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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, Rob McSverham, Let me take you behind the scenes of the show for a minute.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Way back in May, we made an episode about the bonkers housing market. It was titled The Bonkers Housing Market.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in it, we talked a bunch about the root causes of our bonkers housing market. All over the country, houses are being sold at a higher rate than we've seen in a long time, whether you're in suburban America, rural America, or urban America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But when we published it, a bunch of people wrote to us on Twitter to be like, you missed a huge driving factor here. Zillow. Zillow is buying up tons of real estate and ruining the housing market.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I was like, oh no, we missed something big. And I messaged the Explain producer, Miles Bryan, and was like, Miles, did we miss something big?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Miles was like, nah, we didn't. I asked Jerusalem about this and she says it's way overblown. And I was like, phew.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the conspiracy theory didn't go away. My mom sends me housing market memes about companies like Zillow buying up all the real estate in American cities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are memes on TikTok. The goal is obvious. The more homes they can buy up in a given area, the more they can control the housing price in that area, which is very location specific.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On Friday, the Los Angeles City Council moved to ban companies like Zillow from purchasing single family homes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It felt like we needed to revisit this question. Is Zillow buying all the houses and ruining the real estate market?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So that's what we're going to do on the show today.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Is Zillow really buying all the houses? No, not at all.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: These companies, and I think there's kind of two classes of things that we're talking about here. There are companies like Zillow and Offerpad and Opendoor, which are called iBuyers.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And then there are institutional investors like BlackRock and Blackstone, other kind of private equity firms.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And both of these play an extremely small role in the housing market right now.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: What we know from quarter two of this year is that iBuyers make up less than 1% of home sales.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: When we're talking about institutional investors, recent data shows that their share of the housing market is actually decreasing.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So what's going crazy in the housing market is that a lot of people want to buy houses, and that's not really have anything to do with these larger companies.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Okay, well, just so we can fully help people understand what's going on here, especially those people who aren't in the housing market, what exactly is an iBuyer?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So an iBuyer is a tech company, and there's this problem they're trying to solve, which is that it's really annoying to sell your house.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: It's really annoying to stage your house, to have it cleaned all the time, to have your kids and your dogs and cats out whenever someone wants to see it.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They're going to be here in five minutes. Hide your unmentionables. Hide your bones.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: It's really annoying to time that purchase with when you buy a new house and you're trying to like move your stuff and so you don't have to like, you know, put all your stuff in storage or stay at a friend's house between that intermediary point.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So, you know, these companies said, OK, well, why don't we take that over? We'll buy your house for you.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: We'll do replace the carpet and we'll repaint the front and we'll make sure we can sell it.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And you'll just get the money right now from us.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And often they use algorithms to determine what the price of your home should be.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: What this has meant generally is that usually the price that you're getting is a little bit less than what you might get on the open market.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But you get to avoid all of that intermediary annoyance of trying to sell your house on your own or use a realtor.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And so where do we go from here's a service that helps me get my house sold and helps me deal with all the sort of business that I don't really want to deal with to these companies are buying up all the housing stock and ruining the real estate market?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: I think there's a few things going on here.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: One is that most Americans have rightly noticed that it's becoming harder and harder to buy a house.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Fingers crossed. Going to look at probably our what? 50th house now?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: No, that's extreme. We stopped looking at houses, actually.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Now we just put offers on them.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: You have to be richer. You have to have more cash on hand.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: You have to have a really good credit score.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And often, even with all those things, you are entering into bidding wars with people who already bought homes.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So millennials or other first-time homebuyers are noticing that it's really, really difficult to enter the housing market.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And then they look around and they see that there are big companies that are somehow involved in this.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They see BlackRock or they see Zillow and they see reporting that they're buying homes as well.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And to most people, this feels extremely unfair.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Why are these companies able to engage in the housing market when they can't?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And, you know, I think this speaks to kind of the general discomfort people have with the fact that housing is not just shelter in the United States.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: In the United States, housing is also a financial asset.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So we have this situation where maybe a millennial is trying to get their first home so they can have a kid and a family and all that stuff.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And then in swoops, these companies to outbid them.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: What is actually happening there?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So iBuyers, you know, even when we look closer at regional markets, they're still taking up a very small amount of market share.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So Phoenix is the largest place where they've been active.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: We have recent data from 2019 shows they had 5.5% market share.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And then from quarter two of this year it shows that at 5 of market share
