The Housing Headlines You Can't Ignore: Rent, Boomers & Buyer Beware
In this hour‑long monologue, real‑estate veteran Leigh Thomas Brown weaves together a rapid‑fire commentary on the most pressing housing headlines. She begins by recalling her prediction that the 21st Century Road to Housing Act would become law, then critiques the bill’s lack of a modernized capital‑gains exemption and its push for relentless new construction. Using Japan’s demographic collapse as a cautionary tale, Brown argues that U.S. immigration policy and aging baby‑boomer cohorts are reshaping demand: boomers own oversized, upgraded homes they are reluctant to downsize, while younger buyers face stagnant wages and inflated expectations. She questions whether the market is over‑building and warns of a potential “rubber‑band snap‑back” in five‑to‑ten years. Brown then shifts to practical concerns for agents and consumers: the hidden costs of data‑center projects, the need to expand the traditional PITI mortgage calculation to include utilities (PTUI), and the privacy‑invasive Flock surveillance cameras that may require disclosure under state real‑estate commissions. She recounts a cautionary story of a buyer who purchased a house sight‑unseen and discovered three dead bodies, underscoring the importance of physical inspections and disclosure of deaths or crimes. The discussion moves to macro‑level mortgage health, highlighting rising FHA foreclosures, the role of temporary‑visa borrowers, and the taxpayer burden when loans default. Brown also critiques New York City’s rent‑freeze and landlord‑targeting policies, warning that small landlords bear the cost and that housing supply could shift to government or hedge‑fund ownership. Finally, she offers buyer‑side advice—negotiating low offers, focusing on essential needs versus wants, leveraging DIY curb‑appeal, and navigating paint and renovation cost choices—while encouraging viewers to stay informed and share the video. Throughout, Brown blends policy analysis, demographic insight, market forecasting, and hands‑on realtor guidance, urging a longer‑term, data‑driven approach to housing.
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It is another busy day in real estate with an email inbox that is completely slap full of articles and opinions and headlines. And as usual, I read too many of them and it made my blood pressure go up. But other things I've been right about. Yes. So good morning and welcome to A Conversation About Real Estate that is I'm going to jump around from headline to headline. First of all, I want to go ahead and remind you all that if you look back at this 21st Century Road to Housing Act when it was first coming across the pike and it was stopped at the president's desk, do you remember Leigh Brown? Me? I told you all it was going to get signed and made into law even if the president didn't want to sign it because of the rules of how our government works. And now that the housing bill is law, you have a lot of unhappy people that are finally realizing there were some things baked into it that may or may not be for the best. And so when you're looking at the headlines on housing, we're going to have to be having a better conversation about population because y'all, if you look at what happened in Japan, there is a historic lesson right there for America. You had an, an opportunity for growth. And the Japanese families stopped having kids, which meant that as the population aged, there weren't as many kids to pay for the pensions, to pay for the guaranteed money for the elderly, and to buy the housing. So if you look at Japanese real estate, you see that the prices fell off a cliff because there were no buyers. And the reason there were no buyers, because there were no children. Demographics has everything to do with real estate. Now, the Japanese also have incredibly strict immigration policies. They don't let anybody in. I mean, it's very, very vanishing, the number of people who can immigrate to Japan and become full citizens and stay. So for those of y'all that want to argue with me that you had family that served over there in the military, yeah, but they didn't stay forever and become citizens. Might have married somebody and brought them back to the US, but in general, the Japanese population has been very tightly knit. And when that happens, of course, population falls off, housing prices fall off. Well, here in the US, it's been the opposite. We have basically no immigration policy. Anybody can come here and stay forever. And the Supreme Court has now said that as long as you make it over the border in time to drop a kid, your kid's now a citizen of the US, which is Absolutely crazy. So is there a middle ground? I mean, honestly, there should always be a middle ground in everything. Can we just acknowledge that, that maybe sometimes immigration is great for a country? It helps you grow, it helps you change, it helps you figure out new things in a different way. But unfettered migration doesn't work because you have no assimilation. And so when I look at this particular article that jumps up, it says, who's going to buy the baby boomer houses? The question that could shape