In this episode, a July 27, 2026 Reventure video claiming a housing depression gets run through a full claim check, and most of the depression framing does not survive contact with the source data. June pending sales fell 5.4% month over month but only 0.3% year over year, and the MBA purchase index actually rose 6% the week ending July 17. The conclusion reframes the market as frozen rather than crashing, which changes the timing thesis on holding liquidity for distressed assets.
Key Takeaways:
- Check the Denominator Before Believing the Headline The “worst turnover in US history” claim uses a different denominator than Redfin’s, whose data only goes back to the early 1990s.
- Delinquency Composition Beats the Delinquency Number Q1 2026 delinquencies hit 4.4%, but conventional loans actually fell 14 basis points to 2.75% while FHA rose to 11% and VA to 4.99%, driven by expired pandemic era relief.
- One Cherry Picked Week Can Manufacture a Collapse The “tanking” mortgage applications claim rested on a week the MBA explicitly attributed to the July 4th holiday adjustment, and the following week rose 6%.
- CAPE Signals Risk, Not Timing The Shiller CAPE sits just above 40 against a long run mean near 17.5, but it has near zero predictive power at 12 month horizons.
- Frozen Is Not the Same as Distressed With 70% of mortgage holders locked into sub 5% rates and inventory at 4.6 months, this market hands out slow exits rather than acquisition discounts, and that condition could persist another half decade.
Listen to the full episode to see exactly how each claim was checked and why the frozen market read changes how capital should be positioned.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious, where at Serious Land Capital we have successfully funded over six and a half million dollars of land deals with industry-leading 41% operating margins. I also personally implement AI workflows to companies that are collectively doing over $50 million in annualized revenue. So as far as our topic
for today concerns the intersection between real estate and ai. I really want to dive into further fact checking here and how that’s influenced my thinking as it relates to to the real estate market and why I think we might be in this frozen you know down cycle for even longer than you know I thought about e even even a month ago. So
let’s let’s dive in here. and to really direct today’s process and I kind of went over this
you know, type of topic within the last month or so when it comes to you know, checking claims and the, you know, nullius in verba. Don’t take anybody’s word for it. in in relation to parsing out real estate data. So similar here, but I think this is again like one the most valuable topics possible because you know, we are in a society now where it’s never been easier to be
misled with seemingly factual information and you know easy to consume and you know more people than than ever are you know not wanting to do the fact checking work and just accepting what’s what’s told of them. So I think this is a constant muscle that we all need to to exercise here. so you’ve heard a number of times on this channel you know referencing the reventure dot app data
which again I I think Nick and his team, the way they’re able to pull in you know so much publicly available data but also run their own analysis on some of the numbers for some just very easy to visualize graphs and data as it relates to super granular parts of the country.
when it comes to you know single family home investment data as well as rentals too and how that can kind of correlate to land. I mean you’ve heard me mention this a number of times and a nothing for but but respect for for Nick and his team here. and I’ll routinely check in on his YouTube videos and a bigger following there. and you I I I want to note that you know for and I think I’ve mentioned this many times before I have this
clawed skill that I term the learning accelerator. and it effectively maintains my business and personal context. we’ll take all the various timestamps as well as the transcript or you know book that that I might throw into it, article, what have you. and
then summarize accordingly based on how relevant it is to my own personal professional goals and has a claim checking backstop. So anytime there’s a certain claim made by whoever’s presenting the information, Claude has permission to you know web search and figure out okay, does this is this actually corroborated or is it in conflict with other available data?
that again might support or
kind of you know pro provide a a a counterpoint to you know whatever the presenter’s opinion is or you know stated fact. And you know, I I even run this on myself, like I think it might have mentioned before, but you know, a number of the times on on these podcasts when I’m just riffing, you know, I do try to prep as much as possible, but like no human being can hold all of the world’s information in in their head at any given time here. So like
Inevitably there’s going to be, you know, unintended slip-ups or just might not have the right information. Or again, like sometimes, you know, even within a day of publishing something, you know, more relevant info comes to light, either publicly or you know, just from my own consumption of other information that could change some things. And so like wh whenever I utilize the transcript for these podcasts to help build out my weekly newsletter.