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Other cities like Atlanta or Charlotte or Raleigh also have like 5 or 5 percent of market share from iBuyers
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Now I want to be clear here
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They buying these homes and then they're selling them to often individuals.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But that kind of enters us into your second point, which is that they can also be selling them to institutional investors and not to individuals.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: These institutional investors, these private equity firms, and also the growth of this kind of industry called the single-family rental markets.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: These are single-family homes which traditionally have not had a large share of them used for rent.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Usually people just buy them to live in themselves.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And that potentially could be in competing with individual people.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So instead of it going to, you know, me who's looking to buy a house and then I go on Zillow or I go on Open Door and I search for their properties that are available, it could just go right away to some private equity firm instead.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And the private equity firms, these institutional investors, turn single family homes into rentals?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: There's a couple of things that they can do.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: One is that they can also just sell those properties, like maybe they'll fix them up even more or they'll flip them and they'll turn them into something else and sell them.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But what we're seeing increasingly is that these companies are keeping them and renting them out.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Similarly to what we've seen with apartment buildings and with other kinds of like multifamily residences where you have kind of these large actors that are managing properties across the United States.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: People are now entering into the single family rental business and renting those out as well.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And that brings up a host of concerns.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Most people are really concerned, A, because they wish that they were able to buy a house and they're concerned that they're going to be priced out by these investors.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But the second thing that people are worried about is that these are going to make really bad landlords, that these people are going to be really predatory, that these large companies will have a really high asymmetry of power.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But I think what's really important to understand here is that the core concern that people have is about tenant rights.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: It's not about who's owning the property here.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: It would be equally bad if some small landlord was treating a low-income tenant badly as it would be if Blackstone or BlackRock was doing that.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: All told, though, with these iBuyers and institutional investors entering the market, maybe for the first time, maybe in a way we've never seen before, are they driving up prices?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: In order for companies like this to drive up prices, they would need to get sort of like a really high share of the homes in an area.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: That means like it would take so many more times the amount of money that any company in the United States has to buy up that number of homes.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And also remember, especially when we're talking about iBuyers, we're talking about companies that are trying to sell these homes quickly.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They're not holding on to these homes for long periods of time so they can build up this sort of market share.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And if they did, that would be a massive risk, right?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Like there's a huge risk to carrying a bunch of properties in your portfolio at one time.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: It would mean that if there's a hurricane, if there's any kind of local economic recession or any kind of financial hit that happens in that area, all of your homes could just devalue immediately.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Then you're left holding the bag.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: I'm left holding the bag.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: I do think that this conversation has really gotten away from the underlying facts here.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Large investors, those who retained more than 100 homes, and right now I'm quoting from a report from CoreLogic, they remain steady at around 12% since 2018.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And that's 12% of all investment, of all home buying rates.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So that's something where I think it's really important to put things into context because when we engage with this news like these companies are, these all-seeing, all-powerful entities, we actually confuse what's going on here, which is that often these companies are flopping.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Who's flopping? Zillow, actually.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Zillow.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: I thought Zillow was public enemy number one here.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Yeah, I mean, Zillow has gotten completely out of the home buying and selling and iBuying business, essentially.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: It happened earlier this month.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: We just determined that being an iBuyer was too risky, too volatile, and ultimately addressed too few customers, too narrow.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And I think it really just showcases how much of a new and small profit industry iBuying really is.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: If you really think about it, the profits that they're really making are just the difference between what they buy it from, from individuals like me and you, and what they can sell it from on the open market.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But minus all the costs, they have to do all the, you know, staging and have to do all the painting and replacing the carpet.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: You will respect my authority!
