Ali Wolf (RTS 16)

Guest: Ali Wolf
Topics: Meyers Research, economics

Transcript:

Chris Ressa 0:01
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Welcome to retail retold everyone today we have a unique episode. Joining us is Ali Wolf. Ali is the chief economist at Myers research. And she studies the housing market, which I think is really interesting for all those in commercial real estate and really excited about what Ali has for us today. And welcome to the show, Ali. Hi, Chris.

Ali Wolf 1:28
Thanks so much for having me.

Ressa 1:30
The pleasure is all mine. But So Allie, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you’ve done, what you’re doing today, what Myers research does and all that good stuff.

Wolf 1:42
Awesome. Okay, so Myers research is a housing data and consultancy firms. So we look at 18,000 actively selling new home communities across the country. We look at how many homes have they sold? How many homes are they building what’s going on with price trends. And then we also have a custom market research business that’s run by my coworker, Tim Sullivan. And they look at they do actually do some commercial real estate advisory studies, we have a multifamily division. And then of course, with all the data that we have in house, we then do custom studies on the for sale side. For me as our chief economist, I previously worked at another real estate consulting firm, I was a researcher for the Canadian and UK Parliament’s. And today I have to look at all of the data and different trends that we’re seeing and piece together, what’s going on internationally, nationally, what are we seeing the data? And what are the trends we need to watch?

Ressa 2:39
Really interesting stuff. And I think most for anybody who no matter what industry you’re in, if you own a home, you’re what you have to say I think is insightful. And so that it we’re in some interesting times here, where did despite what’s happened, the housing market seems to be doing pretty well. So why don’t you just just start us off of what’s going on in housing today, Ali?

Wolf 3:10
Yeah, and pretty well is an understatement is crazy. In the for sale housing market right now. We are seeing home sales new and existing at the highest level we’ve seen since the mid 2000s. Some of the datasets the highest level since 2005, some 2006 cents from 2007. It’s below mortgage rates today. It’s the we’ve been stuck in our homes for a really long time. And there’s a big fear of missing out components. People are just flooding into the for sale space and buying homes like we haven’t seen in the past 10 years. It’s really remarkable.

Ressa 3:52
Yeah. And so I’m sure you guys look at this, given the unemployment rate where it’s at today. How does that typically track to this type of housing market? Is we it would seem just for the you know, the the non economist out there that this is not normal based on the unemployment rate?

Wolf 4:15
It’s a great question. It is I gave a presentation yesterday that said what has made me the most frustrated is datasets that we’ve always known and love jobs report the unemployment rates, different things like that are not actually jiving with what’s going on on the ground. And in fact, not only do you look at the unemployment rate that’s at 10%. But what we’ve heard like a talking point in the for sale spaces, oh well, a lot of the jobs have been lost for people that probably wouldn’t have been buying homes anyways. So that’s the reason we have so much housing strength. So I dug into that. I pulled up the unemployment rate for people that have a bachelor’s degree or higher and I said okay, if that’s the case, then surely we’re going to be in a way lower rate. In what we saw during the great financial crisis of 2008, we have the highest unemployment rate for people with a bachelor’s degree or higher than we’ve ever had on record. So that makes it even more confusing. Why can we have this strength and have a pretty abysmal picture on the labor front? I think that’s been, we’ve done a lot of research, we can go into some of those numbers of how that’s possible. But I think that’s been something that really has surprised everyone.

Ressa 5:28
What is the unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree

Wolf 5:31
6.7%. And people have a right to say that if you have a different level of education, the unemployment rate will be higher. If I remember correctly, it’s 15.4%. For those that have less than a high school diploma, but you always see that spread, there’s always going to be a higher unemployment rate for those with a lower level of education.

Ressa 5:55
At 6.7%, notwithstanding comparing that to other times, do you feel that is a stable number for housing to be doing?

Well? In the mind you I understand that 7% For people with a bachelor’s degree I’m well, I’ll caveat that Yep.

