 The data that I'm looking at closely from the Federal Reserve, which was last time the typical homeowner in America has $300,000 in total wealth, which includes 401K, but housing would be the big component. Is it you guys that had a report that said that homeowners had a 40% higher net worth? We in the world would have million dollars for that small townhouse. Now you guys are great, great salesmen and you sound very confident that the market's going to be great at everything. We know that prices have increased much more since COVID. What's your outlook on the rest of the year in terms of prices? 10% reduction and... Yeah, yeah. No, it's something that I've brought up since I saw the report. Welcome back to the podcast everybody. Today I'm in Washington, D.C. here at a branch headquarters of the National Association of Realtors with Mr. Dr. Lawrence Yoon. How you doing, man? Good to see you. Good to see you. Yeah, absolutely, man. So Dr. Yoon here is the chief economist for NAR. And first off, thank you, man, for inviting me into your office here and having a convo with me. Well, you are very influential in the real estate industry and for the members. So very welcome. So I'm glad that when you reached out to me that we can work it out. Thank you. Thank you, man, so much. So this week you're having your legislative meetings, right? Which is somewhat of a conference. Yes. Right? Yeah, what the, what it consists of, what the objectives are. So we have about 10,000 realtors across the country coming into Washington. We hold it every year in May. Generally, they will speak with their members of Congress on certainly important real estate issue. One of the issues that we are fighting is capital gains tax reduction. Because as we know, home prices have risen so much that some people are not beginning to hit above the exemption level. And that is preventing people from selling their property, not going to a list. So we are talking about that on commercial real estate or investment property. 1031 exchange is very important to ensure that it's protected. Something unique this year at the baseball stadium where the nationals play is an off day. But we are going to have 10,000 realtors in that stadium. We are inviting all members of Congress, congressional staff to show up. We don't expect 100% participation from Congress, but maybe 80%, 90% people coming, shaking hands and talking about the real estate issues. Watching a baseball game? No baseball game. No baseball. Okay, just showing up, hanging out and having a little networking event. Nice, nice. So the capital gains issue. So that is the issue about someone living in their house for two years and then being able to sell that and avoid the capital gains. Yes. Right? That's the issue we're talking about. And so there's limits on that. What are the limits right now? So for the single individual, it's $250,000 for a married couple, it's a half a million dollars. I hope I got the numbers correct. But with the price increases in many parts of the country. Now some parts, like where you are from in Alabama, home prices are still very reasonable even after the price run up. So they're not reaching the top. Right. In other areas, they have surpassed the top and therefore when one sells a home, generally homeowners say, well, if I sell my home, I don't pay tax. I don't pay capital gains tax. Right, right, right. But now more and more Americans will face potential tax and we're saying, look, it has not been indexed to inflation. Price of everything is rising. We also need to raise the tax bracket appropriately to make it fair. Yeah, it almost falls in line with how much a bank account should be insured for, right? $250,000 is not like it, not what it used to be. So the $250,000 for a single $500,000 for a couple, that's the capital gains, right? Yes. So if you bought a house for $500,000, just generally speaking, minus all your costs and everything, and you sell it over two years later, you claim it as your primary, you sell it for $750,000. That's a $250,000 gain. If you're a single person, you can do that and not pay taxes on that $250,000. That's right. If you sold it for a million, you wouldn't pay taxes on the first $250,000, but you would pay taxes on the second $250,000. Yeah, so say a place in Tampa Bay where they have seen price gain of 30% in a single year, in 12 months, 30% price gain, then another 10% gain, maybe this year it's going to be more neutral, flat line, but nonetheless, say someone who bought 10 years ago, they may be beginning to hit that limit and we don't want that situation where a homeowner begin to think about tax implication because they always thought you buy a home, you sell it, you don't pay tax, and then you move on to the next one, but the tax could prevent some people from wanting to sell. Now, I didn't think about this when it comes to inventory, right? Because I think builders are down, I think existing homeowners are sitting on two, three, four percent interest rates and they feel locked into their homes, and now you're introducing a new problem and that is the possible capital gains because of this ceiling on what you can sell it for. That is a big problem. Yeah, if it was index to inflation, I think one can clearly understand but it has not been changed for I think over 20 years or even 25 years, so given price of everything is rising, price of eggs are rising, the amount that can be excluded from the tax should also be rising. And then the 1031, what do you guys, what's the current situation and what are you guys proposing for that? Well, you know, current situation is a good system where 1031 exchange offers say investment property owners, a commercial real estate deal, you sell a property, so in order to say defer taxes, you invest in other similar property and then one do not have to pay taxes or condition, but Congress is saying, look, we don't know what this is, let's take it away. We think this is a tax loophole, but our study is showing that once you take