Shaun Cathcart – New Year, New Housing Market?

Erin Davis: Hi there, and welcome to REAL TIME, the podcast for Canadian REALTORS®. I'm your host, Erin Davis. As we move into 2023, we are joined today by Shaun Cathcart, Director and Senior Economist, Housing Data and Market analysis at the Canadian Real Estate Association. On this episode 34, Shaun helps REALTORS® start the new year with a better understanding of Canada's housing market, how it's changed over the last few years, what's driving these changes, and most importantly, what it could look like for you, for me, for all of us in 2023. Well, Happy New Year, Shaun. Happy Lunar New Year, too. Thanks for joining us for our first episode of 2023. It's so good to have you back on with us again.

Shaun Cathcart: Happy new year, Erin. It's good to be back.

Erin: Thank you. Let me think, Lunar New Year, Year of the Rabbit. Is this going to be a year of the rabbit, do you think, for Canada and the real estate market?

Shaun: Not for the housing market. Maybe more like a tortoise.

Erin: All right, with that in mind, we will move forward slowly, cautiously, and let's start, Shaun, with a basic understanding of what you do as CREA's senior economist. Would you give us not your elevator pitch per se, but just who you are, what you do, and why it's so important and wonderful that we have you with us here today?

Shaun: Well, I've been working at CREA for a long time, working with the data. Didn't start off as a senior person, but this many years later, here I am in charge of our housing data and market analysis program. We have a small team of data wizards and economists who do all of the data processing and a lot of automation, as you can imagine. We've got a hundred different regions, so we can't be writing reports and making charts and stuff for all of them. We need to automate a lot of that using computer programming, forecasting and presentations, and all that sort of thing. Obviously, out there in the media having to be the spokesperson for a lot of what we're saying. I guess that's the short version.

Erin: Well, you have been everywhere of late because everybody wants to know what's coming in the year ahead, and because CREA is the authority. Do some bragging here. We're totally going to allow this, because what kind of housing market intelligence, the kind that you provide, is not just typical, which you can also explain for us, if you wouldn't mind, but also the best out there that there is. I've laid it out there. Shaun, if you could fill in the blanks for us. What is it that you do that makes the information that you provide so vital?

Shaun: Well, you don't have to take my word for it. I think the attention that it gets out there in the world says it all. You can get housing data from StatCan, it's sort of census data. It's very much data around, like the housing stock and that sort of thing. You can get housing data from CMHC, which is a lot of new builds, rental market starts, and completions and that, but the bulk of what goes on in the housing market is in the resale market. That comes from MLS systems of real estate boards and associations across Canada.

That is the data that we access for 100 regions across Canada, aggregate it to the provincial and territorial level, and then to the Canada level to create this data set that goes back more than four decades. With our partners in organized real estate that are generous to give this to us every month, it's their data, and we hope that we can turn it around and make REALTORS® the authority on what's going on.

The reason our data set is so popular, mostly because it contains the price piece, which I think is what most people are interested in, because a lot of people own homes. They want to know what the value of their biggest asset is doing but our data also has a lot of demand and supply information in it that tells you why prices are doing what they're doing and what they're likely to do next.

I think that it is the preeminent housing data set in Canada. Like I say, we operate a little bit of a mini StatCan. We even work with StatCan to seasonally adjust it. We've got a lot of partners there and this data set goes out far and wide. The bank of Canada and Finance and all the big banks and financial institutions and governments and everyone wants to see what's going on in this data set. It's our job to put it together and make sure that everything is correct and well vetted and goes out on time every month.

Erin: Wow, and with huge thanks to the big boards who make this all possible too. It's not just the big picture that you talk about too, but that you can boil it down from national to your province to your region, even down to your house. That's got to be super useful for REALTORS®, that granular information that you are providing for them.

Shaun: One of the neat pieces of data that we do have is the MLS home price index which is the best measure of home prices in the world. No one else in the world has anything like this thing, it is just the absolute best. I remember back in school 20-plus years ago, professors talking about how in theory, this would be a really neat thing you could do with this kind of mathematics and this kind of information, the granularity you get from an MLS system.

Big data before big data was even a term, and this is something that over the last 10 years with our partners in organized Real Estate across the country and Altus Group, particularly the group based out of Quebec City who were the pros of this stuff. We have put together this, it's basically a national index at this point, but I can give the example of my own self. I can drill down from Canada to Ontario, to Ottawa, to West Ottawa, to Bellaire Park, which is my little neighborhood.