Wolf 6:13
Yep. And so as I looked at that I kind of did okay, well, if you do 100 minus 6.7, that still leaves a really large share of those, those people that have a bachelor’s degree that are still working. So in that case, I started then peeling back the numbers. I’m like, Why is this not making sense? The first thing is that if you, you have to now take rid of the college education because I can’t get this data, looking at specific groups, but total permanent layoff. If you look back to the Great Recession, 7 million people were permanently laid off, compared to right now we’re at 3 million. So I think that could be one of the things is that maybe the unemployment rates getting dragged up by furloughs. And when you’re furloughed, you feel a little bit more confident than obviously, if you were permanently laid off. And you also are seeing this weird disconnect between consumer confidence and home sales. Why did the consumer confidence data just come out and say that we have had the lowest level in six years, and people are still buying homes? To me, it’s just become this really crazy puzzle that we’re trying to piece together.

Ressa 7:22
Yeah, well, before that data, the consumer confidence was last report was strong.

Wolf 7:27
Right? Exactly. And then all of a sudden, we get August data. And it’s lower than March in April, we didn’t like the world was falling apart. And we had no idea what was happening. So I mean, maybe that parents that have kids, there’s a little bit of confusion with going back to school, maybe that’s the stimulus running out. Maybe that’s more pain in the labor market that we haven’t seen in the data yet. Again, puzzle, putting all the puzzle pieces together.

Ressa 7:55
Right. That the that is interesting. And we’ve actually had prior to that we had strong retail sales to as a as a country that were consumer confidence would seem, you know, it was higher than pre pandemic levels. I think in July, so, yeah, two months, for two months. Right. And in the I don’t love how they do the consumer confidence study, quite candidly. But I know it’s it’s a stat that we all use. I don’t love it. But anyway, up

Wolf 8:27
to that point. No, that’s a good point, though. Because what I had struggled with, really from March up until probably June was if you looked at a lot of the consumer confidence numbers, people were saying, now is an awful time to buy a home people were saying I’m so nervous about what’s going on. And then as you mentioned, retail sales shot right back, not every sector, but there were some sectors that really were driving that growth and housing market shot back up. So we saw this huge gap between what people were self reporting, and then what people were actually doing.

Ressa 8:58
One of the things that happened over the last six months was the personal savings rate. Rose, correct?

Unknown Speaker 9:06
Oh, yes.

Ressa 9:07
And so what do you think that played into this on fire real estate market?

Wolf 9:15
Yep. So personal savings rate for context usually is about on average, I think it’s about 7%. If you go back to the life of the personal savings rate, that’s just how much money are you bringing in? And how much are you saving for a rainy day, and then pre pandemic, it was right around 8%. During the height of the crisis, I think it shot up was either 20 or 30%, which was unprecedented. And now it’s slowly starting to come down. We’re just below a 20% personal savings rate right now. And to your point for the housing market. That’s really good news. Because the biggest problem for for sale housing has often been the downpayment, rent to own when you look at them money flee payments very often you can get them at the same. But for first time buyers who are the largest share right now in the overall market, they couldn’t get even a 3.5% down payment. In California, that’s actually a pretty sizable chunk of money. But it depends on where you live. That’s been a huge, huge contributor, but does pose a risk to economic growth with how high it is. Right.

Ressa 10:24
And you, you had recently posted, you know,

eight reasons on on LinkedIn, why you know why you saw this, and they were the wealth effect from the stock market, lack of inventory, seriously low mortgage rates, pent up demand, favorable demos, lifestyle changes due to COVID. The job loss for you know, is the delta between those who earn under 50,000, and then healthy home equity. So, and those those forces seem like the combination make it really powerful for the housing

market, DSC, anything that can take this off the tracks?

