ABQ Housing Market Stats : Were Fewer Albuquerque Homes Bought in Q1 of 2022?

Transcript Snippet: “Tracy:

Anyway, housing stats, Tego, you have more stats

Tego:

For us. Well, I, I just wanted to bring up one thing. There was a story in the Albuquerque business first this week, that, and, and I think what was the headline? Something along the lines of investors, what was it? Housing market investors bought fewer homes, Albuquerque homes, fewer Albuquerque homes in Q1 of 2022. And I’m, I’m like, you know, you know how you see a headline? You go, okay, that doesn’t sound right. It just doesn’t sound. That doesn’t sound right. Well,

Tracy:

First thing I think of is how many investors were there that they’re comparing it to? Cause we’ve never been like this huge market for VC companies to come in and buy a thousand houses. Right?

Tego:

Well, if, if you’re somebody like me, that, that sees stuff in the news and realize that that a lot of it is just hyperbole. And you don’t like it. Well, here you go. So the, the thing that was interesting is they said that the, this, this stats said, and it was from atom research. It does good research on, on housing. They say that the number of investors was down 40% from Q1 2021 to Q1 22 of 22. And I was like, oh, great. Okay, well, how many is that? So all they did is give a percentage, well, what good is that?

Tracy:

Cause it, again, it could be one to two, two to one, right? Right.

Tego:

It’s like, if you get a, if you gimme a stat and you don’t gimme the number, or you gimme the numbers, you don’t gimme the percentage or you gimme the percentage and you don’t give the numbers. What

Tracy:

Good is it? You give me the numbers. I can do the percent, but if you don’t give the numbers, I can’t decide if it’s a relevant factor or not.

Tego:

Right, right, right. So 40% down. So that, that,

Tracy:

And that’s ironic, isn’t it? Because we feel like most of the investors in our market are mom and pop or small investors. Right. Right. It’s people who have a few rental properties. Right. They had their house and they bought a new one and kept the one, they, their first home as a rental house, or

Tego:

So that’s, that’s a really, really good distinction between you and I. You went by field, you know what I did, I went and looked at the data.

Tracy:

That’s the difference between

Tego:

Us. So, so this is what I did. So there’s a, there’s some pretty prominent stories that are floating around out there. You know, how stories get out there. And there’s a story that says 33% of all homes are owned by, are bought by investors in, in the United States. And I’m like going, just, just, you know, the, the whole gut check you’re going okay. That that’s not Albuquerque.

Tracy:

And you think one in three houses is owned by an investors. What that sta says,

Tego:

That’s what that says. And, and, and I hear people quoting it locally and I’m like going that it doesn’t pass a smell test. So anyway, I dug into it and this is what I found is that in 20, 22, about eight and a half percent of homes were purchased as corporate buyers. Okay. And so what corporate means is that somebody, and, and I’ll, I’m gonna wrap this all up here in a sec, but that means that that’s somebody that has incorporated or LLC, or actually even trust in the name of the, of the buyer.

Tracy:

Right. And a lot of people buy in a trust, so,

Tego:

Correct. Correct. Yeah. And then, you know, there’s this big conversation about the, the, the, the institutional buyers, right? So these are the big venture capital back wall street, back companies that are coming and buying up all the homes. Right. We see those stories nationally. And so I dug into it even further. And I found that that only about 2% of all the homes purchased so far in 2022 were bought by institutional buyers again. And these are, these are venture capital in our market, in our market. And the thing that’s interesting is one of ’em is America homes for rent. The other one is home, home partners of America. And then there’s another one that’s Breckenridge properties, right? So those are the three big dinner in our market. And it, a lot of people don’t know this. So if you’re a realtor, you just learn something. You probably had no idea.

Tracy:

America home for homes for rent came in, I don’t know, eight or 10 years ago and bought 200 houses. And they bought ’em all at 200,000 or under roughly. So this is, and they still own ’em and they rented them.

Tego:

So this is the, the, one of the, the, the pushbacks I have on people that say, oh, these, these you know, wall street, people are coming in and taking all the homes and driving up prices. Well, first off, 2% of all purchases is not driving up prices. Second off. It’s not like they’re buying those homes. And then just putting ’em on the shelf, they’re turning them into rentals. And they’re, they’re bringing housing into the market as a rental, as opposed to a purchase. So either way, it’s, it’s coming into the market. Now, you may not like it. You may not like the idea of somebody, you know, taking that money and moving it outta state. But again, of those, all those purchases that were institutional was only 2%. That means the rest of them were small mom and pop we’ll call. ’em A mom and pop local real estate investors that are buying property.