Brief aside, no AI assist: My great aunt, Zita Grazis, passed away last week…less than a month away from turning 100(!).
4 generations of family!
She was my grandmother’s younger sister, and largely took the place of my grandmother over the past several years, who left us in 2019.
Aunt Zita set the record for longevity in our family, which (I think) can largely be attributed to her lifelong acts of service and contribution, and her engagement with community until the very end…as well as her consistent outdoor strolls and exercises.
(She was also a fantastic cook…and memories of family holiday dinners, and Kūčios, will remain with me for life.)
Not many 99 year-olds could boast having a handful of friends, let alone one, that would check up on them daily, and ensure their fridge was stocked.
She even prepared gifts for my mom and wife…after starting hospice mind you, her thoughts never far from her family (they arrived just as I finished writing this, several handmade items…my mom in tears).
Perhaps most representative of her endless generosity, years ago she decided that she would donate her deceased body to the University of Michigan Medical School, to further the education of aspiring physicians. (My own medical school journey is far in the rearview, but my experiences in the anatomy lab are amongst the most memorable…and surreal. The gift given to us by the donors was received with utmost dignity and respect.)
May we all take lessons from Aunt Zita. She will be missed. ❤️
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What I’m thinking about: One of my favorite housing analysts just declared a full-blown housing depression…and claim-checking his own numbers rerouted how we’re positioning our capital for the next half decade.
Nick Gerli just called this housing market a depression, and I take his read seriously.
Nick runs Reventure, and his team assembles some of the cleanest, most granular housing data available anywhere (I reference their county and zip-level numbers constantly in our own underwriting, and that data feeds our SLC Deal Engine program). Nothing but respect for what they’ve built.
Recently I broke down the spin cycle around the June housing reports, and this week I ran the same exercise on a late-July Reventure video built around the WSJ’s housing-crash coverage. The results updated my thinking more than any content I’ve reviewed this year.
For efficiency, retained focus on top priorities, and better ‘imprinting’ on my brain, I run almost every piece of non-fiction content (e.g. podcasts, longer articles, books) through a summarization and claim-check system I built into Claude (my Learning Accelerator skill, which holds my current personal and business context, and is required to web-search a presenter’s claims against the primary data).
And this is no ‘gotcha’ exercise…I run the same system on MYSELF, and nearly every week it backfills corrections from my own podcast into this newsletter (the Get Serious podcast serves as the source for Serious News). No human can hold this much moving data in their head at once. Not Nick, not me, not anyone.
Most Reventure videos come back from this process largely corroborated. This one came back different, and the differences change what a real estate operator/investor should actually do.
Three headlines, three checks
The depression case opens with June pending home sales posting their “biggest monthly drop of 2026”, an index reading of 72.5 against the 2001 baseline of 100. The drop checks out…NAR’s July 16 release confirms contract signings fell 5.4% month-over-month.
But the same release shows the index down just 0.3% year-over-year, the FIRST decline in five months. “Biggest drop of 2026” is technically true because it was the only meaningful drop of 2026.
It gets stranger. HousingWire’s own tracking showed pending single-family sales up 4.1% year-over-year as of July 10…two respected consolidators, nearly a 4.5-point gap, both technically correct. NAR counts contracts signed during June, single-family plus condos (the market’s weakest segment), while HousingWire counts homes sitting in pending status in mid-July, single-family only, after early-July activity bounced. Same market, different rulers…which is exactly why the definitions get checked before the conclusions do.
The case then leans on mortgage purchase applications “tanking” in early July, near all-time lows. The MBA’s own weekly survey tells the opposite trend story…purchase applications rose 6% the week ending July 17, roughly flat versus a year earlier, and the prior week’s dip was explicitly attributed by the MBA to the July 4th holiday adjustment.
Per the MBA’s economists, growing inventory is actually supporting purchase activity, even at a 6.69% conforming rate, the highest in nearly a year.
Quoting the single holiday-distorted week, on the exact metric framed as the leading indicator, is the cleanest cherry-pick in the video.
The most eye-popping stat was delinquencies climbing to 4.4% of all mortgages in Q1, the highest in years, per the MBA’s National Delinquency Survey. Also true…and incomplete in a way that matters enormously for anyone hunting distressed inventory.
Conventional loan delinquencies actually FELL 14 basis points to 2.75%. The entire increase came from FHA loans (up to 11.88%) and VA loans (4.99%). A meaningful slice of that is an accounting artifact…pandemic-era FHA relief expired in September 2025, and trial payment plans keep those loans classified as delinquent until a permanent workout lands.
Candidly, the composition finding sobered me more than any depression headline could, because we’d been watching the wrong tripwire.
The stress isn’t broad-based household trouble. It’s concentrated in low-down-payment, entry-level, often exurban product, which is where forced supply surfaces first if it surfaces at all. And the volume data explains why the rest of the board barely moves.
(Still, increased delinquencies in any segment are concerning…and the largest homebuilder in the US, D.R. Horton, now runs roughly half its buyer financing through FHA and VA loans, per its own earnings commentary.)
