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Eric G. Hey guys, Happy Wednesday.

Thanks for joining me today on the around the House midweek special.

Well, this is our update that really covers things in between the shows of the weekend.

Thanks for joining me today.

We are having a lot of fun here in the studio this morning, cranking things out.

Happy Wednesday for me here.

Yeah, I try to keep these as topical as I can so we can get you some information during the week.

Maybe it's a rant, maybe it's news of what's going on out there in the remodeling and construction world.

It's a little wild out there right now because this is trade show season really for the design and construction industry.

You start out the first week back from the holidays with the Consumer Electronics Show.

Right now is World of Concrete, which also is in Las Vegas.

And then in a few weeks we'll all be down in Florida in Orlando for the Kitchen and Bath Industry show or the International Builder Show.

They combine those into this massive 2 million square foot plus trade show called Design and Construction Week.

So that's where a lot of things get released.

You'll see a lot of the tool companies now, especially concrete related or wood related, will be doing stuff at World of Concrete.

There's not as many power tools when it comes to going to Orlando this year because they've been remodeling the convention center in Las Vegas.

So next year it'll be back, which is a lot easier for me coming in from Portland to get to Las Vegas in a couple hours versus five and change to get on a direct flight to Orlando.

But nonetheless, that'll be coming up.

We're gonna be really spending some time showing you the best stuff that we're seeing out there in the world of home improvement.

One thing I wanted to talk about today is just what's going on in the marketplace out there.

So I was just looking at the national association of Home Builders.

They do part of that show that I was talking about.

So I've been on their webpage a lot looking at their news.

They have the NAHB Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, which they call hm.

It's designed to gauge track all the pulse of the single housing family market out there and Some monthly survey of single family builders and they want to get the reaction of the specific conditions of the housing market.

So that's where we're at.

The January 2026 one here.

Builder confidence in the market for newly built single family homes fell 2 points to 37 in January.

Not a great number.

That declined basically.

Again, we're seeing a couple point drops across here.

Sales conditions declined 1 point to 41.

Sales expectations for the next six months fell 3 to 49 and traffic of prospective buyers dropped 3 points to 23.

So yeah, the housing market has continued to cool out there and there's a lot of reasons on that.

It has also revealed that 40% of builders reported cutting prices in January, unchanged from December.

But it's the third consecutive month that the share has been at 40% or higher since May 2020 tells you where we're at.

And the average price reduction was 6% in January, up from 5% in December.

The use of sales incentives was 65% in January, making the 10th consecutive month this share has exceeded 60%.

So that kind of tells us how builders are looking forward.

Unless we see interest rates, unless we see all of these things dropping, including costs for building homes, we're going to see that happen.

So we're going to, we're going to see this housing market be exactly what it is.

There's always people, oh, it's going to crash.

It's not going to crash.

What we're going to see is just a low inventory out there, which means if you're out searching for a home, it's going to be a little tough.

And I've noticed that we've been looking for homes around here for maybe summer to fall to pick up so I can have our next project house that we're going to live in.

But the thing is bad, a lot of stuff out there.

And I will tell you on a quick little rant, this is pretty funny.

I have seen here in Portland some of the most God awful house flips.

And I'm about to the point that I'm going to start doing a podcast on them or a video podcast on them so I can show you what I see.

It's absolutely insane.

And we might do that just do the crazy wait in the photos kind of thing.

This would be fun just to go through and look at that.

So that might be something we come up and do.

And I tell you what, a lot of great stuff out there to make fun of.

A couple things here I wanted to talk about.

So stay tuned for that.

I'm thinking of how we want to do that.

But we got builder confidence dropping right now.

Renovation spending is set to rise in 2026.

So reports for Harvard's Joint center for Housing Studies steady growth coming in this way.

Mortgage rates right now dropped to three year lows, but they've been high for our generation.

Right now 30 year fixed rates are about 6.06% which is the lowest since late 2022.

Do I think we're going to get back to that 3%?

No.

Are we in that 20 or 30%?

It felt like in the 70s, not even close.

But the problem is with everybody.

With inflation over the last four years just cranking through the roof, a lot of people have less money to spend on things.

So they're a little less inclined to go out and buy a house when they're going, man, I can't believe what I just paid for food at the grocery store or anything like that.

Of course I'm up in the Pacific Northwest where Gasoline is still $50 more than everybody else because we just like to copy California and make some bad decisions on that.

So we pay a lot for our fuel out here.

That does increase costs for everybody else.

So that's interesting.

Now one thing that I thought was interesting, I started looking up, taking a look and see where we're at with people looking at energy efficient upgrades.

One thing that it seems is going to be less hot in 2026 is EV Chargers.

The people that adopted EV have got an EV charger in their house right now.

But when you look at companies like ford and their F150 Lightning thought it was a cool truck.

If you were a landscaper cruising around town probably made sense if you were going to use that.

A regular F150 and take haul the boat trailer 100 miles up to the lake might have a problem.

But I think Ford's changing that over into using a.

They're discontinuing as it is.

But I think they're going to put a generator in with gas to make sure that it gets you more mileage so it'll have a small engine to generate power.

Makes a lot of sense.

I think that's pretty cool.

But that's where you're seeing ev's going.

I think you're seeing it's looking so far at least that the sales have snuck down a little bit.

And amazing when you take that many thousands of dollars of incentives out of it.

You're basically paying people to take to go buy electric vehicles.

Those sales are down.

So we'll see what happens there.

But I think it's one of those things that t chargers are going to be down a little bit.

I think also homeowners are looking to spend money on H Vac systems that are more efficient, I think with the current pricing of them and not complaining to the H Vac industry about this, but I think we're going to see a little less than that in my area here.