Wolf 11:11
Oh, of course, that’s what keeps me up every single night. As we look at that, so like you mentioned, we listed eight. And then I basically went to my social network, and I said, What are we missing? And I think the two things that came out of that discussion, one, people said, well look at what the Fed did the Fed drop rates so low, and that really hurt investors that were looking for a good return. So a lot of people said, add to your eight, you’re number eight, put a number nine, which is investors have returned to the market and make your number 10. This shift to the suburbs, which I would argue is not a new shift. It’s maybe an exaggerated shift. But we’ve seen the suburbs been the top priority for a really, really long time to answer directly what your question was the two biggest things that I see right now. One is on the builder side, they are facing supply shortages, like they’ve never experienced before. Whether that’s running out a lot, having a trouble getting washer, a dryer, a refrigerator air conditioning doesn’t matter, that I’m having a hard time getting some of their trades framers roofers, sometimes just because they’re overworked sometimes because COVID shuts down their companies for two weeks. And then of course, lumber prices, which are just astronomical right now. So lots and lots of problems on the supply side for builders.

Ressa 12:34
Do you see inventory picking up over the next six, nine months,

Wolf 12:42
builders are doing their best effort to make that possible. And they should because right now, the reason home prices and that’s another one of the biggest concerns is that home prices have gone up so much. And for so long rates have been low enough to be able to offset that. But come pandemic mortgage rates have now gone below 3% builders keep raising prices, at a certain point you raise your prices high enough that you offset what you’re seeing with the interest rate drops. So the point of saying that is builders are now looking around and they’re saying, okay, reason prices are going up so much. It’s because there’s not enough supply on the ground, both from the new and from the resale side. So builders are scrambling, they’re trying to get more lots, they’re trying to build more homes. They’re just obviously running into some hurdles along the way. Got

Ressa 13:32
it? In the people who said the move to the suburbs? You know, I would, I would put that as like six

A on your list. I think that’s a lot of change in lifestyle due to COVID. But I think it’s close to that. But the one that I think is the pent up demand. What? Why was there pent up demand to get a new house, I understand why there might be pent up demand to go to a restaurant. But why was there pent up demand to buy a new house if your house is fine? What was the pent up demand?

Wolf 14:02
Yep, so pent up demand comes in two different ways. So the first way we’ve already really worked through which was people that were going to buy homes in March and April, and then the world fell apart. And they were like, Whoa, I am definitely not buying this house. But at that point that lasted about eight weeks. And now we’re way past those eight weeks. So I would say those buyers have either entered the market or have left the market. They’ve made their decision. The bigger thing and it kind of the pent up demand kind of goes to demographics as well. Was that going into the COVID crisis in February of this year in January of this year. We were already having rapid sales earlier in the year than you normally would we have a spring selling season that usually starts towards the end of February. That was fueled by millennials who have now the peak age if you look at it on a graph between 2829 and 30 years old, you then overlay when the millennials usually get married when do they have kids? When did they buy a home? I’m usually 2829 3031. So we’re starting to hit that peak life stage for that demographic. Boomers obviously have been looking to move as well. We have so many of them that are retiring every single day. And when they retired that often comes in a change in maybe where they want to live or how they want to live. And then the Gen Xers have just been incredibly benefiting from the fact that home prices haven’t crashed so far.

Ressa 15:26
Do you have a prediction on when you see prices plateauing, maybe not crashing but plateauing?

Wolf 15:35
Thank you for not going dramatic there because a lot of people want to say like, what are they going to crash? What are they going to go down 40% of what I see from our builder clients, so for Myers research, we advise builders, developers private equity, hedge funds, and we’re getting on the phone constantly with division presidents across the country and saying, hey, you know, how concerned are you about affordability? Is this something we should be watching? And I’ve had builders say to me, like, every single day, we’re looking at how much demand Do we still have? And so I think a lot of builders are getting anxious that they have pushed prices. And at some point, like, it all just feels too good to be true. And maybe it isn’t, maybe this is truly just the demographics that we’ve had. But I would say in the next six to 12 months unless the economy is roaring back and people are getting raises like crazy and our life gets back to a 3.5% unemployment rate. I don’t think it will. There’s no way prices can keep going up as quickly as they have been in the past

Ressa 16:36
five months. Understood. You mentioned a lot about new homes. What about existing homes do is in what’s the difference between the price the price is rising on the new homes versus the existing homes.