If I went out for a jog, I could run around it in five minutes. That's how granular it is to my house. Type two-story little detached, I can see all of the attributes of my house, which matches up exactly with what the house is like mine are in this neighborhood, and I can see the entire price history of what that's been doing, including right up until yesterday basically. It's a really, really neat product that REALTORS® can use to help clients price their homes and understand what's going on at that hyper-local level.

Erin: That's incredible. That is incredible. You have seen the future evolve, although you haven't just seen it, you've been a part of it as well. I have to go back to the best in the world. Why Canada? Why us, and what kind of challenges did you have, Shaun, aggregating all of this information for such a huge country, not big in population when you compare us to our neighbors to the south, but why are we the best in the world? I hate to keep focusing on making you brag, but it really is something to be proud of.

Shaun: Well, there's a lot that organized real estate in Canada does have to be proud of. We have a really great federation where we're not a disparate regions, all of these boards are local, but they're all part of the same system, I suppose, the same federation, and so that enables us to capture everything. We're not missing coverage really anywhere, and so that's one of the advantages. It is a challenge to maintain all of those relationships and make sure that we're gathering data from all of those different places in a timely way, because we always talk about the last horse across the line oftentimes.

In January, you get somebody from a smaller board that takes an extra week of vacation after the holiday season and there's no one to send us the data, so that can be challenging. Obviously, the HPI was a challenge because it's a really big complicated project that you've got to bring a lot of people to the table and get agreement on how it's going to play out. That's where we are, and that's why we have the best housing market intelligence of any country in the world, I think.

Erin: Coming up, how that hindsight, that 2020 vision helps us pull into focus what's on the way. As 2022 wrapped up, CREA donated a check for $5,000 to the Canadian Hospital Aid Society of Calgary in honor of local REALTOR® and superstar Lorna Hamm. She's the recipient of the Canadian REALTORS Care® Award presented by REALTOR.ca for her remarkable commitment to her community of Calgary. Learn more about Lorna's amazing contribution to her city and the people who needed her help by going to REALTORSCare.ca.

If you are doing good and we know you are, please put it out there on social media using #REALTORSCare, and thank you. Now, back to CREA Senior economist, Shaun Cathcart on REAL TIME. There's a saying that you should look through the windshield because it's much bigger and you want to see where you're going and not in the rearview mirror, and there's a reason that it's smaller. I think we need to look in the rearview mirror when it comes to what's happening in the housing market. Let's do that, Shaun, and paint a picture for us, if you would, of Canada's housing market pre pandemic. Let's go back there, shall we, before we look through the windshield?

Shaun: That's a great question. It's one that almost never gets asked of me, even though it's one that I always want to answer because there's this inclination for people to say like, "Man, COVID made the housing market go crazy," but I would trace a lot of what's happened in recent years, a lot of the seller's market, the multiple offers, the big price gains. I would trace that all the way back to a starting point around 2015 when the price of oil crashed when the Canadian dollar went from par with the US dollar to 70 cents, when the oil patch really cooled down, but everywhere else in the country, particularly manufacturing places that export to the United States started to heat up and most places took a number of years to heat up slowly but some places did flare up.

A lot of that migration that was all going to Alberta for a while sought out other opportunities in the immediate wake of the oil price crash. A lot of it went to the lower mainland which was the first part of the country to really flare up and look like what we've seen during COVID. We saw that in Vancouver in 2015/'16 just as the psychology was peaking and there was no inventory and multiple offers on everything, double-digit price growth.

Governments came in and were like, "We're going to put us off to this. We're going to make things affordable." The policies that they had brought in wouldn't really be all that impactful on the market, but it was the impact on the psychology that sent everyone to the sidelines and said, "Whoa, what are they going to do here?"

That was the first example of that that we saw. It happened a year later in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, General region around Toronto. These days, it seems like it stretches all the way from London to Kingston where the same thing happened. We went from months of inventory to weeks of inventory. Everything was being bought up, 30% price growth. The Ontario government came in and said, "Fair Housing Plan. We're going to make housing affordable."

Nothing in that was really that impactful from a policy standpoint but the psychology changed in an instant. That was the second example of that that we saw. Then obviously during COVID, we saw the entire country join in and do the exact same thing. When it became apparent that the Bank of Canada was going to be raising rates quite dramatically in 2022, the psychology snapped just the same as we'd seen it before in Toronto and Vancouver, and then here we are today.