the 2030s. Well, this is actually a pretty relevant question Now it goes in a direction talking about how today's baby boomers— and of course, as y'all know, the youngest— the oldest of the baby boomers were born in 1946 according to generational guardrails. So that's my parents, it's your parents. My parents are, you know, '47, '48, so they were early baby boomers. It goes all the way up into the '60s. It's the biggest generation ever because all those wartime people came home and got right busy making some families because They were all about population growth. It doesn't stop until the '70s when you have the zero population growth people, the ZPGers, who are out there saying, don't have kids, the Earth's gonna end, because at that time it was cooling, then they turned into warming, and now they just want to obliterate all of us and put us under surveillance. That's a different conversation. And so the Boomers are this huge generation, and they also are the first materialist generation. I mean, honestly, take a look at how the generations think about housing and think about it differently. So my grandparents and probably your grandparents, if you're medium like me, and if you're younger, your grandparents might be the Boomers. They had a North Carolina brick ranch, a 1,188-square-foot, 3-bedroom, 1.5-bath house. You walked in the door, you had a kitchen, and a little dining area slash breakfast area all in one. You had a living room down the hall. You had a bedroom and a bedroom and a hall bath. Mom and Dad had a bedroom and it had a half bath in it. That was amazing. It was their house. Housing doesn't have to be you having an en suite bedroom and every fancy upgrade you can possibly imagine. So the American dream of housing used to be our house. Trailers weren't looked down on, they were just affordable housing. Certain neighborhoods weren't looked down on, they were just different neighborhoods. We've created a whole lot of the barriers that come in with this materialistic view on things where it's always about the stuff. Well, the boomers were the leading ones to want stuff, to want the second car and to want a TV in every room. And you start watching it grow from there to today's buyers. When I talk to a first-time buyer, they want hardwood floors and granite, and they want everybody to have their own bedroom, and they want a big lot, and they want it fenced, and they want, and they want, and they want. And don't blame them because that's how they were raised, but they're not thinking about the budget and the austerity and how do I really get thoughtful about this in a way that I can make do. We kind of need a make-do generation. The Boomers weren't make-doers, their parents were. So anyway, the boomer houses have gotten bigger. They're taking that 1,188 ranch and they've added a garage to it or add a master suite off the back, add an upstairs, and you can do some really cool things with some of these mid-century ranches and they've made them beautiful and wonderful. But when you spend and spend and spend and make it bigger and bigger and bigger, it gets more and more expensive. Well, as those houses have gotten bigger and more expensive, the article questions who is going to be able to buy them because we have stagnant wages. We have a cost of living that's crazy. Inflation is not slowing down. And so these younger buyers, your younger millennials and your Zoomers, may or may not be able to afford what the baby boomers have. And then the baby boomers, because they're used to all of their creature comforts, would love to have a nice downsized house that's got a good fit and finish. Don't blame them at all. You've been living in a house with a great fit and finish. You don't want to backslide. So they're looking for something that's smaller and has great things in it. And there's not as many of those as there probably could be. So you have this weird push and pull, and it's not as much about interest rates as the media would make it out to be, y'all. I just don't think it's an interest rate conversation as much as it is a what-do-different-generations-want conversation and what do they need. So then tie that back on to the 21st Century Housing Act, which is all about build, build, build, build, build. Again, look at the Japanese. They were building while the population was shrinking, which meant that when that population became the buyers, you had too much inventory. Are we currently overbuilding for the future a couple of years away? And I don't know the answer. I'm questioning because I'm reading all the data points and I just think we need to look a little further than 5 minutes down the road. I'm pretty sure we need to look at 5 and 10 years. Because there's going to be a snapback of the rubber band at some point. And I don't want communities to get hammered for it. I don't want homeowners to get hammered for it because what you pay today, you'd like to think will be relatively stable, even though housing prices do go up and down. Again, look at the Japanese market. They are, they've been in a housing hotspot recession for quite some time. So when you think about the baby boomers who do want to sell, there is a reason