, and tends to be a bit lengthier than screaming in all caps for two sentences calling everybody stupid sheep. Let me throw a thought out there.

Opinions Versus Facts And Data

Do you know why you’re hearing so much about the bubble and why so many people are googling it? It’s because more people have platforms to voice their opinions. More opinions and louder opinions do not mean correct though controversy and corporate greed bashing get more views. I understand why. The facts and data when it comes to a housing bubble contradict these yelling opinions. People are posting philosophies, not actual facts. They’re theories, not actual data.

I understand Millennials are fighting back. You’ve been terribly mislabeled but one mislabel I hear all the time in the world of real estate is even more wrong than when Millennials get called entitled. People will often say about Millennials when it comes to buying homes that they don’t want to buy homes. They’re not buying homes. That’s why the bubble will burst. They won’t be fooled by the man this time. They want to FOMO, travel, and never buy a house. In 2021, Millennial homebuyers went up from 37% in 2020 to 43% in 2021.

Once again, it’s facts and data. The actual facts about housing inequality have always been there for every generation. The difference is the generations before didn’t have social media to talk about it. It was quieter. Back then, the information was only shared in The Wall Street Journal. Most people with their heads down don’t read that. You couldn’t sit in your bed at night and scroll through The Wall Street Journal in your hand but now you can. You’re being told all these different opinions of people. People are taking it verbatim and for a fact, just like they’re reading the journal.

HBH 101 | Housing Bubble — Housing Bubble: Where do you get unbiased information? Is there a bubble or no bubble? You need the information to figure out what’s going on in this great debate.

Every keyboard warrior can spew fake news out to the masses and tout ridiculous opinions or straight BS. They do it all online. It’s like some newly discovered conspiracy. It has been out there all the time. This is the way the economy and housing work but because you’re getting this in your face, some people are buying it because they have been raised to trust the Yelp and Google reviews and the people over corporate advertising. I get it. I love that, power to the people. Unfortunately, many people are dead wrong.

I’m afraid that you’re putting too much trust in the people. I understand because that has been a powerful tool for you. That’s awesome. I love all the shifts in power. A lot of companies are getting massive market share because they have sustainable practices. I love what happened with the GameStop Revolution. I love the power of reviews and community thinking to help people figure out which corporations they want to support but perhaps you are not distrusting enough of some of the people going online talking about this. You’re too distrustful of the people who are trying to help.

Find your trusted source. Trust and verify. Don’t let the headlines drive you to Google to find out that the sky is falling. Don’t let the seemingly slimy earned reputation of this crappy real estate industry keep you from using real estate to build your family’s wealth. Don’t let the fear hold you back. For God’s sake, don’t give the haters any power. The worst thing of all is that sometimes it’s not even the comments that are incorrect. Sometimes even the posts are non-data-supported drivel.

There’s a jackass on TikTok who claims to be a financial advisor. One click on his bio and I saw that he is selling three things. The first thing is an art investing club. The second thing is Rakuten, the get paid to shop site. The third thing is one-on-one coaching with him for $289, “I’m here to help you achieve your goals. In this one-on-one call, I will personally give you specific advice on your situation, build you a plan to reach your goals, and walk you through all of your questions.”

That’s the description after, “Join the art club. Go to Rakuten. Get paid to shop.” He’s going to coach that vague nonsense where he said nothing for $289. I’m not here to rag on the posers online. If I were, this would be the longest show in human history. I want to let you know that when you’re searching for the housing market crash on TikTok, this guy comes up first with almost 250,000 views for a 41-second video. He says, “We’re in a massive housing bubble.” He used two stats to back up this theory. One, investors bought 35% of the homes in the metro areas.

Right off the bat, I know this isn’t right. I couldn’t find any data to verify that. What I did find is the actual national statistic, which I already knew because I’m a nerd. Real estate investors did buy a record-high number of homes in 2021 at 18.4%, not 35%. 18.4% of the homes that were sold in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2021 were bought by investors. That’s up from 12.6% in 2020. It’s up 6% but it’s not at 35%. Are investors buying homes to rent an issue? It is but it’s not the reason that inventory is low. For that information, read Episode 78, the 2022 Low Inventory Reality Check.

I couldn’t post all the data from that episode to dispute his 41-second clip about the massive bubble burst that’s coming because A) If I disputed all the wrong things I saw online, I would never sleep and B) Episode 78 is 38 minutes of facts and data. There’s not one point of total misinformation in a 41-second TikTok post like he did. The second point that this guy with 250,000 downloads to why he said we’re in a massive housing bubble was freaking laughable.

