Today’s tight housing market is already overbuilt, one analyst says

Anyone out house hunting right now knows the pickings are slim, the competition is fierce and the prices are high, but one analyst said there are actually too many houses being built.

The supply of homes for sale at the end of August totaled 1.29 million units, down 1.5% from July and down 13.4% from August 2020, according to the National Association of Realtors. That represents a 2.6-month supply at the current sales pace, which is one of the lowest supplies on record. A 6-month supply is considered a balanced market between buyer and seller.

One analyst, Dennis McGill, director of research at Zelman & Associates, however, said that the current supply of homes for sale is not indicative of the overall need to build more houses. Demand is strong right now, he said, because of an unusual emotional surge driven by the pandemic. Demographics, which are a better measure of housing demand historically, do not support more construction.

“There is a downward trajectory of population growth, household formation as well, that’s really going to undermine the need for what’s built,” said McGill. “On the other side of that, you have the development community that’s actually very optimistic about there being a housing shortage and actually very optimistic about how much needs to be built, and they’re actually pressing the accelerator harder than we think they probably should be.”

McGill cited data from the latest Decennial Census from the U.S. Census showing household formation is about 24% below where it was in the prior four decades.

McGill’s partner Ivy Zelman, who is perhaps best known for one of the first warnings about the subprime mortgage crisis over a decade ago, agreed.

“The market is too hot. There is just a massive amount of capital that’s coming to the space,” Zelman said, referring to the investor interest in the housing market. “We actually believe the industry is already overbuilding in single-family to normalized demand by roughly 20% and about 10% for multi-family, so we couldn’t be on more of an opposite side of where the market is and where the industry is, frankly.”

Homebuilders, however, seem to disagree. Housing starts are still not where they were over a decade ago, but they are slowly crawling back, and homebuilder sentiment is high. The stocks of the nation’s public homebuilders have also been on a tear, although that is largely due to pandemic demand.

“I have seen Ivy’s thesis, and do agree population growth is slowing, and that’s a reason why the old normal (combined single-family and multifamily construction of 1.8 million starts per year) is too high,” said Rob Dietz, chief economist with the National Association of Home Builders.