a lot of them don't sell, and it's not because they don't have a buyer who'd like to buy their bigger, nicer house. It's because of the capital gains rules. So my biggest question for all of our lawmakers who aren't listening to me, because I talk to y'all all the time and you don't seem to listen to me at all, but I keep trying. Why wasn't the capital gains exemption moved in that 21st Century Road to Housing Act? That would have been the most logical place to put it because the current exemption of $250,000 is not taxable on your primary residence for a single person, $500,000 for married filing jointly. And that's the same number that was set in the '90s when this came into being under President Bill Clinton, but it hasn't moved since then. There's been no indexing to inflation. So now we have the situation where a baby boomer who's been in a house for 30 years and they've done some nice upgrades, they added the master, they added the garage, added the upstairs, made it really cute and nice. The values here, their gain is more than $500,000, and maybe they don't want to pay taxes to the government because the government hasn't shown that it's very good at managing money. Let's just be honest, the government doesn't produce anything. They take from us and then do whatever they want to do. So you have baby boomer sellers that say, I'm not trusting y'all with my money. I'm just going to stay here because I don't feel like paying taxes on it. I'll just go on and die, and then my heirs can let the basis reset. So if you want to know why we have a push-pull, maybe it's because we don't have enough buyers. Maybe it's because the houses are too expensive, and maybe it's because the boomers aren't willing to pay crazy capital gains. And maybe all of that is because our elected officials aren't listening to good voices on all sides of a conversation and realizing that there's got to be some reasonable things happening besides just throwing more houses into the marketplace. I'm just not convinced that all we need are seas of concrete with more vinyl villages. Some areas I'm sure need houses. There's going to be a need for housing in all price spectrum, but right now you can't even build in the lower price ranges without specific provisions in the tax code to make sure you have options to offset some of the costs because labor's high and materials are high. And then we have the elected officials that still don't want to pass the SAVE Act and still can't figure that out, except that they're paid off by somebody somewhere. I reckon there's always money at the root of this. But if you're going to support a bazillion new houses, I guess you have to bring in the bazillion new people because the Americans aren't having babies. So I don't know, I don't know. But the chickens and the eggs are very intertwined, and it's I'm concerned about the 5 and 10-year window, to be quite honest. And I've been in real estate 26 years. I've watched my city change completely. I don't recognize it anymore. Some of it's good. Some of it's, I think, better back the way it was, but can't go back and change things. But we could look a little further down the pike. And I wish more realtors would think longer term as they're talking to people, which goes back to a conversation I had talking about data centers. And I will continue to say this because data centers are not necessarily great for communities and they're not necessarily evil because obviously we're using it right now. But if you're in a community that is talking to data center companies, please go to my Substack. I'll put the link in here somewhere. Pull down that checklist. And the biggest thing that better be in that contract is that the data center being proposed should be closed loop because that is lower impact on your water supplies and make sure that they are going to offset their own utility costs so that the energy bills don't go through the roof. And the reason I hammer on that as a REALTOR® is that when we're counseling buyers and we're looking at payments with our favorite preferred local lenders, the payment calculation has always been principal, interest, taxes, and insurance, those 4 characteristics known as PITI, except that I'm now talking to people out patooie, because you have to plan for principal, interest, taxes, utilities, and insurance. Because on any house, if the utilities triple, that could affect their ability to stay there. And I don't want people to jump into the American dream and then get boosted out because something changed outside of their control. That's not good for anybody. And we've got to be smart about it, which also means I should point out my other big top issue right now is these flock cameras. And if you're not paying attention, It's basically North Korea-style surveillance owned by a private company, accessed by God knows who, and you don't have any say over that as a citizen, which is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. But the real estate angle on this— hear me when I say this— every state right now should have realtors contacting the real estate commission asking this question: what is our exposure as professional licensees when it