Like there there’s almost always corrections in place that you know has to be kind of backfilled and and corrected for for the newsletter by just running, you know, this claim check system. So like I just mentioned that because I’m not infallible about this, no one is. and I run this, you know, claim check and learning accelerator process on you know, some of the absolute highest level experts in any particular field.
like some of the biggest podcasts and so forth out there. so that’s that that’s just to say like everybody is gonna be fact checked at at some point and also being able to point out to like people’s marketing incentives what s relationships or commercial interests they might have that might influence some of the claims they might be making
Even if they’re presenting it, you know, a as facts here, they might be unconsciously influenced by some of those incentives. So like that is just something we constantly have to keep in mind. I know I’ve reiterated that from you know one of my prior you know podcasts and newsletters on on the vein of of this topic here. and you know, really wanted to
show a particular example within a recent reventure video. this was from July 27th, 2026, about the Wall Street Journal you know, predict predicting more of a a housing crash. It’s like a 15-minute video, you can check that out. And again, just to mention this, you know, too, like not, you s some of these videos that I’ve run through with with Reventure.
you know, there’ll be more corroborated claim checks. This one just had more info that was like, hey, this is doesn’t seem quite right here. So I just want to run through this exercise so you can see like even somebody I really, really respect within the field and I think does an excellent job when it comes to assessing and you know collecting data within real estate, it just goes to show like the amount of data available is just so complex and you know ever-changing that.
no matter how some you know well read or confident somebody is about proclaiming something, it might not always be the case. and so I I just wanted to provide some counterpoints as well as again how that’s kind of updated my thinking. along the way here. So like and and I’ll just run through, you know, in in brief his kind of key points of the video and then where some of those claim checks run in and and you know, to end.
and summarize what I’m kind of thinking about going forward as it relates to our business and you know, my own direction. I’ll probably take a separate podcast to run through like all those updated thoughts here, but you know, I can at least directionally get give you some idea. So we can make sure we we keep it relatively tight around that 20 minute range for these podcasts. So you know, Nick had, you know, again, Nick Nick’s the runs Reventure and
He had noted again, Wall Street Journal saying in June that pending home sales had fallen, biggest monthly drop in contract signings of this year, second worst June performance on record. mortgage purchase applications for the first two weeks of July, which he claims were tanking, you know, down 42% versus the same week in 2019, and just 49% versus 2021 near all.
Time lows. and he frames mortgage applications. It’s a leading indicator for the next few months and leading indicators, more future oriented in terms of predicted predictive values versus lagging indicators that you know are helpful as far as you know assessing what has actually happened historically, but might not be.
as correlated to what’s actually going to happen for whatever you’re you’re you’re measuring. and then he’s just saying, you know, the buying freeze, like, hey, if the economy were strong, like look at the stock market, et cetera, like why aren’t people buying more houses? Like it’s a good question, it’s good framing. and you know, noting demand’s been low for four years.
That you know, people are actually realizing losses on the seller side now. and then it goes into a case study about a 500k new build in the Atlanta area that sold for 500k in you know five years ago, 2021, housing boom. post COVID. Now it’s only listed at 375k. So, you know, on paper over a six you know, six K loss. and this one, you know, is a lower to middle income.
Area, still, you know, a half a million dollar house, possible investor buyers during the pandemic. But yeah, just noting, hey, there’s some you know more recent purchases that are running into seeming distress here. and then he’s making the argument that post crash pricing is showing up on individual listings because both demand is down.
And existing owners are hitting difficulty. So, you know, certain buyers post-COVID or you know during that COVID rush are running out of cash, they’re unable to carry payments, perhaps forced job relocations, outright defaults. you know, he was noting that the mortgage bankers association is saying that delinquencies rose in Q1 of 2026 to 4.4% of all mortgages.
says that’s the highest in seven to eight years, above pandemic era levels. Still says, you know, it’s nowhere near, you know, the GFC 0809, which is like closer to 12-ish percent. but also mentioning, you know, it can still be problematic if you’re seeing rises in delinquencies anyway. so that’s a note there, and that that’s certainly a claim check that will
Come back here, but I’ll proceed on with with what he was noting. he was saying, you know, losses first starting appearing in the lower income zip codes, but you know, high income Atlanta areas, prices still up year over year. and you know, the K-shaped economy that we’ve noted prior, you know, where the upper decile.
Of the the economy, you know, have more equities exposure, stock market still being record highs, but you know, Nick points out there’s 130 year price to earnings chart that shows what appears to be a record bubble comparing only to the dot-com crash. so you know, noting okay, there could be a possible stock market crash here that could you know disintegrate or at least reduce demand.
and resilience from the upper portion of the economy here.