Frozen is not the same as distressed
Nick’s strongest argument is turnover, and it holds up. Redfin’s analysis found just 2.8% of US homes changed hands in the first three quarters of 2025, the lowest rate in at least three decades (versus 3.4% in 2012 and 4.4% at the 2021 peak). Four straight years of subnormal volume, though the “longest stretch in US history” framing overreaches, since the reliable data only reaches back ~30 years (…still, lowest turnover in 3 decades ain’t nothing, either).
The causal story matters even more than the record. Redfin attributes the turnover collapse primarily to the lock-in effect…more than ~70% of mortgaged owners hold sub-5% rates against a market above 6.5%, so they simply won’t list.
That is a supply freeze driven by unwilling sellers, and unwilling sellers are not distressed sellers. Closed sales are where unwilling sellers meet rate-squeezed buyers, and NAR’s July existing-home sales report, released last week, shows that meeting point holding around ~4M annualized transactions, with their chief economist calling the market “remarkably stable” even as rates climbed. Flat, frozen, rate-sensitive, and not collapsing.
Before anyone reads “frozen” as “safe,” there’s a layer underneath, and one of Nick’s case studies in the video captured it better than any of his headline stats. A home bought new for $480K in early 2020, now listed at $550K after repeated cuts, works out to ~15% nominal appreciation against ~30% cumulative inflation over the hold…a real loss wearing a gain’s clothing (and that’s the list price, so the eventual exit could land lower still).
The national data backs the anecdote, with the latest Case-Shiller release showing US home values down in real, inflation-adjusted terms for roughly a year straight (“treading water in nominal terms and falling in real terms,” per the index committee’s own head). The freezer holds sticker prices in place while inflation quietly melts the value underneath.
One more exposure worth naming. The high-end buyers still transacting are the upper leg of the K-shaped economy, and their resilience rides on equity wealth in a stock market whose Shiller CAPE crossed 42 in July for the first time since July 2000, the height of the dot-com bubble (CAPE measures prices against ten years of inflation-adjusted earnings…the long-run average sits near 17.5).
The caveat the video skips…a CAPE this high says almost nothing about where stocks go over the next 12 months, because expensive markets have kept climbing for years before correcting (the dot-com run did exactly that). What it HAS reliably preceded is weaker average returns across the following decade…the size of future returns, not the date of the next drop. So the risk Nick points at sits in the system. He just can’t time it, and neither can anyone else. Premium-buyer housing demand and equity valuations remain the same bet held in two places, and we now track them as one exposure.
All of which lands on the question we actually get paid to answer…what a frozen-but-melting market does to a capital strategy built for distress, or at minimum buoyed by reliable demand .
What this changes for our capital
Our standing posture for much of the past year has been holding liquidity for distressed opportunities, outlasting those who wreck themselves in the froth. The principle survives this claim-check fully intact. The trigger and the timing do not.
A lock-in freeze doesn’t hand out acquisition discounts, because the marginal seller isn’t forced…they’re just unwilling, and an unwilling seller can hold an unrealistic price indefinitely (if anything, this applies even more so to most land owners). Meanwhile the distress that IS materializing (FHA and VA foreclosure starts, overbuilt Sun Belt entry-level product) is mostly inventory we wouldn’t typically consider anyway, unless it arrived at dirt-cheap pricing (every asset has a price, or set of terms, at which you would acquire it).
This market is not handing us discounts. It is handing us slow exits.
We’ve already operated inside this frozen setup for ~4 years (“Survive ‘til ‘25” became “Stay in the mix ‘til ‘26”…still waiting on next year’s phrase haha), and my updated read is that it could easily run another half decade or more (I’d love to be wrong, and it’s entirely possible I am…in either direction, TBD). That stretches the liquidity question from “be ready for the moment” into “position for a marathon,” a different capital strategy entirely, and one I’ll break down in a coming issue.
None of it is stopping us from acting. We’re still deploying meaningfully this year, including hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own capital currently out on a larger entitlement deal, with more expected soon. A freeze punishes forced sellers and rewards patient, selective buyers, and we intend to keep being the latter…more cautious than ever, still swinging at the obvious pitches.
The bigger lesson travels well beyond housing. Everybody gets claim-checked eventually…the analysts, the data providers, and me.
Nick sells a subscription whose value proposition is, candidly, the depression framing…concerned buyers utilize his housing data to negotiate harder. And that incentive (perhaps unconsciously) shapes which stat leads the video and which nuance gets skipped.
My monetary incentive is funding deals, selling AI underwriting tools, and serving as an AI implementation expert, so weigh my framing accordingly too (…I also believe my #1 incentive is to source and spread the truth, growing and evolving my platform to do so, because a population that improves its critical thinking skills makes for a better society writ large).
The entrepreneurs who run the numbers underneath every narrative, and turn on a dime when the truth disagrees with their priors, are reading this market correctly…and a market this complex (and oftentimes confusing) pays a premium for exactly that.
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If you’re an experienced operator with routine deal flow looking for a capital partner that claim-checks the market as hard as the parcel, get in touch. We write checks from $50K+, we close 100% of the deals we commit to, and our national underwriting was built on never taking a headline’s word for anything…including our own.