Our H Vac contractors around here are struggling because all of a sudden that $7,000 heat pump that people thought they were putting in is now $25,000 and they're going, holy smokes, I can't afford that.

So you're seeing financing coming up 0%.

You're seeing all these different sales techniques to get people to buy.

So I think right now we see in the H Vac industry out there people going, hey, I'm going to maintain this.

I'm going to keep this thing going along the road as best as I can and make sure that it's.

We're doing good with that to keep it moving.

Because they don't want to spend 25 grand when money is a little tight.

Now, I was watching the presidents.

We're now getting a politics here because I tell you what, there is not one person in the world that has probably changed their mind off of seeing something on social media about a post or anything else.

It's usually just an echo chamber when somebody posts up some, we'll call it political speak no matter what side you're on.

I don't think I've ever seen somebody go, wow, I never thought of that.

I've changed my mind.

A broken clock has rate twice a day.

But our tribalism today is crazy.

But really I think that we are going to see with our labor shortages and some of the interesting things that we're seeing out there, it's going to take interest rates dropping significantly.

Now, if the president puts in his own Fed chairman, we could see a point or two drop down and things get a little crazy out there, which could jump just jumpstart the housing industry out there.

Now, we've talked about it in the past.

I'm not gonna re rehash to you guys and tell you the same thing over and over again.

But in certain states, like out here on the west coast, we have places we can't build.

So if they can open that stuff up, make things a little bit easier for builders out there, the paperwork that you're seeing for these guys to get a house built is absolutely insane of the hoops that you have to jump through the taxes you have to pay, the development fees you have to pay.

We have to do that to get affordable housing figured out.

And I tell you what, one of these days, when someone investigates places like the city of Portland, the city of Seattle, all of these major west coast cities, when someone decides one day to do an audit of what they're spending for these places that they're building, and I'm going to use air quotes for affordable housing.

When you're seeing some of these projects have twice the square footage price per square foot because it's the city or a municipality that's building it versus having a builder do it, you're going to start to see that, wow, this money is going everywhere.

It's just like here in my area.

And this was a crazy one this week.

We just saw some just absolute massive fraud because they're trying to rebuild the two bridges on i5 that go between Oregon and Washington.

So they had a meeting in December.

They went, hey, this is pretty crazy.

We need to have our numbers for this project.

We're getting ready to break ground.

And the group of people running it, I think for most of the state of Oregon, told the legislatures members from Washington, Oregon, we don't have pricing for that project yet.

It was like at 6 billion plus dollars, we don't have pricing.

We haven't had it for the last year.

We'll get it to you shortly.

Come to find out with Freedom of Information Acts, our people over at Willamette Week figured out, yeah, they got a price for it.

They just were trying to hide it and now it's at 13.6 billion.

So you can see how this stuff goes out here.

Crazy stuff.

And I'll be honest, I think they're way low on that.

I bet you it's going to be 23 to 25 billion by the time it's done.

And they want to start the project even though they don't have funding for it.

So we'll see what happens.

It's absolutely crazy how this stuff goes.

And a simple tunnel could have fixed that whole problem and they would have had something that would probably be cheaper, quicker and less disruptive and you wouldn't have to buy all this land that they're having to buy now just to tear it down to make the freeway wider and to put this new bridge out.

The bridge got to be replaced, but we're seeing that kind of thing around here.

1.

Another quick note, real quick, before we run out of time here.

I am starting to do an investigation about this group of homeowners in my area here.

And it's an affordable housing one.

You're gonna love this.

So we've got a group of homeowners, an architect.

We have a Habitat for Humanity and the city of Portland.

And right now the homeowners are getting the absolute shaft two years after moving in where.

And we're gonna find out who's really a fault here.

I have got probably hundreds of documents to go through and.

And my shoulder surgery that was supposed to be Friday, of course, just got moved till Wednesday of next week.

So they had something break down, so they pushed me out a little bit.

So I'm gonna be working on this story to find out why this hasn't been taken care of.

We've got a.

We've got fire inspectors involved.

There was people, I think, looking the other way on the permit process.

So I think we've got multiple people at fault here.

But I really want to defend these poor homeowners that moved into a Habitat for Humanity project that, quite frankly, for what I'm seeing so far.

And again, I'm early on in the investigation in this.

We're going to do a whole story on this, probably an episode of what went wrong so we can all learn.

And this is going to be.

This.

This is going to be a lot like Dateline NBC the way this goes.

We'll have to see which direction it goes in this, because I don't have any preconceived notions other than these homeowners are getting the shaft.

So the people I'm looking at right now is going to be the architect, Habitat for Humanity, the Portland Fire and Rescue, their fire inspectors, and of course, the Portland building department.

So we're going to take a look and see we can find here.

This is going to be an interesting one, and I'm excited to take a look at it because we're going to do a deep dive and have a really good story with some interviews with people, and we're going to get to the bottom of this one because right now these people moved in and they are the victims right now.

And we're going to see if we can figure it out and expose the problems so this stuff doesn't happen again.

All right, everybody, we got a great show coming up this weekend.

Can't wait to share with you here in a day or two.

And of course, we'll be back next week as well.

No Best of shows right now.

I think I'm going to be able to power through with surgery and stuff and get through all that.

And I know it's just a shoulder.

It's not like I can't walk.

But it's going to be a little interesting to see how it works with the schedule, but I think we've got it covered.

Have a great rest of the week, everybody.

We'll see you on Saturday.

If you want to find out more about us, head over to our website@aroundthehouseonline.com.

we'll see you then.

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