And moving on from there, he noted another case study with a property in a nicer neighborhood that was listed at 700k in just two years ago. Now it’s cut to 550K. and that this was bought new in February 2020 for 480 K. So that this is a key point here is because you know at 550K now.
that’s you know, roughly 15% of nominal appreciation over six plus years, which, you know, when you break that down is only about you know, two percent annually, against cumulative inflation of near thirty percent over that period of time. So like that that’s a key number to to keep in mind here is like against inflation. So even if some of these homes have appreciated, it’s it’s like a a a nut loss in in relation to to inflation.
And then he’s going into you know why he’s saying this is housing depression and saying, you know, pending sales index is at 72 and a half as of June against you know when this in index started in 2001 with a baseline of 100. so he’s noting that contract signings are 28% below their level 25 years ago, roughly 40% below the pandemic peak and you know 30% below.
Prepandemic norm, and noting that sales and contract signings as a percentage of all homeowners is now worse than 08-09 on a relative basis. and the longest stretch of sub-4.5% turnover in US history. and so you’re saying, you know, the duration, not the price, is what’s justifying the word depression. so
That’s another note there. Again, we’ll we’ll claim check that in in a bit. and as he you know starts to reach the conclusion in his video, you know, with he’s saying, hey, the counter-argument, steel steel manning his argument is that you know national prices are near record. but he’s saying that you know the explanation is that the sellers either don’t know or they don’t care about the demand conditions, you know, they’re not as in the know about real estate.
so they they o overprice. but that’s not necessarily leading to closes that are justifying that
price that that they’re actually trying to to achieve. and he’s saying, you know, that is dislocation, not resilience of the market. and it you know eventually resolves through through through price cuts here. and you know in relation to that dislocation he’s just saying that you know remote work share is negatively
Correlated with home price. So he did a whole bunch of review on his Reventure app and you know sorted out info that had counties and areas that were heavier on remote work, that it was correlated with home values decreasing year over year versus return to office areas of the country, they tended to have more.
appreciation for homes in in the area here. so again there’s a claim check that will come up for this and then he’s saying that remote work created this you know quote unquote dispersionary force so like people in downtown areas could move further out from the city or you know state to state but now
It’s a reverse force, which he terms agglomeration, which is like pulling demand back to the the center cities. so that’s why we we see in the last three to six months price cuts have broadened from the lower to middle in income areas and investor markets into higher income neighborhoods as well, that were on more of the dispersionary areas of the country that had you know absorbed all of that remote work.
and he’s just noting you know, that this downturn or you know lack of appreciation on home prices has just continued to expand. I know we’ve talked about this, you know, initially it was like a Florida Texas story. Now you know we’re seeing that in Georgia, Tennessee, other parts of the country. And then he goes ahead and you know pitches reventure and also notes hey, utilize this.
to negotiate more with home sellers so you can get a better deal. So like he’s potentially more incentivized for you know, people to use his his tools so that
You know, they they could get concerned that, hey, there’s a real housing depression. So hey, I I I should negotiate harder in in order to get b better pricing on deals that that might be available. I know that kind of repeated itself, but you know, relevant to note the incentive structure in place, because again, that is just always critical for whoever we are listening to, including myself. just always keep that in mind here.
so now with the the actual claim checks, you get you know the positioning here. Now let’s actually dive into, you know, when I ran it through this quad scale and you know, pulling all of the various information that’s publicly available here. So, you know, we had noted you know, and this is not all all always in the exact order as I had noted it. so we might be jumping about around a bit here. But you know, when I had mentioned yeah, the June pending home sales posting their biggest monthly drop.
Of 2026 and second worst in history. this was closer to the start. and then also the index was at 72.5, so you know, a much you know 28% drop compared to the relative 2001 levels. you know, the the NAR’s release confirms that this pending sales did indeed.
fall five point four month over month. but that index is down only point three percent year over year. so and and this was only the first decline in five months. So saying the phrase biggest drop of twenty twenty six is true, but it was the only meaningful drop in twenty twenty six. and you know separate
Piece of data from HousingWire actually showed pending single family sales up 4.1% year over year as of July 10th. And the NAR report attributed that June softness to the highest mortgage rates in nearly a year. Actually, I think they’ve peaked even higher as of you know early August, late July here. so that kind of collided with that record median price.
