E Why The Real Estate Boom Has A Decade To Run

Real estate brokers are still reeling from the news that December existing home sales rocketed by a blockbuster 14.7%, to an annualized 5.46 million units.

And now I hear that Apple (AAPL) is planning on building a second new research and development campus that will need 20,000 new high tech workers. The housing crisis here in the San Francisco Bay area just went from bad to worse.

It is all fresh fuel for a continuation in the bull market for US residential real estate, not just for this year, but for another decade.

Friends in the industry tell me the eye popping numbers were due to the implementation of the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) in October.

Dubbed the “Know before you owe” requirement, TRID is the inevitable outcome of the 2008 subprime housing crash.

If you weren’t born yet in 2008, or were living in a cave on a remote Pacific island back then, go watch the movie “The Big Short” for a further explanation of those dark days.

As a result, real estate closings now take at least a week longer, and sometimes more, thanks to a new requirement for several three day “cooling off periods.”

When the new law kicked in, TRID nearly brought he industry to a halt, and firms were sent scurrying to their attorneys to draw up the new disclosure forms to stay within the law.

TRID undoubtedly was responsible for the slowdown in the market in the run up to December.

Although prices seem high now, I am convinced that we are only at the beginning of a long term secular bull market in housing. Anything you purchase now is going to make you look like a genius ten years down the road.

The best is yet to come.

The big driver will be demographics, of course.

From 2022 onward, 65 million Gen Xer’s will be joined by 85 million late blooming Millennials in bidding wars for the same houses. That will create a market of 150 million buyers, unprecedented in the history of the American real estate market.