3 Comments

Thanks for sharing, a great post. If 80% of new home scales are not completed at the time of sale, is there any risk of developers going bankrupt and buyers not getting what they already paid for, similar to what happened in China?

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To be honest, I don't think it would happen in the U.S as what happened in China. First, the business model of real estate builder is not exactly same. In China, the builder have highly leveraged status and huge amount prepayments for land bidding from the government authorities. However, the U.S house builders have light-asset model. They have stricter control and risk assessment on acquisition of land purchasing than Chinese peers. If you have chance to look through the earnings transcript of Lennar, you would definitely have right conclusion on the U.S house builders.

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Thank you. So educational! How quickly do these two markets, the market for existing homes and the market for new homes, tend to react to a rate cut cycle. I'm wondering whether the supply of existing homes and the demand for new ones are likely to pop soon after the Fed starts to cut, or these homeowners and home seekers tend to react with a long lag.

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