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Replacing the carpet and all that kind of stuff.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And on top of that, too, there's this fundamental problem, which some economists have mentioned to me, of when you are buying things online like this, it is likely that the majority of people who are going to say, yes, I would rather go with an iBuyer than with a realtor, especially in a hot market like this where they think they can get into a bidding war and make more money, are going to be people who know something special about their house.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They know something might be wrong.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They know either it's on this weird street or the view is occluded from something or like there's something wrong with the underlying infrastructure or it floods a lot of the time in the winter.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And obviously these iBuyers are doing some sort of due diligence here.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They're not just like offering you the money right away.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But it's not the level that you would do if you were an individual who's searching a house for yourself to buy on your own.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And so it's a sort of like lemon problem where they might have been buying a bunch of houses which were actually overvalued by their algorithm.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Zillow kept paying top dollar, over asking, over asking.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So they ended up getting these houses, trying to put them back on the market, and they couldn't sell them at anything close than they bought them for.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And the reason why this is important is because people were talking about Zillow entering the housing market like, oh, this means that they're going to have this massive market share.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They're going to take it all over. All this is going to happen.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But in reality, they're not even able to accurately price these homes.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: The idea that they could have this sort of monopoly share posits that these companies are these like all-knowing masterminds, like megaminds of the housing market.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But in reality, they're just like these companies kind of sort of flailing about trying to find their footing.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And obviously, a lot of them are still in it.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Open Door is a big one.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Redfin's still in there.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And, you know, they're going to continue offering the service.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But, you know, for them, it's like CarMax coming to your house and buying and selling your car really quickly for cash.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And that the way that could go or it could go the way of what people are concerned about is that these iBuyers go around turn around and start selling it to institutional investors which is what we seen with Zillow actually recently where Zillow after it announced that it was no longer going to be doing any iBuying it looks like it selling a lot of its inventory to institutional investors rather than to individual homeowners
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We got to take a quick break, but after we get back, we're going to talk about what's actually still causing the housing market to be so bonkers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right so Jerusalem we know that i buyers are certainly active in the american real estate market, but are certainly not causing the housing market to be so bonkers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Remind people what is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's the shortage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a national shortage of housing all across the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Freddie Mac has estimated that the shortage is at 3.8 million homes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That means 3.8 million units of housing are missing from the country that are needed by people who are young adults trying to move out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're millennials who are maybe roommates right now, but they're trying to buy their first home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's not enough housing available and it's contributing to a lot of problems like increased prices, increasing rates of homelessness, and just the inability for individuals to find a place to live near their jobs, near their family and near their friends.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So like as we discussed last time you were on the show, we just need to build a lot more houses, yeah?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Building housing is the first and primary way to fix the problems in the housing market.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I think that the simplest way to think about it is just like imagine me and you, Sean, are like trying to buy a house and we both to tie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We like the same house and we want to buy it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And let's say you make more money than I do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so you're saying, I'm going to bid $450,000 in this house and I can only bid $400,000 in this house.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, there's a lot that the government can do here to try to help me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They can try to give me more money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They can say, you're a first time home buyer. I want to help you out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Here's like an extra $50,000 or whatever it is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you can also try to buy this house.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I bid again and I go, okay, I'm also going to bid, let's say $460,000 now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you go, okay, but I can also do that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I can bid $460,000 or $470,000 and then you end up winning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what's happened here, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not only are we in the same position where you have this house and I don't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But also the price of the house increased.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the only winner there was the person selling the house.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they sold it for now $20,000 more than they were expecting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I still don't have a home and you have a house.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think this is a really important way to think about this is because people often think like, okay, the issue is that people just need to be given more money in order to afford the homes that exist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's definitely true that poverty is an issue in the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's definitely true that there are a lot of people who need more money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But you could give me a ton of money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the end, it's likely that you would still win the home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But even if I won the home, you still don't have a house.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it's a situation here where if you don't solve the underlying issue of the lack of housing, you're not actually going to get to a place where everyone who needs a house will get one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So how do we get to the place where everyone who needs a house gets one?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So one of the big problems and the major reason why we have a housing supply shortage is because of these laws that exist at the local level.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're zoning laws.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes made of ticky tacky. Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes all the same.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are these rules that dictate what kinds of things can be built and where.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So whether or not you can build a home within 50 feet of the sidewalk or 40 feet of the sidewalk, all of this stuff is dictated by your local housing authorities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And these rules often can sound pretty reasonable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what they have the added effect of doing is that they make it such that the only types of homes that can get built in most of the country are large single-family homes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What we've seen over the recent decades is that the share of small starter homes, these are homes that are like around 1,400 square feet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe you're a first-time homebuyer trying to find a small single-family home for you to live in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These have declined so much.