Erin: Leading up to 2020, it was truly a seller's market. You talk about markets evolving from high to low inventory over five to six years, and then COVID. We're going to talk about COVID. You say that people say that, "Oh, COVID did this, COVID did that." You saw things happening. What is the biggest thing about COVID that stands out as one of the most significant changes you've seen over the last few years, from sales activity to prices and such? We've all got myriad ways in which COVID changed our lives, but what do you see in the big picture there, Sean?

Shaun: Sure. As much as a lot of that was developing beforehand, it was made that much more extreme by COVID. People say COVID acted as a turbocharger on so many trends. This is another one where we may have had price growth that was running at 15% per year in a non-COVID world, which would've still been making headlines. In the COVID world it was 30%, right?

Erin: Yes.

Shaun: The most striking thing to me looking at resale market data, is in the not new home construction, but the existing market was how many sales were happening. Because in a normal good year in recent years, we would have half a million sales happen. During COVID, we're popping up 700,000 at one point on an annualized basis. I think in March of 2021 it was 800 and something thousand. How is it that there are so many sales happening?

Well, the unique feature about COVID was when you didn't have to commute to the office anymore and your kids weren't commuting to school, you didn't really have to live within that small circle of possible housing options that you thought was your forever home. You could really cast a much wider net and inter-provincial migration data from StatCam shows it, in Truck Provincial data within provinces, people moving from one city to another.

People moved around during COVID more than they ever had before and that's the most unique feature. That's why we're very unlikely to ever see a sales number, at least not for a very long time, that's going to match that 2021 numbers, such a unique feature. It wasn't just regular housing demand, it was churn, it was the ability for people to pull up stakes and move where they thought they would be in the same place for decades, and then all of a sudden, they found themselves going from Toronto to North Bay or Winnipeg to Halifax or whatever it is.

That was the most unique thing about COVID. I think that's probably mostly done at this point unless people get called back to the office and they end up moving back in the other direction. We'll see.

Erin: Well, that's what I wanted to ask you. Have you seen the inverse of this yet? Have you seen any kind of a bounce back where people are moving back to, for example, metropolitan areas?

Shaun: I wouldn't say that we're seeing it as obviously as in the direction of people leaving. That interprovincial migration from Central Canada out to the coasts has there been a big reversal of that. There's been a reversal of people going back to Saskatchewan and Alberta, but that's for economic opportunities.

Erin: That's very interesting, boy. You have a lot of crystal balls on the go there with your data and all of the tools. Could you ever have predicted that this might be some of the fallout of COVID? When we were actually told to shelter in place, people went, "Okay, I've had enough of this and we're going to do something else." It's a whole human nature and psychology thing, Shaun, but did any of the crystal balls say, hang tight, this is going to get really interesting?

Shaun: Boy. It became apparent at some point that maybe it wasn't so much the people moving around the country, but definitely, people looking for more or different things out of their home was another reason there was a lot of churn. I want to work out at home. I need room for a gym, I'm working from home. I need a home office. My kids are doing school from home. We want more green space.

Maybe we don't want to be as close to other people. If you can remember what that was like back in the early stages of the, could we have seen it coming? Boy. The only prediction that I made during COVID that I think I got right, I got really slammed for in the comments section, I learned my lesson to never read the comments section, was a video I did with a fairly major national news outlet early on.

That was a long form one where I'd made the comment. It was in the very early days when the data was very bad and everyone was really freaking out about what the market was going to do. I said, ''Look we came into this pandemic with a really red hot market, and that's not normally a good thing for things to be that out of balance.''

If you're going to have a big bucket of cold water thrown on you a good place to start is to be red hot. I think that ended up being true. As far as things rebounding and going crazy the way they did we didn't necessarily predict that things were going to go off a cliff, but to come to the defense of those who did nobody knew that rates were going to get dropped the way they were.

Nobody knew about the support programs that were going to come out. Nobody could gauge to your point, the psychology of the world has changed and my whole life has changed and I'm going to change where I live. I don't think anyone predicted that. I think that the best we could do was we track daily data so that we could see it coming before anyone else, and that was about the best we could do. We're about a month ahead of everyone else.

Erin: Up next with CREA Senior Economist, Shaun Cathcart, the part of our country that seems to have staved off the biggest whiplash after that highest of highs, REALTOR.ca sent 5.7 million leads to REALTORS® in 2022. On average, 54 leads are sent to REALTORS® every 5 minutes. These leads are exclusively available to you as a benefit of your CREA membership. Of course, is information you're hearing today on REAL TIME.