[bctt tweet=”The actual facts about housing inequality have always been there for every generation. The difference is the generations before didn’t have social media to talk about it.” via=”no”]

He did the green screen thing and showed the Zillow stock price pre-pandemic and then the price now. He claimed, “If the housing market is so healthy, why has Zillow stock dropped in that time?” It was $14. It dropped 21%. No one in the real estate industry has ever used Zillow stock to determine the strength of the housing market. Anyone who pays even the slightest bit of attention to anything going on in real estate knows exactly why Zillow stock dropped at that time.

Do you know that in November of 2021, Zillow lost $380 million in the defunct iBuyer program Zillow offers? It’s a $380 million loss. That’s what we call a business. When a business loses money, the stock goes down. Nobody ever looks at the stock of Zillow to figure out what’s going on with the housing market, yet this is something that you put on TikTok and try to tell everybody what’s going on. What happened is they lost $380 million, they cut 25% of their staff, and their investors freaked out. That’s why the stock fell. I thought you should know.

I’m not trying to be a hater here either. I’m trying to be your protector and let you know what’s going on because if you’re searching online to get your info, verify, re-verify, research, and look at the person’s track record and history. Speaking of Mr. TikTok coaching guy with 250,000 views, in his latest post, he was disputing people who say that real estate prices can’t go down. No one is debating that dude. No one says they can’t go down. They go up and down. That’s how it works. Who told you otherwise?

In his new post, he says that institutional buyers or investors are not as big a percentage as the media makes them out to be. That was point one in the last video when you claimed the investors were going to cause a massive housing bubble. My favorite thing was in the comments. This dude named Swaggy V is cool. He’s a reverse commenter. He’s not a troll. He’s on a low-alert because he was speaking a little truth. Swaggy V said, “Didn’t eighteen months ago, you promise that the market would crash because of the end of the eviction moratorium?” TikTok, you’re the best.

If you want factual information, real data, and stuff like that, follow @HowToBuyAHome on TikTok or you can follow @DavidSidoni on Instagram. They’re actual facts, data, research, history, calm analysis, and not frantic panic and not BS like that dude was saying. I will discuss both the positive and the negative things of all things real estate. Why is this sidebar of me savagely tearing this guy a new one important? I found this TikTok coach of all things vague, general, and nonspecific through a search.

Google Trends

We’re talking about what’s going on with the housing bubble. If you search it on Google and TikTok, you’re finding some things that end up like this and the information is not correct. People are searching. Let’s go deeper into that. Let’s go to the Google Trends that tell us what people are wondering about. In the spring of 2021, bidding wars spiked high on Google Trends since bidding wars for homes exploded at that time. They had about 30% of the homes on the market in 2020 and they jumped to 60% of all the homes. They got bidding wars on them in the middle of 2020.

It then got to 65% in August of 2021. That’s when the Google spike happened. It was a full year after the 30% increase from 30% to 60% in the bidding wars. It’s odd that it took that long or a whole year of going from 30% to 60% for the buyers to start asking questions and googling. The frustration hit and it led to the seeking., so it took some time. Moving on, in the spring of 2022, interest rates shot up from 3% to 5%, so buyers got freaked out. Google search started spiking the housing bubble.

All of this is according to Google Trends, which lets the user of the platform identify popular search terms. If you want to see how it works, plugin Will Smith. You’re going to see a fatty spike. I have no idea why. It’s weird. Look at Google Trends for the term housing bubble. If you look at the last few years, it remained constantly low and flat. It even dipped during the Coronavirus. However, in spring 2022, searches for the term have soared. It was a fast straight-up spike. It’s a big increase. It specifically took place in late March 2022.

The spike appears to line up with the release of a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as well as media coverage of that report. This pointed to an abnormal housing market behavior for the first time since the boom of the early 2000s and found evidence of “a brewing US housing bubble.” That report came out and coincided with the average rate on a mortgage for a 30-year fixed going to 3.76% and jumping to 4.67%. All that happened in March 2022.

This chart shows you how the mortgage rates popped up in March 2022. It coincided exactly with when that report came out on the housing bubble. That resulted in this next chart to show you the huge spike in the Google search for the housing bubble. That’s years of information. That’s a flat line with a giant spike in March 2022. Picture a street and then a streetlight. It was that big of a straight-up. It shows you how intense the search for the housing bubble was but people are freaking out about it. What’s interesting is when you go back and look at the Google searches for the housing bubble all the way back to 2004.

Nowadays’ spike in searches, if you look at this chart, the one on end is the one that looks like a streetlight but all the way on the left is 2004. The recent search is a little spike compared to the huge mountain of an uptick that began in 2004 and hit a huge peak in 2005. It’s a full three times higher than the recent spike and the increase in searches on Google in 2022. In 2004 when home prices were shooting up but the bubble hadn’t burst yet, searches grew slowly with mounting concern, creating that mountain that you saw on the chart with a peak three times higher than nowadays instant fear.

