Logan Mohtashami on the housing year in review

Today’s HousingWire Daily features a rerun episode with HW Media Founder and CEO Clayton Collins and HousingWire Lead Analyst Logan Mohtashami.

In this interview, which was conducted at HousingWire’s Annual Conference, Mohtashami delves into the chaos theory applied to housing in 2020. As we wrap the year, we are rerunning our favorite podcast episodes and interviews of 2020.

Here is a small preview of today’s interview with Mohtashami. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

Clayton Collins: Logan, you’ve been pretty vocal that there’s plenty of supply in the market and inventory is not holding us back. Can you go deeper there?

Logan Mohtashami: Well, whenever there is a sale missed on an existing home sales report, what do you hear? “There’s no homes to buy!” How can your sales grow? Guess what? When inventory goes down, sales rise, right? This year was supposed to have the lowest inventory ever, but in February, we had the best sales print pre-cycle in 11 years. So, there were homes to buy. To me, it’s a marketing gimmick….I don’t buy it. I think every institution has marketing gimmicks, and this is one of the most vocal gimmicks I’ve seen. It gives an impression that home sales can’t grow or there’s a potential sales outlet there. It’s just not the case as people are just staying in their homes longer. We’re going to have cycle highs in total sales to buy in a period where there’s no homes to buy either, so it does constrain offers but demand picks up, inventory goes down and sales rise. Don’t overthink this.

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