Let's get back to our discussion with Sean Cathcart, shall we, Sean, you mentioned one region of Canada in particular and going back to 2015 with the oil patch crash and all of that, there is a region of Canada that didn't join the 30% price growth, but actually is having now a better outcome because of it. Can we look at that for a sec?

Shaun: Sure. Again, that's your Alberta, Saskatchewan the places that were still as everyone else was heating up from 2015 to 2020 they were still pretty cool looking in that part of the country prices melting high inventories. I guess to come back to my previous analogy, if you're going to have a market that suddenly goes red hot and you don't want it to come out of control, a good place to start is on the cold side.

What I would say about Alberta and Saskatchewan is the analogy I like is they showed up really late to the COVID party and didn't see any anywhere near that price growth and for that reason, they got a lot less of a hangover right now.

Erin: There you go.

Shaun: Those are the parts of the country that are actually from a sales activity standpoint above average prices holding on pretty well. Pretty much the only part of the country where prices are really holding on and aren't off that peak at all. It's something to watch. Definitely almost like a reversal back to the way things were prior to 2015 in a way.

Erin: No kidding. The market has felt like a roller coaster with those exceptions of Alberta and Saskatchewan that you talk about these past few years, it's been whiplash watching things. Do you think, Sean, that this degree of flux is the new normal?

Shaun: I don't think it's the new normal. I certainly hope it's not because it's very stressful, I think, back to my life doing this job before COVID, analyzing a 2% increase and a 1% decrease, and trying to figure out what it meant. It was a lot less stressful than sales plunging off a cliff and then flying into the stratosphere. I don't suspect we're ever going to see volatility again like we saw during COVID unless we have an event that's as big as COVID. I'm thinking that things are going to settle back down, and so the real question for the market is where are they going to settle and when are they going to settle, I suppose?

Erin: Has it become harder or easier to predict housing trends?

Shaun: Both, it depends on your time frame and it depends on what you're talking about, easier in some ways during COVID when a global pandemic hit, it was easy to forecast that activity was going to go down, and then when people started buying houses like crazy, it was easy to forecast that prices were going to go up.

Longer term, it's easy to forecast that the market is going to come back to a position of arguably too much strength relative to the supply because the demographics are that strong and they will be, it's already happening and it's known, but where has it become harder? Well, it's become harder when you're forecasting 2020 back in 2019, and you don't foresee a global pandemic coming.

It's harder in 2021 when you're forecasting 2022 and you don't foresee a generational inflation crisis, and so it really has been a roller-coaster, like you say. I think that the hope is that 2023 we're through COVID, we've tamed inflation to some extent and that we can barring the next crazy thing that happens. I've often joked that pandemic used to be used as an example of a crazy black swan event that could happen, but not so much anymore, so I was thinking maybe, I don't know, like super volcano or alien invasion or something.

Erin: Could you just not?

Shaun: Barring those things or something similar? I think that we're going to see things calm down, let's hope.

Erin: I sense a lot of optimism for you in the longer term because of the demographics for Canada. They are so strong, you've said that, and that it's easy to say that we're going to get back to trend and keep going. Is that even with inflation? What are you thinking here, Shaun?

Shaun: See, I'm not a professional inflation/Bank of Canada watcher, I watched the watchers though, and I know what they think, so the idea is that inflation has come off its peak, you could say, oh, that's just gas prices and maybe it is, but the bottom line is that it is moving in the right direction. It's widely thought that the Bank of Canada's very close to finishing up their tightening cycle, which is also going to be good for housing, it's not going back to rates that are going to be friendly to first-time buyers anytime soon, but you got to stop going up before you can start going down.

I think that that's where I'm looking at the demographic and the return to trend is more of a long-term thing that I think that we can really get, we're probably not going to get running on all cylinders again until 2025 when all of those first-time buyers can come back and have interest rates that are a bit more friendly. So it'll take us a-- It's a multi-year climb out of this situation, but I think that that's the direction it's going to be moving in.

Erin: Look at just how Shaun Cathcart with a little help know a lot of help from the boards who feed him data can peer into the future and help us all. REALTOR.ca is the only real estate portal that combines MLS system feeds from every real estate board and association in the country. First of all, it's right there at your fingertips. Learn more at REALTOR.ca. Now back to REAL TIME, the podcast for Canadian REALTORS® and even those of us who just watch and listen with interest. In this segment, we're going to take a look into 2023 and your forecasting, you've already mentioned 2025, but it's a little bit a closer focus, but before we do, Shaun, what factors influence how you forecast housing trends?