The fear and the potential for disaster were so much greater for those of us who watched the markets back in 1998 to 2004. We slowly started to question what was going on. If you’re paying attention to the news, you’re hearing three times less than the worry that was happening back then. It all happened in one day. It was the interest rate change and the report. What I did was I figured I would get in the action and see what people were finding in their searches.

The Top Results

I googled it and here are the top headlines, not from lenders or realtors. If you’re a cynic and you think people are always trying to tell you something by sugarcoating the information, if you Google the housing bubble, these are the top results. They all came from reputable economic sources, which are not only more unbiased than people trying to sell you something but they can be downright cynical. They could be worse than the wackiest conspiracy theorist because they sell their publications to investors. Investors love to feast on the downtimes in the economies.

They’re looking for something that could burst. Buy low. Sell high. Here are the top results from BusinessInsider.com, “A housing crash is unlikely, but a correction could be around the corner. Here’s the difference.” Here’s the difference. That’s the first thing that happens when people Google the housing bubble. The next one is from Forbes, “Will The Housing Market Crash? Experts Give 5-Year Predictions.” I read the article. None of them said bubble. They all said correction. The next listing on Google was The Washington Post, “Rising rates will cool the housing market. But a crash is unlikely.”

[bctt tweet=”The future will be what it is. How you prepare for it is going to make all the difference.” via=”no”]

Next was TheStreet.com. The headline was, “Will The Housing Market Crash? (May 2022) Rising mortgage rates and economic uncertainty have some people questioning the market.” This is another classic bait-and-switch headline because the main summary from the entire article, which I read, is a dip is not a crash. We’re going to get a dip. Here’s the next one on that Google page for everybody out there googling the housing bubble. This one comes from The Atlantic. There’s a bold headline, “The U.S. Housing Market Has Peaked.”

Underneath it, with half the font in non-bolded and italicized, this is what the subheadline said, “But no, we’re not headed for anything even close to 2008.” The next headline was an article from Fortune on May 9th, 2022. It said, “Housing bubble 2.0? Regional housing markets are beginning to look like they did in 2007.” That was interesting. It’s a reputable source saying that some regional housing markets look like they did in 2007. That’s some juicy bubble talk.

Let’s see what that article says, “When the US housing bubble burst more than a decade ago, it brought the global economy to its knees. It turned out that the multi-year housing boom through the early 2000s was hiding skeletons. Homebuyers were driven by fear of missing out on home prices. They were stretching themselves well beyond their financial means. Zealous lenders were giving out mortgages, or better put subprime mortgages to folks who historically would not have ever qualified for a home. As the credit rushed in, it helped to drive the housing boom. However, as the housing market corrected, those bad loans created a foreclosure crisis.”

Skeletons of predatory lending were giving loans away for nothing due to FOMO. That is not happening. Ask any of my readers who have applied for a loan in the last few years. It takes verification of everything. Back to the article, the article then states, “Fast-forward to today, the US housing market is once again going through a historic boom. Over the past few years, US home prices have been up 34.4%, including a 19.8% jump in the last twelve months. That twelve-month hike is more than four times greater than the historic annual average.”

They gave it 4.6%. I always tell you around that it’s 4%. I’m conservative. I’m thinking about you. They said, “It’s 4.6% posted since 1987. That’s the average. It’s also well above the largest twelve-month price jump posted in the years leading up to the financial crisis in 2008. That was 14.7%. Our ongoing housing boom has more economists pondering the most feared word in real estate, bubble. In March 2022, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas sent chills down the spines of home builders and real estate agents when they released a paper titled Real-Time Market Monitoring Finds Signs of Brewing U.S. Housing Bubble.”

Remember, I told you about that but they went on to say, “Unlike the last go-around, they say that household balance sheets today appear in better shape, and excessive borrowing doesn’t appear to be fueling the market boom.” That’s what happened last time. Those were those skeletons. It goes on to say, “That said, some regional housing markets could be in full-blown housing bubbles. Some regions could be in a bubble. At the very least, many markets are priced exorbitantly compared to what local income levels can support.”

“That’s what Fortune found after looking at the analysis. Each month, researchers at Florida Atlantic University would calculate how overpriced or underpriced homes are in America’s 100 largest housing markets. In order to find a housing market that closely resembles the current market, you would have to travel back to the years leading up to the 2008 crash. Back in 2007, 99 of the nation’s 100 largest housing markets were overpriced. Forty markets were overpriced by at least 30% and 19 of them by at least 50%.”

Here’s the difference though, “Back in 2007, many of the nation’s most overpriced housing markets were California, New York, and Florida. This time, Florida still does have a heavy concentration of overpriced markets but California and New York, which both have seen an uptick in out-of-state migration during the pandemic, rank much lower. Look no further than Los Angeles. In March 2007, LA was overpriced by 62%. As of March 2022, Los Angeles is overpriced but only by 10%.”