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in their place, what is happening is that they were building larger and larger homes that are only affordable to wealthier individuals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And getting rid of these restrictions on the ability for people to build these smaller homes is necessary and important in order to make sure you actually can meet demand.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because we're wasting a bunch of land here where, you know, maybe people don't care about the space between their home and the next home being 50 feet or 40 feet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that 10 feet adds up over neighborhoods to being a lot of housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we get to a situation where there's just not enough housing, especially in the places where people need them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If we're talking about big cities where there's a lot of jobs and there are a lot of economic opportunity, people no longer can afford to live anywhere near there and are forced to commute several hours in order to get to work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: California has a few big cities and I believe they recently did something about single-family zoning, yeah?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, they passed this bill, which essentially ended single-family zoning in California.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: SB9, or the California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency or Home Act lets owners build a duplex on a single family lot or divide the property into two for a total of four units.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a big swing because it increases the choices available to people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think often when people hear the end of single family zoning, they think this is the end of single family housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what it really is, is it's the end of restrictions on what you can do with your own property.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think often people get frustrated when I think of homeowners associations and things like that, telling them that you can't paint your house a certain color.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that's what these zoning laws are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're just this government sanctioned form of the homeowners association telling you that you can't build a mother-in-law suite for your grandmother to help come take care of your kids.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a law saying that you can't convert your garage into an apartment for your kid to come live in after college because they can't afford housing in their city.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, these kinds of laws are restricting the ability for Americans to do what they want with their own homes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the new law in California will now give them more options.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are other states going to follow California's lead or is this more of a California thing?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, Oregon actually already did this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they were first.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They don't get enough attention.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Oregon actually beat California.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They love that when people give California more attention than them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nobody wants me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know why. I try, I try, I try.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But, you know, Oregon's done this already.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's statewide action in other places on a smaller scale.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Connecticut this year also pursued policy that would allow for those kinds of basement apartments slash garage conversions or mother-in-law suites to exist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's more attention being paid to this on a national scale as people are recognizing just how bad the shortage has gotten and how much it's impacting the entirety of the United States' economy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What about federal attention on this issue?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know President Biden's still working on a huge sort of care infrastructure package, Build Back Better.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that going to address the housing shortage?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So the housing portion of the Build That Better bill is mostly full of things that will not address the housing shortage.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: There's one part of it that the White House is trying to push is going to make a dent in housing supply, and that is a low-income housing tax credit.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And these are tax credits, essentially, that go to developers, and developers are able to sell those to different investors, and then they can use that money to build affordable housing.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And that's really great.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: I mean, it's a fix making sure that there's enough financing available for developers to build affordable housing is awesome.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And the low income housing tax credit program is the largest federal source of building new affordable housing.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But the real problem is this, is that if it's illegal to build the housing, which it is because of these zoning laws, no matter how much money you put behind it, you can only get so far.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: I think a really instructive place to look is Los Angeles.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Los Angeles has this proposition Triple H, which they passed, which is a billion dollars, a billion dollars five years ago to build affordable housing.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Regardless of what happens, every time they try to build a new home and a developer tries to use that money to build a house, these zoning laws standing in the way, there are local individuals standing in the way and not allowing them to build it anyway.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: So I think that really underscores that, you know, it's important to make sure the financing is available.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: It's important to make sure the money is available.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And the Build Back Better bill does that.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: But it doesn't actually attack the fundamental problem here, which is that it's illegal in most places of this country to build affordable housing.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And that's really the first step that needs to be addressed before we can actually get to the money part.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the meantime, while inflation continues to tick up and the Build Back Better Act potentially doesn't do enough to address these issues and housing stock isn't going to dramatically change in the near future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's someone to do if they want to own a house in this country?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does everyone just have to move to Kansas?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Well, I mean, are things crazy in Kansas, Jerusalem?
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: I don't even know.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Things are crazy everywhere.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Things are crazy in Kansas as well, actually.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: All over the country, home prices are increasing.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: Even in rural parts of the country.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: You know, I think people are doing what they always try to do, which is just like try to figure out a way for them to find a housing option that works for their family.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And it means that they're going to have to compromise on something.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: I think often people are compromising on space.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They're compromising on location.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They're compromising on amenities or the age of the house or a bunch of different things.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: They're compromising on closing costs.
--:-- Jerusalem Demsas: And they might even be compromising on their financial future by spending a lot more money than they intended on these homes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think one of the things that I would say here, a piece of advice that I get a lot from when I'm talking to realtors and housing specialists is that people often really underrate how harmful a commute can really be for their well-being.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, they'll often say like, okay, I'm not going to compromise on having a lawn.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I'm willing to live 45 minutes away from my job in order to make sure that I have this like nice large backyard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, that's a reasonable choice you can make, but people often really underestimate how bad it is to sit in traffic for 45 minutes, what it does to your mental health alone is really bad, but also like you