Wolf 16:54
still seeing a whole bunch of price growth on the existing home side. And that comes directly to the fact that inventory is down depending on the market 10% down year over year for total inventory in places I think it’s like Miami and Vegas are down 10% Riverside, California, Charlotte, North Carolina, inventories down 50 to 60%. Year over year, Nashville’s another really hot market, when you have inventories that low. Basically what happened at the height of the pandemic in March and April, supply fell off a cliff, people stopped listing their homes, they didn’t want someone having their you know, dirty hands touch their house, they didn’t want that. And demand fell off a cliff. And so that was fine because you hit a new equilibrium. But after about six to eight weeks, starting mostly at the end of April, going into may demand came full back and then some supply never did. And so just thinking of the basic dynamics supply and demand. We’ve just seen prices skyrocket on the existing home side, homeowners are selling homes within days of them listing above asking price was getting worse.

Ressa 18:05
Wow. Do you see that plateauing at a different point in time than new newly built

homes?

Wolf 18:13
That’s an interesting question. Well, there’s a few different factors here. So the first factor is we have a whole bunch of existing homeowners, I’m sure you have been following the refinance, boom, the fact that a lot of people were in their homes, and now they’ve refinance their home with a 2.2% interest rate. Yeah, in that case, the existing home inventory is not likely to flood the market to be able to soften that gap between supply and demand because you have a lot of people that are looking at Home Depot’s earnings look at Lowe’s earnings, people are staying put and saying I’m gonna figure out what I’ll do with my existing home. The other thing though, that we have is people want a bigger home. And if they have some equity and they look at the low mortgage rates, maybe even if they refinance, they want to move. And if you have that happen need enough first movers. Right now we’re kind of going through that classic prisoner’s dilemma where there’s no hormones on the market. So then no one’s putting their home on the market, too. And no one else is putting their home on the market and it creates this vicious cycle. So if we could get more to a virtuous cycle where more people move, I don’t think that’s going to crash home prices. I think that will help stabilize them out. But that’s tricky to predict when I think you got to it may be closely linked to the vaccine when people feel more comfortable having strangers in their homes again.

Ressa 19:33
Do you do you feel the existing home market prices are more stable, the new home prices? No, no, no.

Wolf 19:46
I think it’s they’re both rising very, very rapidly, very

Ressa 19:50
quickly. And are there any markets of concern or is it is just wide.

Wolf 20:03
Usually, it’s really, really exciting.

Ressa 20:06
I say concern, I say concern, but right now it’s good. So I don’t mean that let you know, let me rephrase the question. Are there any markets that stand out to you? Yes.

Wolf 20:17
So early in the pandemic, it was weird because some of the markets were growing faster and sooner than the others. And we were looking at the unemployment rate. And we were saying, Oh, my gosh, places like where I live in LA Orange County, our implied unemployment rate for July is about 17%. We’re like, there’s no way that the housing market is going to withstand a 17% unemployment rate. And that’s down from where it was a few months ago. Doesn’t matter. In La Orange County, if your price right? Once you go above like 1.5 million, you see a little bit of slower activity, really anything, anything under a million Bill flying off the shelf would surprise you, Las Vegas, gotta be crushed. Right. Las Vegas is like the center of where the job losses have been. It depends on people being around other people, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter homes are flying off the shelf. So I would say the southeast is the clear just superstar, the southeast came. So that’s Charlotte, Raleigh, Tampa. I know parts of South Carolina, those markets came back quicker. And they’ve been Atlanta to a certain extent, they’ve been very, very strong. But all the other markets have now basically caught back up to them.

Ressa 21:36
I live in the Northeast where, you know, typically higher cost of living but and prices were were high, but it feels I don’t know if it’s a flood of people out of New York City to the suburbs, or what but it feels like we’re in a time that we haven’t been in a long time hear from the real estate market. What do we think about what’s going on?

