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November 10, 2025
Ivy discussed what’s currently frustrating her about the housing market — including the factors holding back a stronger rebound. She also highlighted some of the lesser-discussed headwinds impacting the sector.
November 05, 2025
October 22, 2025
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September 17, 2025
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August 26, 2025
In this episode, Willy welcomes Kris Mikkelsen, Ivy Zelman, and Aaron Appel.
Alan believes the housing market won't recover any time soon and a housing market recovery will take years. He said, "We were seeing levels of inflation, at least in our part of the world, housing, that clearly were not healthy, clearly were not sustainable," he said. "It should have been clear to everybody that if things continued at that level that there were going to be problems."
Surging mortgage rates have quickly turned the tables for would-be buyers qualifying for loans. As a result, a slowdown of qualified buyers have significantly decreased. The Las Vegas market is already seeing a meltdown. Ivy provided her thoughts saying, “How rapidly things have deteriorated is pretty remarkable,” but “there’s a huge difference from the go-go days of exotic mortgage products and no money down,” with the latter quote referring to the loose lending environment before the 2007 crisis.
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Zelman is serving as exclusive M&A adviser to DiamondHead Holdings (Nasdaq: DHHC) in connection with its recently announced acquisition of Great Southern Homes, Inc. (GSH), valuing the combined company at a pro forma enterprise value of $572 million. GSH is one of the largest and fastest-growing private homebuilders in the Southeastern U.S. focusing on entry-level and move-up buyer segments and employing a “land light” operating model.
Fortune highlighted Ivy's past housing market predictions and focused on her current view that once again have housing bulls sweating with her bearish assessment of U.S. home prices in 2023 and 2024. In a recent podcast, Ivy said, “So right now we’re getting a backlash of the change in direction from free money to now the rise in (mortgage) rates and inflation. So the market is poised for a fairly significant (price) correction. And we’re already seeing signs of that over the last several months.”
New home sales tumbled 12.6 percent in July according to data reported by the Census Bureau, representing the largest sequential decline since February 2021. Meanwhile, the absolute pace of activity stands at the lowest level since January 2016. Alan provided his thoughts on the pullback as well as mortgage rates’ effect on demand and affordability. He commented, "It is clear that the increase in mortgage rates combined with consecutive years of double-digit home price appreciation has significantly reduced the demand for new homes as potential homebuyers either struggle with affordability constraints or are worried about buying at the top of the market."
June sales of new single-family homes have dropped below estimates. Dennis provided his thoughts on the Census Bureau's new home measure, the demand for homes as well as our proprietary homebuilding survey results from June. Dennis commented, "There's no question that the demand environment is quite weak at the moment."