away all these many commercial deals will not happen, investment deals will not happen, and it actually reduces economic activity, so we are trying to show all the numbers. So they're trying to take it away completely. There are some, I always had some discussion and there are some permanent members of Congress who every year wants to move it, but then we have to convince the middle, the large section of the middle, believe to say this is very important for economic growth and for the local community. Yeah, I love that NARA comes in and it's not just about real estate agents, it's not just about the agents and the things to do with specifically agents. You guys are diving into consumer, everyday buyers and sellers and trying to do what's better for the overall population, not just real estate agents. The organization is comprised of members, committees, participation, so they express what they are seeing from their clients. So if they are sensing their homeowners are feeling a little nervous about the capital gains tax, that filters up and through the discussion they say, you know, NARA should be focusing on this issue or that issue and certainly we know the importance of real estate for the health of the economy and just American dream, people want to live a good life and real estate provided opportunity through that ownership. Yeah, yeah, I love that, I love learning about that today. Switching gears to the feds, raising rates, I believe you put an article out that said it was harmful, unnecessary. What did you mean there, why did you say that? The Federal Reserve job, their mandate is to control inflation and with inflation having run up to 9% last year, you can say they did not do their job. Now one can say that there's other factors that was outside of the Federal Reserve control that causes that. But since their job is to control inflation, they say, well in order to control it, less raise interest rate and they have aggressively raised interest rate, the fastest rising interest rate in short durations since early 1980s and also filters are feeling this impact, clients are feeling the impact, people who thought they could buy a home suddenly realized, oh no I cannot make that mortgage payment, I have to back away and my comment on the latest increase is really related to more of a small bank's failures. Many small banks, they did a prudent investment, you receive some deposit and they said, I'm going to put it in safe asset like US government bond, which pay 2% interest. But as long as you are paying the depositors 0%, making 2% is not that bad. But if the depositors leave and they are leaving because now Fed has raised interest rate, they are saying okay come put your money in my bank, put your 3%, so the money is leaving, it's flipping, many small banks upside down, so the small bank cannot lend and they are in a more of a zombie mode, so this is already tightening the policy beyond what the Federal Reserve is doing, Fed needs to be aware of this and therefore I think it's an unnecessary harm on the latest rate increase. Basically you feel like that inflation is coming down and the feds have already done their job to try to initiate that and they are just not being patient enough. So the inflation was 9% middle of last summer by Christmas, inflation was coming down to about 7%, the latest number is 5% and interesting part is that the biggest component of the inflation is related to housing. Now home prices are not part of inflation, so it's the rental component and what the homeowners would pay in rent hypothetically, so when they look at the rent, rents are still rising strongly, so what's happening right now is that overall inflation is coming down at a time when rents are not yet coming down, but rents will come down because we have so much apartment construction across the country, all these empty rental units coming onto the market, so Fed needs to be mindful, yeah inflation will come down by year end, so there's no need to raise interest rates. I'm sure that people may have confused the comment with thinking that you're referencing mortgage rates because from what I gather through doing this, I realize that there's a lot of the general public that doesn't realize that mortgage rates are more tied towards inflation rather than the Fed rate. You guys are predicting mortgage rates continue to ease throughout the year and into next year. Tell us how you come to this conclusion, what are you looking at, what data, walk us through the process of that, just so people are looking to buy a house, real estate agents, whoever, kind of understand the mechanics there. So when the Fed raises interest rates, it's not a one-to-one relationship with mortgage rates. In fact, sometimes even in news, we'll say Federal Reserve raises interest rates and then you look at the mortgage rate, it actually declines. So it's going in opposite direction. But if you look at it over a longer time horizon, when Fed raises interest rate, it just generally pushes up the mortgage rate even with some bounces. And when the Fed reduces interest rate, it's going to do the same. So the market, the mortgage market, are beginning to price in that the Federal Reserve will stop raising interest rate and may even cut interest rate towards the year end or early next year as they see the inflation numbers are much calmer. So how do I come to the forecast of mortgage rate going from current around 6.5% average to possibly 6% or even below? There's two factors. One is inflation will come down, that will help on the mortgage rate or the thinking on the Federal Reserve about possibly cutting interest rate, which the Wall Street will factor that in. The second big factor as to why mortgage rate could go down is the following. If you look at most mortgages consumers take out, FHA mortgages, their government guarantee, veterans' affairs mortgage, the veterans for their service, government guarantee. Even mortgages originated by Bank of America or rocket mortgages eventually get