Wolf 21:59
Yeah, that’s a good point. Because in. So like I mentioned earlier, we have 18,000 actively selling communities that we track. And we put together what we call a new home pending sales index, which tracks contracts by market. And the most recent read that we have is for July data, and New York, the entire CDSA. So that includes parts of New Jersey was actually the only major market in the country that still had sales activity actually below where it was last year. Wow, we are including, but we’re including some of the more urban areas do and I agree with you that I do think in a place like New York, at least temporarily. You’ve had some people say, I want a little bit more space right now. The reason I live in New York is to be able to enjoy life. And that’s kind of been taken away from me. I don’t I’m never someone who’s going to call the death of the urban living because I think there’s so many reasons why people want to live downtown. But I do think this has pushed some people that we’re going to buy three years from now to decide to buy today.

Ressa 22:57
Yeah, I think yeah. Yeah, there’s, it feels the suburbs are.

I don’t know, you mentioned activity, it feels like prices are rising. I don’t know if you’re seeing price growth in the Northeast. But it feels like in the suburbs here. prices are rising. I’m seeing people get over at you know, over list price, like every house that gets on the market. But it’s anecdotal. My information, yours is a little bit more empirical evidence.

Wolf 23:28
Well, in ours, I’m trying to see I don’t think I have New York quickly that I can look at, but i Yes, ours was talking about sales rates. And I was looking at sales rates for builders. So it could be different than the resale market, anything that’s lower priced or anything, that’s where people want to live. So I wouldn’t doubt what you’re seeing on the ground.

Ressa 23:45
Got it. I guess the one thing is, I want to make sure we end on a positive. But one of the things that has been interesting to me is in the Great Recession of Oh 708 When we had massive unemployment. One of the things that happened was, we mentioned low mortgage rates. But one of the things that happened was the credit markets froze up for homebuyers. And it seems like they are wide open right now. And is there any concern about like a lender going wait a second, were lending on these accelerated prices. And, you know, I know they have a job. They passed their application was great, but like, I just don’t know what’s gonna happen. Is there gonna be a pullback from the mortgage market?

Wolf 24:38
It’s been a question we’ve been asking since March. And you saw for a while this there were so many headlines that oh, the the markets are tightening up and it’s gonna be harder to get a home and hey, if you’re buying a jumbo home, which is a more expensive home, you’re not going to be able to get loans. And yet, that hasn’t happened at all. And we’ve actually seen it real be crazy. I’ve heard people say like, oh, I don’t know, if I’m gonna be able to buy my car, I don’t know if I’m gonna keep my job. But I’m gonna buy a home right now anyways, because I at least want to be able to get in and I want to be able to qualify right now, to me that’s mind blowing that that’s happening or that anyone even has that mindset. But I guess you also look at the rates and you want to so everything that I have seen shows that technically, credit standards are tightening, but practically, I don’t really see it, I think the rates again, right now have been able to offset any kind of challenges with debt to income ratios. I don’t think lending standard standards are getting out of whack. But as we talked about earlier, as prices keep going up, you will end up impacting some of those calculations, that will ultimately diminish the buyer pool a little bit.

Ressa 25:50
Right now, I feel like it’s an exciting time for homeowners and homebuyers. Notwithstanding the pandemic, you know, people are creating, some people are creating wealth, some people are getting the homes that they’ve dreamed of. And we’re in a unique time. And, you know, I’m overall bullish on the housing market, because, you know, I think lack of supply and mortgage rates are helping to stabilize that I don’t know, if it’s, I don’t, you’ll know better than me on when it will come, you know, when they will come down. But overall, would you say you’re happy with what’s going on? You know, are you concerned? How would you describe like, just your, your Outlook now.