comes to disclosure of flock cameras. Because if I've got buyers driving into a community, they have the right to know if the HOA put in flock cameras and now they're being surveilled when they just drive in to look at houses. Because these are not just license plate readers, y'all. These are looking at your face. They're looking at what your phone pings. They know when you leave, when you go. They're looking at all these characteristics and they are using this information for lots of reasons. I'm sure some are good 'cause they wanna stop crime, but I'm not willing to trade my privacy and my liberty for the idea of somebody else's definition of safety. So in your state, you need to be asking, what is our exposure on disclosure? We need to know. I've been asking the North Carolina Real Estate Commission, and our wonderful chair has read my article, and he says they're gonna have a conversation about FLOC and what it means. All right, now I want to share with y'all another article that I thought was worth reading because y'all probably read it too. Uh, the fella who bought a house and found 3 dead bodies after buying it sight unseen. What? That's why my podcast used to be called Crazy Shit in Real Estate, but then it was hurting feelings for people who knew I was trying to stop cussing, and they said if I was going to stop, I shouldn't encourage it in my podcast. And I said, fine, y'all win. So now it's Real Talk with Leigh Thomas Brown. But this one is just a great example of why so many of us in real estate were at a panic level during the COVID market when we did have people buying houses sight unseen. And we're walking through, we can show them on FaceTime, we're looking, we're doing our best to disclose. But at a certain point when you move into the house, you just going to find things. And on this one, it happened to be a foreclosure. So just a reminder that on any house, you should lay eyes on it and make sure your realtor lays eyes on it. Those of us that were panicked, we're having people sign waivers that You know, you're buying sight unseen and we, you know, may the odds be ever in your favor, but there have always been agents who just write papers up and go through it. Well, you're thinking, well, what's the point? What's it matter if there's 3 dead bodies in the house? Well, in some cultures, they don't want to live in a house or walk in a house where somebody has physically died in the house. And you'll get this question if you're in real estate long enough on a vacant house or on an estate sale. Where somebody will ask you, did they die in the house? And it's not a disclosure issue in North Carolina. We don't have to say what went on in the house. We don't have to disclose crimes that happened in the house. You can Google the address pretty much, but you will have that question because there's cultures that don't want to buy that house and they have the right to know, which is why we ask. And then we have to say, sometimes we don't know and they can move to the next house. This poor fella, he probably can't sleep at night, and if he does, he's got friends in there sleeping with him. Oh, and he didn't even ask for them. So the last thing I will chat with y'all briefly about when it comes to real estate is that there is a big conversation out there about what is going to happen with foreclosures because the FHA foreclosure numbers are currently rising. And FHA, if you did not know, was one of the more stable mortgage products during the Great Recession because they do a lot more paperwork, and there's a little more of a government guardrail on that. So most of those were stable. The loans that went bad during the Great Recession were what we called NINJAs, no income, no job, no asset, no problems. They're really ninjaps. And the ninja products were the ones that went bad 'cause there was no homework that had been done on them. FHAs were pretty good. But right now, we're seeing an increasing number of FHA foreclosure filings and defaults and delinquencies. Now, what does that mean? I don't know, because some of those can get solved. Banks don't like foreclosing. You should know that all along. They've never liked it. They are always reaching out to somebody in financial straits saying, hey, work with us here. We'll work with you. Are you out of work, looking for a job? What's going on? Can we recast the loan? How do we work with you? So if you're a consumer who's watching this and you've gotten behind on your mortgage payment, I can't see who you are watching my video, and Hopefully somebody shares this with you. I don't even know who's sharing it, but you probably should if you got a friend out of work. If the bank is calling you and sending you certified mail, don't hide from that because I promise you they are looking for a way to keep you in the house. They don't want to evict you. They don't want to foreclose. So let the banks find a way through for you. And when I see that the FHA numbers are high, that tends to be our first-time buyer product. Although some of that was our— temporary visa workers, the H-1B workers in the country were eligible for FHA products prior to the rule change in 2025. So it is possible