sold to Fannie and Freddie who are government guarantee. So what does the government guarantee mean? That means that if homeowner defaults on their mortgage, people who provided the money, say the Wall Street through the process, they still get the money back through the government. So there's an incentive to provide that liquidity to the mortgage market. And consequently, historically, if the government borrows at one rate, mortgages with government guarantee is only a little bit above that. In fact, to use a little bit technical term is 170 basis point above that, which is historical average. The 10 year treasury. Right now it is 300 basis point. So if we can just get back to the normal spread, I think this morning, treasury yields were 3.5%, under normal spread, mortgage rate would be 5.4%, whatever. And the three point spread now is that I've heard different things. Do you think the most sensible one I've heard is that because the government backed and people buy these mortgages on the second market, that they feel like since rates are high, people are going to refinance when rates come down and they feel like they have to make something off these mortgages that they're only going to keep short term. Do you feel like that's the case of why we're seeing this three point spread versus the normal one and a half to two percent spread? So, you know, it's interesting why we have this large spread. Again, you know, it's a government guarantee. It's a sure. But, you know, one of the reasons could be that Federal Reserve is unwinding something called quantitative easing. So during the early months of COVID, they went all in to provide maximum liquidity. They said, we're going to buy mortgage-backed securities, all these securities, which provided the liquidity. Now the Fed is saying, we are holding on to too much. We have to sell it into the market so they are reversing that process so that it's also causing a little spread. But also the possibility of refinance and some of the wholesale mortgage market, they lost money when the Fed aggressively raised interest rate. So, you know, they lend money to the home borrowers. They wanted to sell it to the Wall Street after packaging. But given the mortgage rate went up so much, so many people lost money temporarily and now they want to at least compensate for some of the losses they experienced. That makes a lot of sense. So inventory. Okay, let's talk about that for a second because it seems to me in the 80s when we had 30% less people in the country, 30% less existing homes. I'm just guessing on those numbers. But we had anywhere from 2 to 3 million homes per sale at any given time during that entire decade. And then we come into the 90s and 2000s where it ran up to 4 million in 2008. And now we're sitting under a million. If you take out pending deals, we're probably around 500,000 or so. This is the real crisis, I believe. I guess my question, do you have you thought about where this so-called inventory could possibly come from? Builders are down, existing homeowners don't want to sell for another reason I learned today. Foreclosures aren't even half of where they were pre-pandemic. People have so much equity in their homes if they did become defaulted, they could just sell the property. Most people are in a situation where they could sell and take money off the table. Do you have any idea where we could see a flow of inventory? I mean, the natural process is for the builders to build this empty home. We have a rising population. Naturally it means we need to build more. Now, of course, when you build it, it's generally unaffordable home, larger size, more modern. It's not for the first-time buyers, but it's for the trade-up buyers. And as trade-up buyers buy, they release their old inventory. So at least the chain reaction will help that process. And the builders were greatly under-building for almost 10 years going into COVID. So we actually had a housing shortage in 2019. It simply got a very acute, exacerbated shortage during COVID, and we are still in that shortage situation. Talking about this 10,000 realtors in Washington, another issue that we're saying is we are short on inventory. This is denying many young families from participating in American Dream because of lack of inventory. Is there a quick way to release inventory? Because building takes time. It's not multi-year. Something that can be done immediately. So one thing we are also talking to members of Congress is to say, look, real estate investors, there's some investment property out there. If they sell property, they face capital gains tax, and you can say that's fair, but now in a time of inventory shortage, can we reduce the capital gains tax, even say six-month window, whatever it is, to incentivize some of the real estate investors to say, look, this is a great access strategy, and you can reduce capital gains tax temporarily if you sell it to a genuine first-time buyer or say a buyer who owns an occupancy. So we are in the initial stage of discussion. Let's see how it moves along. But generally speaking, you say investment property owners, certainly they must be a little wealthier than general population, and you may say that's correct, but at the same time, we need inventory for many first-time buyers, young people who want to buy. So we are in discussion of that. Seems like we're in this vicious cycle. I saw an article where Zonda did a survey that 98% of millennials want to be homeowners because they want to build their own equity instead of someone else's. And so I went back and I looked at you guys' reports that said that the average age of a first-time home buyer was 33 in 2021 and 36 in 2022. So that kind of tells me first-time home buyers earn that 33 to 36 age range, which are the millennials, which make up 72 million Americans, and 98% of them, according to the survey, want to become homeowners. So I looked back at birth rates and realized in 1990, 33 years ago, we had a massive spike. And so we have this record