Shaun: Sure, the biggest factor that influences the way that you model data like this is the data itself, where it is that's your starting point for your forecast and what direction it's been moving in, historical volatility, and that sort of thing, and then you add in your various fundamental factors. Your longer term is population growth and just demand and supply in the housing market.

A shorter-term interest rate forecasts and employment forecasts that heavily influence the housing market in the short term, and you plug all this stuff into a model and you get your highs and your lows and your middle-of-the-range outputs, and then you can exercise some judgment within that range based on things that are not possible to put into a model. Those are the fundamental factors. The things that you would just assume is demographics, employment, interest rates, people that need to live somewhere, are they gainfully employed? Do they have a good confidence in the future and are they able to go out and borrow the money to buy that place?

Erin: It's so much more than just shoveling numbers into a magic generator of some kind. You have to use your gut when you're forecasting. You have to use your experience and you have to use your knowledge of how Canada works. Forecasting into this year ahead of us, what do you expect the housing market to look like, Shaun, based on the current available data and what you know?

Shaun: Right. The way that we're thinking about that we've published a forecast recently that people can go look at CREA.ca but I'm not going to get into super specific numbers. It's more of a narrative at this point. 2022 is the year where everything changed, interest rates went from zero to inflation-fighting mode in a year. Sales went from red hot to below average in a year.

Prices went from the biggest month-over-month increases ever, boom, boom in the winter of 2022 to the biggest declines we've ever seen, bearing in mind that they're still way up from before COVID, but they have given some of that back. Market conditions went from the tightest market conditions we've ever seen, one month of inventory nationally to much more in the balanced range still on the tight side, but a big change in the course of a year.

If 2022 is a year that all of that changed very rapidly, I think 2023 is the year that it stops changing at least. We have a year where things calm down, flatten out. We're already seeing that on the sales side. I'm seeing it on the price side in some markets, but that's not everywhere yet. That's still playing out on a downward trend a little bit. Interest rates flat to be close to a top at this point. That's going to stabilize.

2022, think of a year not of recovery, but of turnaround. Hopefully, we see some improvement on the road to 2024 where that's when we really start to see the improvement. Then I would think, even though our forecast doesn't go out this far, 2025 is the year where really the market is back running on all cylinders. It is a multi-year sort of climb out of this. 2023 is the year that we turned the corner, I suppose.

Erin: If I understand you correctly, Shaun, the decline was the steepest that wasn't a financial crisis but we started from the highest point, therefore, we come out ahead of where we would've otherwise. I'm not trying to turn this whole thing glass half full and half empty, but really, we are starting from a much higher basis point, are we not? Am I understanding this correctly?

Shaun: Yes. That applies to both when we talk about sales and prices being down. The only thing that really compares is the financial crisis, but the difference is in the financial crisis, sales went from Goldilock's middle of the road to ice cold, whereas this time they went from white hot to a little below average. It's a big decline but you need to think about what you're comparing where your starting point was. The same thing with prices.

Prices went down more in the last year than they did in the financial crisis, which is the only really, other time that we really saw a significant decline in recent history. They also went up in advance of that decline by way more so that, to your point, from the beginning point to where we are today is that much better. It's much higher and the sales picture is much more average as opposed to being historically low. Again, I come back to the point I think I made earlier that if you're going to have a bucket of cold water thrown on you it's good to start off white hot and you might end up just lukewarm.

Erin: Where do the first-time buyers end up in this whole scenario then moving forward as you look ahead? When can they feel like, okay, we're ready as a demographic, generally speaking, Sean,

Shaun: I think for a lot of them I've often said in 2022, there's a lot of people on the sidelines and some of them are waiting and watching and there's going to be a great window of opportunity for them to buy in in a slower market. If they're trading another home and they're playing with a lot of equity for first-time buyers who are borrowing a lot of money with interest rates as high as they are, it's going to be really tough for a lot of them. For a lot of them, they're going to be stuck on those sidelines for a while.

