Building Market Intelligence

The US labor pool will grow 75% more slowly than usual over the next decade due to heavy retirement. This will: Bring unemployment down quickly, even if we attract more people back to the labor force, and Create wage inflation …

Demographics tell us that eight million more people should retire in the next decade than in the last decade. You had better pay attention to the retirement housing market! While the active adult (55+ age-restricted, amenity-rich) home market was brisk …

Why are household formations so low? Because 1.2 million more adults live with their parents than just 8 years ago! Nearly 4% of US households had an oldest child aged 25–34 living at home in 2012. Compare this to 2006, …

Talk about an amazing reversal of fortune! This may be the most amazing, underreported demographic fact today. 30-34 year olds in 2012 had the lowest homeownership rate of any similarly aged group before them! Five years prior, this exact same …

People buy homes for many different reasons, and the mix of reasons has shifted lately. Family-related reasons, such as marriage or divorce, is an increasing percentage, while the desire for homeownership is a decreasing percentage of home buyers. This supports …

The growth in non-family households is staggering! The number of non-family households – people living alone or households that do not have any members related to the householder – has increased nearly five times in the last 50 years, from …

The weakening job market is a key factor in rapidly deteriorating consumer confidence, which is now at its lowest level since March 2003, surrounding the beginning of the war in Iraq. The current consumer confidence index rating of 64.5 is …

While it is now clear that we are in regional recessions, the poor performance of many of our market indicators over the last several months supports speculation of a national recession. Our overall grade for the health of the U.S. …

As if a horrible housing market isn’t enough of a drag on the economy, businesses are now curtailing their spending as well. In December, a survey of manufacturers indicated that their budgets are being cut, and this week we learned …