number of 33-year-olds this year who will be 34 next year, 35. Then we have another group, and that birth rate stays about the same for a good 16 years. I believe that we're in a situation where we have more pints of demand of people who want to buy houses, not just housing, rentals, but these people want to buy. I think we have more pints of demand, of course. I believe you guys' report 27% or so last month or whatever it was. We're first-time home buyers. So this group makes up a big chunk of the people buying houses. And I think that with interest rates, these people back on the sidelines for just momentarily until rates kind of come down. And as rates come down into the sixes and opens up the floodgates, we're going to be in this real situation, I believe. And do you believe that, do you think, not to put you on the spot to speculate, but I just have this theory that we're kind of in this perfect storm of no inventory, more pints of demand than ever, and dwindling mortgage rates, which is going to open up this massive wave of buyers with no inventory and possibly create a price situation, again, not as bad I don't believe as it was in 2021, but isn't that, I know home prices aren't necessarily tied to inflation, but it trickles down to supplies and wood and lumber and everything else, create a second wave of inflation, which will then bring mortgage rates back up and then we're just in this vicious cycle because of the situation we're in with inventory and supply and demand. Well, I mean, you know the numbers we get, so like the demographics, how many people are in their 30s and so forth. You are doing a lot of homework, so you're natural with the numbers. But you are right in terms of pent-up demand and the desire for home ownership. Even if the survey was slightly off, say 90% of the millennials want to buy, this is part of the American dream. They know that homeowners bill well, you pay rent check, that goes away, it just goes away, so people understand that. So when the mortgage rate, the anticipated drop in mortgage rate that is anticipated, means that the gates will open, maybe not a massive amount, I don't expect 3% mortgage rate for the remainder of my lifetime. I think people got 3%, congratulations, it was your bonus rate. I don't like the term locked in sound like you are in a jail. No, people are loving it, people are loving that 3%. In fact, they are loving it so much that if there is an additional child in the family, generally they need to move to another house with a larger bedroom. But they don't, they're saying, I love my 3% more than the baby. So people are, you know, but I think eventually you have all these pent-up sellers. So jobs are constantly changing, maybe the new job is on the other side of the town, but they're postponing that movement because again they love their 3%. So there's a degree of pent-up sellers and if the gap between 3% rate that homeowners have and the market interest rate begins to decline, it's going to begin to facilitate some selling because it's just natural to say, no, this house simply do not fit my lifestyle. But we need to reduce that gap and I think the gap will begin to narrow based on my, hopefully it turns out correctly that inflation comes down, or reserve begins to reverse some of the policy, mortgage rate comes down, so that's going to open up some of the pent-up sellers coming into the market. But we need more home-building to assure that there is plenty adequate supply for rising population that's occurring. Yeah, builders couldn't keep up before and now they're down from where they were and now I believe we've got more people in the market who want to become a first-time home buyer. Something's got to give and I've been saying maybe there needs to be some kind of policy around incentivizing builders to build more or something of that nature, just throwing stuff out there. You know, realtors are very smart, so when we have 10,000 realtors there's 10,000 opinions, 10,000 viewpoints and yes, there is a lot of viewpoint to say that sometimes the builders are hinder at the local level on excessive regulation so they're spending $70,000 just filling out the form to assure that water regulation and all this part that makes the home-building very costly. So if one was to reduce some of the regulation then we can do more ready supply more supply coming onto the market. We need clean water, we need clean air, but we also need more housing so we have to see what the bright balance is. We cannot be so restrictive to say oh, if you dig a ground it's going to damage something. We have to start building more homes. Yeah, yeah. Let's switch over to affordability for a second because that's a big issue with a lot of people. A lot of the people who talk about how bad the market is talk about how a lot of Americans can't afford to buy a house. Back in 2020 I believe the average was $1,072 your mortgage payment and it peaked out about $2,000 a month, which is double back in November-ish and now we're down to $1,700 and something, but still way above where it was we do have a household income up to try to compensate that for a little bit, but just so they can hear from the horse's mouth on affordability what is your viewpoint of affordability to buy a house and where is it going and how are we going to solve that problem? In terms of the affordability of home price and income, yes, incomes are rising and currently about 30% of the markets across the country is actually seeing some reduction in prices. San Francisco being the most extreme example but like where you are from prices are still rising. I've been talking to realtors from say Charlotte or Atlanta prices are still bumping up in fact about one third of the newly listed properties with multiple offers and being sold above so demand is there but the interest rates haven't even dwindled down yet so the affordability is first we need income to catch up with some of the price gain that occurred, but more importantly mortgage rates to reverse