Wolf 26:37
What I would say I’m enthused, the activity is so great. The builders that we’re talking to are just having so much success. And I like how you put the human element to it because people have wanted to purchase new homes. Every single survey we’ve done, it doesn’t matter life, stage lifestyle, how old the person is, which country, what state they’re from, people have always said they want a new home, they want to make something their own. And affordability has been the biggest factor standing in the way between them and that dream. And yes, rates have gone down both for the new and existing home space. But at least in terms of relative affordability, standing here today. Again, I think that’s a big risk going forward. Standing here today, a lot of people all of a sudden have been priced into buying a new home. And that has been so fun for so many families. We believe the short term housing activity is going to be great, short term, how would I define it? Probably at least six months, we believe long term housing activity will be great. We see so many demographic tailwinds. That will just support the housing market, let’s say three to eight years from now. And that includes some of the supply demand fundamentals that you had just mentioned. Then we have what we call the mushy middle where

Ressa 27:53
she met.

Wolf 27:55
I know we’re so we use nice to eloquent phrases. But as we look at that there are risks on the economic front that could impact the housing market. And so that’s where we’re keeping our eyes out.

Ressa 28:10
And the mushy middle is, what’s that? Is that 12 to 36 months? Is that where we are from the mushy middle?

Wolf 28:19
Yeah, I would say anywhere between starting on the low end six, I think closer 12, you’re probably right is the 12. So I would still say six to 30 months. That’s a huge range. But let’s let’s shorten it, I would say the next six to 18 months to me is when you start to see, do some of the home prices have to come down because they’ve gone up too much. And does that create any kind of nervousness from consumers? Does, you know the Fed came out and talked about how they’re going to change their inflation target. But usually when inflation rises, bond investors want to help their return. And so you see yields go up, that usually translates into higher mortgage rates. There’s a risk that some of the job losses could spread into higher income individuals. These are all things that we have no idea and if they don’t come to fruition, enjoy the ride, the housing market is going to have a great time.

Ressa 29:12
All right, I got a couple more questions that I got on my notes here. That to make sure I asked the the elephant in the room. I just I’m going to say one word.

And you tell me what it means for the housing market. You’re not gonna like the word though. Ally. You ready? Oh, dear.

Wolf 29:34
I’m ready. Election. Oh, come on. All right. I didn’t think you were gonna go there. But you’re right. Okay. So for home sales, historically, the election month and only the month does result in a greater pullback than in non election years. People get distracted people get anxious. You don’t know what the new regime or the same regime is going to look like there’s a lot more uncertainty, it doesn’t normally crush the housing market more than one month. If normal times translate today, we know nothing about today is normal. For the presidential candidate, I’m not going to say one or the other. I will say, right now we have a president who is dealing with an economic crisis. And we also have someone running who dealt with a financial crisis. So when you’re looking at the two candidates, at least we have people that have learned on the jobs either today or 10 years ago, and that at least gives me a little bit of comfort.

Ressa 30:39
Okay, I appreciate that eloquent answer. And backed by facts. Moving on from election, typically, and maybe it’s different, because people are, you know, that we have this new, new type of schooling that’s going on virtual schooling, but typically, you know, as you get into the fall and winter, it’s a little bit of more, for lack of a better word,

you know, slower time period for for home sales. Is that going to play? Is that going to play out like it traditionally does?

Wolf 31:23
Oh, Chris, this is a question I have been asking. Honestly, I think since April, I’m like, what does this mean, because we normally have a spring selling season. For that reason. Exactly. You buy the homes ahead of the school season starting. And I have some my friends who have their kids going back to school they already have. And so that’s an August, and we have from our builder research, home sales are still going strong this far into the year. So as of right now, the historical trends are getting a little bit turned upside down. I know not from experience, but from conversations that parents that are working from home with kids that are schooling at home, it is hard to do anything, it’s hard to keep your kitchen clean, let alone go shop for a new home. And so I think it will be interesting to see if it falls into its normal historical pattern. But we also know a lot of families have said, we don’t have enough space, we can’t do this. And that’s prompted some people to move maybe a few cities further away from the city, just so that like the main city just so that they can get more space cooking work one of two ways, and we have not been able to pinpoint what exactly it will be

Ressa 32:37
that anecdotal feedback on that. It’s hard to get anything done. I think a lot of people can relate to I hadn’t thought of that. That’s really interesting.