In the article, Mark Zandi, the Chief Economist at Moody’s, said he doesn’t foresee a housing bust over the coming year. However, he says, “The overvalued housing markets could see prices fall 5% to 10% over the next twelve months while the national home prices drop flatline to zero.” Why does he see that? Even though things are going up, he says, “The economic shock caused by spiking mortgage rates is finally going to reign in the rate of the home price growth. We already see signs of a cooling housing market.”

While Moody’s Analytics research found that 96% of the housing markets are overvalued, this is how Zandi wrapped it up. He won’t call this a housing bubble, “In order for it to be a bubble, it would need to be both home price overvaluation and speculation in the market.” This is something a lot of people don’t talk about when they’re talking about the last bubble, “Unlike the FOMO-driven 2000s housing market, Zandi doesn’t think speculation is driving our ongoing boom.”

According to Zandi, two things are necessary. He said overvaluation and speculation. Let me give you some of the data to back up the speculation that happened the last time and how it’s not here this time. Back in 2007, people were speculating that they could all sell their homes for top dollar and inventory was crazy high. I’m talking crazy high. In 2007, we had 700% more inventory than we did in 2020. We’re about 600% more than we did back when the last crash happened.

In 2008, the stock market crashed. That means we have 600% to 700% more homes on the market. There were tons of homes sitting on the market. It was the worst economy we had ever seen since the Great Depression. The lenders then got slammed for giving away the loans for nothing. They had to stop giving away loans to anyone with a pulse. Suddenly, the market is left with millions of overvalued homes on the market. Many of them were upside down due to the massive increase in the home equity lines of credit maxing out the homes’ values, thus creating a foreclosure crisis.

None of that is happening now. The number one reason is that we don’t have the inventory on the market. It’s 700% or 600% less. That’s why there are bidding wars everywhere. Lenders are far stricter with the home equity lines of credit. Those are happening. People aren’t maxing out the value on the homes. Fifty percent of Americans have over $300,000 worth of equity in their home. The ones who bought in the last decade were more scrutinized when they got approved for their home loans. They’re much more stable than all the owners that went into foreclosure in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

That is a taste of all the data that you’re going to get from Episodes 47, 48, 68, 74, 89, 92, and 93. Google away, panicked public. Check out what’s going on. Even the folks that give the articles talking about prices being overvalued mentioned that it’s only one part of the equation. The speculation isn’t happening in all that stuff I just listed and I listed in all the other episodes. Hopefully, people are googling because, as we saw, a lot of the headlines look bad but if you read the article, you find out that a bubble is not going to be happening. Correction, yes. Bubble, no.

What does that mean for you? How the hell should I know? I don’t know your personal situation. It’s time to dig deep into the archives of the show and see how the numbers work for you on renting versus buying. It’s time to read the May 2022 episodes on waiting versus buying later. There’s a whole bunch of those. You can look it up. It’s time to go to HowToBuyAHome.com and ask me to help you find a local unicorn team in your area that can help you start a 1-month, 1-year, or 2-year plan so you can take advantage of whatever the market does.

It’s also time to go to my Instagram @DavidSidoni, my TikTok @HowToBuyAHome, or the YouTube at How To Buy a Home Podcast and start leaving non-hater comments of your own so we can get the real world to stop googling and listening to all the haters. Leave me, “I am a homie,” in the comments. Gang, stay fierce. Don’t get sold, get educated. Don’t get fearful, get knowledgeable. Don’t trust and verify. Verify, research, and check track records and then maybe you can trust. Google is a must. It’s super helpful.

You have such an advantage over the generation before you did but don’t be a headline reader. Be vigilant and find a trusted team to help you plan. The future will be what it is. How you prepare for it is going to make all the difference. Your actions today will affect your tomorrow. You must take action. Since 2019, many of my readers have done that and made it happen. You don’t know where to start. You’re paralyzed by fear and confusion. This is Episode 101. Use it correctly. I have 100 suggestions on where you can start. If you take action, no matter the market or the headlines, you can do this.

Important Links

This podcast was started for YOU, to demystify things for first time home buyers, and help crush the confusion. After helping first timers for over 13 years, I knew there wasn’t t a lot of clear, tangible, useable information out there on the internet, so I started this podcast. Help me spread the word to other people just like you, dying for answers. Tell your friends, family, and perhaps that random neighbor you REALLY want to move out about How to Buy a Home! A really easy way is to hit the share button and text it to your friends. Go for it, help someone out. And if you’re not already a regular listener, subscribe and get constant updates on the market. If you are a regular and learned something, help me help others – give the show a quick review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, or write a review on Spotify. Let’s change the way the real estate industry treats you first time buyers, one buyer at a time, starting with you – and make sure your favorite people don’t get screwed by going into this HUGE step blind and confused. Viva la Unicorn Revolution!

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