And so if we look at this like on a year over year level, it’s really showing that the market is flat and more rate sensitive, but not necessarily like falling precipitously. If we look at like, yeah, 5.4% drop month over month, but year over year. And I I showed data like this too in my other report about a month ago, where yeah, we have to separate out relative rates and
where you’re actually taking snapshots of data. And so yeah, if it’s been flat over roughly a year, like it just tells a bit of a different story. So you know flat, but still like it’s not a great market. Like flat at an already depressed level of activity, still a hard market to dispo. So, but it’s not necessarily like decreasing in, you know, or increasing distress rather.
and then he noted that mortgage purchase applications are tanking in the first two weeks of July, near all-time lows. however, what’s contradicted in regard to that is that the the MBA, which is the the mortgage association, their own weekly survey showed that seasonally adjusted purchase index rose six percent in the week ending July 17th, and sat about
0.2% above the same week a year earlier. and then the prior week, which was ending in July 10th, did fall 7%. but MBA explicitly attributed that to the July 4th holiday adjustment. and one of the industry experts, Joel Kahn, noted that purchase applications had been ahead of 2025’s pace with year-over-year growth for roughly three months.
and another industry expert within the MBA tied that modest strength to growing inventory supporting purchase activity, even with the 30-year conforming rate at about 6.7%. so this undercuts the demand is collapsing leg here, considering that there was almost like a complete flip in
relation to w week over week data here compared to like just looking at the first two weeks of July. And it seems that, you know, Nick with Reventure might have you know, perhaps inadvertently cherry picked a piece of data or a certain week that made the demand look even worse than that than was actually true because it was so influenced by by a holiday.
and then he had noted that again the MBA data had showed delinquencies rising to 4.4% in the Q1 of this year, highest in seven to eight years. so this piece is true, seasonally adjusted. you know, a up eight eighteen basis points quarter over quarter, 40 percent or 40 basis point, not 40 percent, 40 basis points year over year. and foreclosure starts,
Up four basis points to like 0.24%. however, you have to really look at the composition of this data. So conventional delinquencies actually fell 14 basis points to 2.75 percent. whereas the FHA and VA loans rose significantly. FHA up up to 11%.
VA loans up to 4.99%. So that’s what really drove that increase in delinquencies versus conventional loans here. And a lot of this was affected by the expiration of pandemic era FHA relief that stopped in September of last year, 2025, and trial payment plan accounting that kept FHA loans classified as delinquent.
until a permanent workout lands. So the FHA foreclosure inventory, you know, hit its highest level since 2018, VA since 2017, because of some of these you know relief packages that that have disappeared. But we should also note that you know most of those FHA and VA loans are
You know, if they are going to be distressed, like that inventory typically will be more entry-level to low down payment, like an exurban product, rather than across the board here. So like these are on average going to be lower value properties anyway, that that could be in more distress. another claim here. So when he was saying that sales volume relative to the housing stock.
Is worse than the GFC 0809, longest such stretch in US history with roughly four and a half percent turnover. so redfin had noted that tur about or just a little less than three percent of all US homes changed hands in the first three quarters of twenty twenty five. That was actually the lowest rate in three decades versus
3.4% in 2012, 4.4% at the pandemic peak in 2021. and Redfin can only go back to like the early to mid-1990s. So we’re like, you know, 30-ish years back. So you know, when you know Nick at Reventure is mentioning, you know, in in US history, potentially longest stretch, like it it’s a bit of a stretch because the data doesn’t go back that far anyway.
And then you know, the claim check is also noting like that 4.5% figure that he’s utilizing is using a different denominator than Redfin’s. so you know, we always have to check, okay, how is the cal how are the calculations actually being produced? and Redfin, again, really points for this lower turnover to be, you know.
Attributed to the lock-in effect. We’ve we’ve talked about endlessly here. A lot of people are familiar with it. You know, more than still more than 70% of mortgage owners right now are holding sub five percent rates. against a current market rate above six percent. So, you know, they’re just not incentivized to to to list here. and so like this is still showing like it’s still more of a frozen market, where existing home sales ran at, you know.
about four million annualized inventory at about four point six months, like technically not a buyer’s market for existing inventory. and so, you know, frozen markets, it’s fewer transactions because the prices are so stubborn, which affects dispo velocity, but you won’t really get an acquisition discount either. So we we can’t really read that low turnover as an incoming buying opportunity as well.