Wolf 32:47
Anything else we

Ressa 32:48
didn’t cover that you want to talk about about the housing market that you think is,

you know, relevant, and, you know, would be good to get to know.

Wolf 33:01
You know, the last thing I would want to mention is to just watch the stock market. Because what we have found is often there’s a close linkage between home sales and what’s going on with equity pricing. And I think some of that goes back to the wealth effect, people are just they feel more competent, they feel good about the economy, even though the two aren’t necessarily following the exact same pattern. But I would say also, from the boomers in particular, that can impact their ability to make a downpayment, and a lot of cases, that’s the retirement savings. So that would impact that demographic of the buyer. And then for the millennials, right now, some of them are lucky enough to have their parents that are helping with a downpayment. And again, often that money comes from them selling some stocks. So that’s a good if you see it start to fall through start to reset. We don’t forecast stock prices. But we do know that there’s a direct link between what happens with equities as the same with the housing market.

Ressa 34:00
Do you happen to know what percentage of millennial buyers actually get their downpayment from parents?

Wolf 34:08
I don’t have the percent I know it’s a it’s a very big talking point. And we’ve had builders say that they’re seeing it now more than ever, because I think the parents like my dad bought his home and he always tells me Oh, I bought my first home. It’s like a 14% interest rate. So when you have that in your mindset, and you’re looking at

Ressa 34:27
a home with a 2.3 You’re getting into home. Yeah, exactly. Got it. Okay. Well.

This has been fascinating, really awesome stuff. Really appreciate you coming on. It brings us to the last part of the show. We call it retail wisdom. I’ve got three questions for you. Tell me when you’re ready.

I’m ready. All right. Question one. What is your best piece of real estate advice out there? Housing real estate advice.

Wolf 34:59
Restart which the builders that are doing the best have done the most consumer research that they have. They’ve looked at, you know what sells or what’s attractive or how are consumers trends changing? It seems a little bit frivolous sometimes, but that’s the best way to make the smartest decisions.

Ressa 35:17
sage advice? Awesome. Second question. You ready? I’m ready. What extinct retailer Do you wish would come back from the dead?

Wolf 35:34
Okay, I think I’m gonna go super lame with this answer. And I’m gonna say blockbuster. And the only reason is because it’s so nostalgic when you think about how fun it was like, think about how stressful our lives are right now. And then you would go to Blockbuster and you would walk around and it was so it just like created this atmosphere of like, oh, tonight we’re gonna watch a movie and we’re gonna have popcorn. And I just think we all need some levity in our life. And we need some greetings activities. And I don’t know why I always just like went to Blockbuster.

Ressa 36:10
Yeah, I love blockbuster, too. I love you know, now it’s IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes. But I loved reading the backs of the video cases. So

getting in getting the previews through that last question. Yep. All right. I am on Best Buy’s website. You’re in the home sector. One of the first things you get a new home is or a builder gets but maybe a homeowner has to get is a washing machine. I am looking at the Samsung 4.5 cubic foot front load washer with Vibration Reduction Technology in white. They can

it’s free delivery and they can deliver it to you as soon as September 17. And if you need it installed,

they can do that too. What does that retail for?

Wolf 37:05
Oh my gosh, okay, the installation, I’m going to save $150 And my friend just had her washer break and she said it cost $500 to get it fixed and that 500 wasn’t enough to tilt her into buying a washer. i Oh my gosh, I have no idea. So I think it retailing 1500

Ressa 37:30
Wow. So she might have got a an amazing washer. I don’t know but the Samsung our Best Buy is 569 99 and it was 790 $99. So but thank you for playing me

Listen, this was incredible. Thank you so much for coming on.

Wolf 37:55
Of course thank you for having me.

Ressa 38:00
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