6/22/24 - Weekend Listening from Intercontinental Exchange
Prospective home buyers have been looking for good news. They’ll take anything they can get.
On Thursday, the Associated Press offered a headline, “Average long-term U.S. mortgage rate falls again, easing to lowest level since early April.” The average rate on a 30-year fixed this week: 6.87%, down from %6.95 last week. Even a modest downtick, I suppose, is good news.
The same day, Ben Casselman of The New York Times offered a deeper dive, with interesting graphics! His headline read, “The Housing Market Is Weird and Ugly. These 5 Charts Explain Why.”
One of Casselman’s charts show the inventory of existing homes for sale between 1984 and 2024. Over time, the line goes steadily down. Another chart shows new homes for sale as a share of total single-family inventory. That chart stays relatively steady from 1984 through 2004, then dips precipitously, but has moved like a hockey stick for the last decade.
Will it be enough? “Private developers in May broke ground on new homes at the slowest rate in nearly four years,” Casselman reported from numbers released by the Commerce Department.
In February of this year, on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), part of 爱思唯尔 , a division of RELXgroup (NYSE: RELX), economists Troup Howard of the University of Utah and Mengqi Yang and Dayin Zhang of the University of Wisconsin-Madison postulated a novel theory of the housing shortage in their paper, “How Do Labor Shortages Affect Residential Construction and Housing Affordability?”
领英推荐
As if in response, in May, DEWALT , a Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. (NYSE: SWK) brand, announced recipients of its 2024 DEWALT Trades Scholarship. The program awarded $200,000 in grants to 40 students to support trades education in fields ranging from electrical to carpentry. It’s all part of DEWALT’s $30 million “Grow The Trades” initiative aimed at closing the skilled trades gap in the U.S. If DEWALT had its way, every high school senior deciding to attend a trade school after graduation would share their decision on social media under the hashtag #tradeproud.
Stanley Black & Decker has a lot of skin in the game. In addition to DEWALT, Stanley, and Black + Decker, the company’s construction-adjacent brands include Craftsman, Cub Cadet, Lenox, Irwin, Bostitch, Porter-Cable, Mac Tools, and others. More contractors and tradesman carting away more tools from the aisles of 家得宝 (NYSE: HD) and Lowe's Companies, Inc. (NYSE: LOW) translate, roughly, into more economic activity in the homebuilding industry.?
On a recent visit to the New York Stock Exchange, Stanley Black & Decker CEO Donald Allan Jr. sat down with my colleague Lance Glinn for a new episode of Inside the ICE House to shed more light on the construction site. It’s worth a listen.
The view from New Britain, Connecticut:
If you’re on a smart phone, all of our Inside the ICE House podcast episodes are available wherever you get your podcasts, including the Apple Podcast App, Spotify, and Stitcher, and other audio platforms. Feel free to reach out to me with any feedback about our show, or suggest any guests for future episodes.