And the the final claim check for this is that, you know, when he was mentioning the stock market at you know, the price earnings ratio being at an all time high, or you know, just under where the dot com bubble was, is that you know, right now the CA, the Schiller CAPE score is like, you know, just over 40 as of June, June and July of this year. the long time mean is near 17 and a half.
and pre-dot com it was all-time high of 44. two. he said, you know, sustained readings above 40 have only occurred in the dot-com bubble. but a key caveat here that the you know claim check noted is that the CAPE score, the CAPE, has a well-documented near zero predictive power at 12-month horizons.
for stock performance. But you know functions as a long-run expected return signal, but not a timing tool. so yeah, it you you’d still have to read that there’s risk within the system, but are you able to time anything and be able to tell, hey, we’re like imminently, potentially going to be facing crash of the stock market that it’s not
something that that will be able to tell this. And we have, you know, 130 years of data to to to move with. so those were all the claim checks here, which again you can really see it would be really hard to hold all of that data in in hand and just be able to like speak off the cuff for such complex topics like this. and that you know where you know Nick’s presentation of hey this is like
effectively a housing depression here. When we actually look through the data more thoroughly, like it it seems that the market, yeah, is just just more of a frozen setup here. And I have some other you know research that corroborates this as well. And so like our positioning internally of like holding liquidity for the distressed assets, you know, while still sound in the underlying principle
the timing of it might be far more difficult to ascertain or prepare for. And like this current these current market conditions that we’re sitting on, they could last for potentially years now. Like we’ve already been in this for like four years straight. our new read is that hey, that this could easily be another half decade or more. and like how should we position liquidity?
In relation to that, how how do we strategize our business? So that again, that’s a whole nother discussion here, but that that’s kind of like the the landing point on our new framing that we have to consider versus like, hey, distress is potentially nearer. and you know, liquidity would would have cr greater near term value. you know, especially and again, like, okay, some of the distressed opportunities could be these
FHA, VA, foreclosure starts, you know, potentially like overbuilt inventory in the Sunbelt submarkets, like okay. but are are those really assets that you really want to go into anyway? Unless again, it’s like super dirt cheap prices, but it’s not like national turnover that that was happening c closer to the the GFC here. So that’s something we have to keep in mind here is that like
This mark is just not handing us discounts. but it it is handing us slow exits. So again, just very tricky to operate within.
So and again, like it was pointing out as I was reading over my notes again here too, that you know again, you just always have to manage the assumption or manage the incentives that who is presenting the data is how they’re presenting things. And so it’s like, yeah, you know, Nick at Reventure, he’s selling monthly subscription for a product whose value proposition is the depression framing. and that’s why, you know.
uncharitably perhaps you know he picked the holiday distorted mortgage application week omitted that conventional delinquencies actually fell and read a supply side freeze as a demand side collapse which you know we found the information and and data that pointed you know counter to what what what what he was framing there. that being said like you know all all these other items are
you relevant here and you know some of those other you know case studies that he mentioned could have been cherry picked a bit more you know when we’re looking at the overall data and you know some of these other reventure videos that I’ve run through this are are like much more largely corroborated with less pushback on the claims here. So you know keep in mind my own cherry picking but I really wanted to utilize this as again another lesson in
framing and how much we need to double check anything, including what we say, to ensure that we’re we’re utilizing the most accurate data possible and just being willing to turn on a dime depending on what the truth actually displays to you and not just hold on to potentially false beliefs because it’s more convenient for whatever mental framing you’ve already developed. So we are sitting tight in the midst of again this frozen market and trying to pivot and
Act accordingly here. We’re still you know deploying a lot of capital that this year. I have you know hundreds of thousands of dollars. personally out on on deals and expecting to do more here shortly. So it’s not preventing us from acting, it’s just yeah, making us even more cautious than before. So subscribe and share, everybody. Hopefully this one was interesting to you. I I absolutely love these these topics. let me know in in the comments or you know, message me directly if you want to see more like this.
or the opposite, of course. feedback’s always appreciated. again, if you want any funding for your deals, serious land at capital, you can submit there. Or if you’re interested in working with me directly for AI implementation into your business with the most cutting-edge workflows in the world. again, I work for companies that are collectively earning over $50 million in annualized revenue and looking for select.
handful of boutique clients to to implement AI workflows into their business. So you can reach out to me about that directly as well. take care everybody. Talk to you next time. Bye.