and go down so that will make the affordability easier, but the longer haul longer haul is that we don't want to see sudden spike in prices in the future it's good for homeowners it's a very bad news for first time buyers we want that latter of opportunity to become homeowners to be there without a missing run and only way to do that is to have adequate continuous supply of new construction with a rising population to occur and so this would be it and the other part that's happening on affordability is I mentioned San Francisco prices going down small townhouse, million dollars and just how in the world would pay a million dollars for that small townhouse well if you are unhappy with it go to Alabama and buy a mansion for you know, 800,000 dollars so I think many office workers who have little more flexibility to work remote maybe either they go to the next county which is more affordable or in some cases all remote work you may see people migrating out of expensive cities and going into middle America to say I can buy a mansion and live a more peaceful life So your message to people who have been priced out of the market is maybe look in different areas I think even the next county could just simply offer especially if one do not have to commute to downtown every single day if it's a hybrid model two times a day coming into office well less commuting means you can live further out Yeah, I didn't think about that so people watching this some people may be come from the mindset that you guys are real estate agents Ricky you're a real estate agent you're with NAR you can twist the data around however you want to and make it look good or bad you guys are great sales people that's what I hear a lot you're a great salesman and you're still very confident that the market is going to be great and everything what do you say to people like that that you may say we're just great sales people we're just twisting data around to make it look like it's something great on our benefit so that people buy houses so we make commissions One thing is that I speak with many other economists and some economists are very pessimistic either about the economy future direction of the US say fiscal policy, national debt level being so high or it's very specific to housing so I hear all this discussion but at the end of the day I think one has to just look at the factual information the factual information is the following we don't have those risky sub-prime lending that gave mortgages to anyone with a heartbeat no income documentation, good thing so now people are getting mortgages are soundly qualified unless they were to lose their job which is a little different story fortunately we are still adding job for all so that's helping that picture so we don't have bad mortgages which is the reason why we don't have any increase in foreclosures in any meaningful way currently one can do a lot of analysis here and there and one can make a very logical conclusion to say don't buy home at this moment but the end bottom line is homeowners build well how we came out with a report recently to show that in the past decade someone who owned their property in the US they have gained over $100,000 just by being homeowners so people who make those pessimistic assessment well they will do their analysis but what do homeowners do independent of analysis their wealth grows so I think you know that was it you guys that had a report that said that homeowners were 40% had a 40% higher net worth than a renter 40 times more the data that I'm looking at closely from the Federal Reserve which was last time they came in with the report was 2019 pre-COVID but we know that prices have increased much more since COVID so accounting for that sort of conservative estimate is typical homeowner in America has $300,000 in total wealth which includes 401K but housing will be the big component while the renters typically have only about $5,000 so that is a 40 multiple difference yeah, yeah it's something that I've brought up since I saw the report I don't remember exactly what you guys' projection was for prices in your last projection what's your outlook on the rest of the year in terms of prices, home prices so I'm going to do the economic model spits out actual precise figure now don't rely too much on the precise figure but it's just baseline yeah, yeah so home sales this year will be down 9% home prices will be down 2% because like San Francisco they are experiencing quite a meaningful decline in San Francisco areas and also some of the fast growing regions like Austin, Nashville, Boise super strong job market prices simply got ahead way too fast compared to fundamentals I think in the past since pre-COVID prices in Austin grew by 70% now they are seeing 10% decline someone who bought one year ago maybe they are unhappy someone who bought a home 3 years ago in Austin what's the big deal so overall forecast is that 9% reduction in unit sales because first half we are still down I think the second half will turn positive year over year gains but insufficient to make up for some of the first half declines what about January 1 to January 1? it was down about 20% 20% on the unit sales but 2024 things will light up mortgage rate a little lower assuming job gains continue I'm looking at 10% 15% unit sales growth and prices turning positive 3, 4, 5% next year so this year is a transition year for people in the real estate industry a little transition year one can say even last year was a transition year but 2024 things will really light up one can even say even second half of this year one will begin to see that steady improvement occurring earlier this year there was a report that said we were on track to do 4.6 million sales 4.66 or something and then the latest report showed 4.4 so that's a deceleration of number of transactions is that what you guys are seeing and you think that's just going to continue and how many transactions for existing home sales are you projecting for the year? the year is 