On the sidelines of the resale housing market probably in the rental market where I think that if I could make another prediction, we're probably going to see a lot of stories coming out about renovictions again and payments to landlords to secure a place and rents going up by $500. All of those stories we saw back in 2018, this is that on steroids. To come back to your point, where does that leave first-time buyers? It's not going to be enough for rates to top out which they're going to do possibly any day now, and it's not going to be enough for them to start to go down which could happen in the second half of this year even, maybe in the fall, the first cut.

They're going to have to actually be down. We're talking like two more normal from where we are now is we're talking like 200 basis points which would be eight meetings from the Bank of Canada where they cut by 25 assuming they do it every meeting, that's still a year from when they start. I don't think until, like I say, to get all of these first-time buyers back engaged in the market the way they want to be with friendlier interest rates is probably more of a 2025 story than it is certainly not a 2023 story.

Maybe towards the end of 2024. If you looking at buyers really reentering the spring market in big numbers that's probably looking out into 2025, unfortunately. It's going to take that long for the Bank of Canada to wind down this inflation fight that they're in.

Erin: In our final segment with Shaun Cathcart, we look at the year ahead and beyond. Look, we all love a happy ending, right? Well, there are some amazing stories awaiting you from a first-time buyer sharing how her realtor opened the door to homeownership for her to how one woman's realtor helped her through last year's ups and downs. Read these stories and think about sharing your own.

Just go to REALTOR.ca and click Living Room. It's comfy and heartwarming just like a living room should be. Wherever you're listening today thank you. Now we're going back to CREA, senior economist, Shaun Cathcart. As we wrap up here, Shaun what should REALTORS® and their clients be aware of heading into 2023 year of the rabbit that feels like a tortoise, you said off the top in both the short and long term. What are you seeing and what can we expect?

Shaun: First of all, no offense to tortoises.

Erin: Oh, no. We love tortoises. We love all animals.

Shaun: I like tortoises, but the analogy is that it's still going to be a slower year. We'll get there. My advice for buyers, I think it's a real window of opportunity between the hot market that was that a lot of people did not want to engage in. A lot of existing owners who were looking to say, downsize or move up buyers do not want to engage with 10 other offers, a hundred thousand over asking when you're my age or older that's your money. That's $100,000 of your retirement fund.

That's not the bank's money that's 25 years away from having to deal with. I think a lot of people didn't want to have to deal with this market. There's a whole subset of buyers out there who are going to want to come back in now that real active market that we saw during COVID has been pushed out. I think that's a wild card for this year. If you're one of those buyers, it's going to be an opportunity to engage in a much slower market. One, like you probably remember from 10 years ago you can see different properties. They stay up for a while.

They don't just disappear. You don't have to make a decision in two days. You can negotiate, you can look at different properties, you can do a home inspection, you can put conditions in your offer. A lot of things that people have been waiting for and you also are going to probably be able to negotiate that listing price down a bit. A lot of things that we would consider a more normal balanced market will be back in 2023. I think it's not going to be a normal market, it's a turnaround year that's going to be heading back, I think in the hotter direction just based on supply and demographics.

For now, I think it's a window of opportunity. If you're a seller this is not the market of one year ago and you are likely, unless you're in a very few places in Canada, not going to get the kind of money you could have gotten in the second week of February 2022. I think that there is a chance that prices are stabilizing. I don't think that they're in free fall. You be careful about how you price your property and be prepared to negotiate because there is going to be more of that. Price it properly and price it reasonably and just don't think that we're in the market of a year ago because we're not, but we're also not still heading in the direction that we've been heading in since then. How about that?

Erin: That sounds great. Also, you have advised people don't be offended. Don't take it personally. This is a change in things ride it out and make the most of it.

Shaun: This is how it's been for most of buyers and sellers throughout most of history. Coming off of some of the conditions that maybe some people were used to seeing in the last few years, yes, it's going to look a lot different for now. A lot more similar to what it's been throughout most of our history, these big seller's markets tend to be the exception, not the rule.

Erin: Excellent. Thank you for your time and your insight, Shaun, it's always great talking to you, and really, do have a great year.

Shaun: Thanks, Erin. You too.

Erin: Thanks so much for listening to this episode 34 of REAL TIME. To catch up on previous episodes with everyone from designers to architects and ability, ambassador and an ad agency genius, just scroll through our REAL TIME podcasts, I promise you'll find hours of great and timeless information. Be sure to click follow so you don't miss a new one. REAL TIME is a production of Alphabet® Creative with technical production by Rob Whitehead and Real Family Productions. I'm Erin Davis, and we'll talk again soon on REAL TIME.