4.7 million so second half again being a little better than the first half but let's just put it into perspective pre-COVID 2019 home sales were running close to 5.5 million go back to year 2000 maybe some of the people in the audience were not even born in the year 2000 in year 2000 there was 5.2 million home sales with a population that was about 40 million fewer Americans so when we project a forecast of 4.7 million this year this is below the baseline so there will be a little bounce coming up in the upcoming years just to reach back to the baseline now switching gears to real estate agents number of agents in the country based on what I saw I didn't look at it with a microscope but based on what I saw it looked like we saw the first year over year true decline since the great recession in terms of number of agents is that right? what are you seeing there do you guys have projections there what are you guys seeing talk to me about your thoughts on as far as just how many agents are out there and what direction that's going in pre-COVID 2019 1.4 million agents realtor members then it peaked at 1.6 million I think by 2-3 years from now it's going to settle down at around 1.4 million range go back to pre-COVID condition I always admire the entrepreneurial spirit of Americans want to try out business so I admire but the reality is real estate business is super competitive out there given so much competition not everyone can succeed and when we look at the data roughly about 10% or even some years bad years 15% of the members would drop out of course the other new members who are joining in and trying out their entrepreneurial skills I'm not an actual business person which skills work better than others but we know it's a fiercely competitive industry out there 20% of the agents make 6-figure gross commission income 20% about 20% then you have about 30% of agents who make less than 20,000 in gross commission income and you have the business expense and you feel like they were just spinning wheel there's a good 20% who actually are making 11 basically doing this good living I've heard numbers but it's hard to really confirm there's another 1.5 million who are real estate agents but not realtors, not members of NAR is that true? so the realtor membership is today about 1.5 million then there's another 1.5 million who have real estate license realtor members but many tends to be inactive so maybe they have left the business but their license is still valid so it could be that or people who are just viewing it part-time I'm not sure exactly reason but in terms of the productivity realtor members are doing driving business compared to people who are just holding real estate license and let's just clarify for the audience if you are not part of NAR if you're a member of NAR that means you pay membership to NAR not just the local board it's an additional fee on top of your local board of realtors membership so we have a 3-way agreement which means that as a realtor you want to use the name realtor name along with other access of realtor resources like RPR database property specific so other trying to utilize as a member so once realtor decides to pay a due they're not paying for any specific association they're paying all that goes to 3 associations how it gets divided it depends upon locality and state they cannot say okay I want to pay to local association but I don't want to pay to state association it doesn't work like that they pay it automatically so when you pay your local board that's paying for your NAR membership as well the state membership and national members so these agents that aren't a member means that they have a license but they're not part of their local board is that what that means? and that could fall could also commercial agents who aren't part of their local boards for residential could that also could commercial agents fall into the category of people who aren't members of NAR so commercial real estate licensing actually that's a good question that I don't have a good answer to but we know that many commercial real estate practitioners are not necessarily realtor because they use different MLSs and stuff right different I was wondering about that so it could be people who aren't part of their local board because they can't afford the fees they're still active but you know residential agents or commercial agents who just aren't members of their local board okay that's interesting so we were talking before and just to give everybody a little bit of your background you were born in South Korea came here when you were eight years old South Carolina and went to Purdue absolutely and you've been a part you've been the chief economist for NAR for how long so I joined NAR from a year 2000 as a junior economist in the back office then we had that foreclosure crisis in 2008 things rolled up and then prior chief economists left and then they were searching for it and they said well would you like to come in and try to fix the thing but you know one thing great is not my efforts the efforts of realtors, advocacy team all through communication channels we were able to pass something called home buyer tax credit back during 2008 essentially to say we have abundance of inventory, not enough buyers can we provide simple incentive to get the buyers back into the market even temporarily to stop the bleeding so buy a home and one gets $7,500 that's the tax legislation that the realtors worked on I remember that it sounds like the exact conversation you're having now just opposite we need more supply back then it was can we find some buyers can we do something even temporarily to get more buyers we need sellers can we do something even temporary to get more sellers on behalf of myself all the real estate agents out there we appreciate you and all you do for us and the general population thank you so much for your time today this has been a great interview and let's do it again good questions, great conversation thank you sir, have a good day