that some of the temporary visas have expired and they've gone back to their home country and walked away from the mortgage. And why that bothers me and should bother you is that with FHA being a government-backed loan, that means that if they've walked away from the note and the house is underwater and there's a take back and there's expenses, You get to pay the bill. You the taxpayer. Now, I don't blame the people who took advantage of the program. I don't even blame the builders who sold it to them. I blame the rule makers and the regulation makers who allowed a program to be given for a 30-year mortgage to people here on a temporary work visa. That math does not math. And so we don't know how many of the increase in FHA defaults are temporary visa workers who have left the country. Never gonna know because if you didn't know, FHA never tracked, never tracked citizenship status or worker status. They just gave out loans willy-nilly and the price of that increased delinquencies. So whether it means there'll be more foreclosures in your market or not, we don't know because when we see the increase in numbers, we do know that the banks like to sell those notes and those houses off market so they don't hit the public knowledge, which causes fear and can actually cause some panic selling, which isn't good for anybody. But anyway, that seems kind of like a negative place to go. But I'm looking at the big picture. I'm looking 3 and 5 and 10 years down the road, and well, I have questions. But in the meantime, I love that I live in a great county, and I love that I live in a great state that I hope gets on the right track here soon, and I'll keep doing what I can for it. But I love my buyers and I love my sellers and I love my fellow agents. And so we're going to keep working and figure out the best way forward because at the end of the day, y'all, this country is 250 years old for a very good reason. It was designed by men who saw a better way and we need to help get that track back in line to our original Constitution because it's been working pretty well and maybe we shouldn't undermine it. Speaking of undermining it, I should mention one more little article here about landlords in New York City. I have to wind up here talking about the American dream and our birthday because, as you know, we have a mayor in New York City who's not American and not a capitalist by any stretch of the imagination. He would like to take from everybody and give to his favorites, but, you know, math. And so what they're going after right now are the landlords in the city And what they forget is that when you go freezing rents and freezing evictions is that landlords do have costs. And we know that the costs are continuing to escalate in the form of taxes and especially in the form of insurance. But also if you're a landlord who's covering utilities, I mentioned the PTUE earlier. If you are a landlord covering utilities as part of your package rent and those numbers triple, well, you've got them baked into a lease. And so They keep talking about double-digit profits for landlords, which is something I've never seen, but they're absolutely crazy. But I should point something out here that when they start yelling about landlords and wanting them to go away, you should know that in the city of New York, the biggest landlord is the city housing authority. They have the most rental properties. So if they want to freeze everything, well, it's the taxpayer who's going to pay that bill.. But in the meantime, it's your mom-and-pop landlords that get run out of town because they can't afford it anymore. If it was an investment that you designed for long-term cash flow while you provide housing to other people, because landlords are housing providers and look in your marketplace, they tend to provide the units that are the most affordable because they're not buying the big fancy new hedge fund style buildings. They've got a fourplex, a duplex, and a smaller unit over here that is clean and well-kept and not super expensive because it hasn't been upgraded to the nines. But they're not going to keep that building if they lose money on it every month. And when they sell it, who's going to buy it? Well, is it going to be a hedge fund? Probably not. So maybe the city housing authority buys it. And if you look at government housing over time, they don't seem to do that any better than they do anything else. So in New York City, I hope that the people will figure out how to get their voice back before it's too late, because it's always been one of the greatest cities on earth. And frankly, you should always have housing available in all price points to the people who want to live in a city. They shouldn't have to drive an hour away to find somewhere to go. And to provide housing in all price points, you need landlords and you need good mortgages. So you can't let them get undermined by bad policies. Anyway, let me see if there's any comments over here because y'all know I talk and talk and talk before I look. And we got a comment here. Let's see. Oh yes. And Stacy, by the way, we are mediums because we don't know what the middle is, just to be fair. All right, show this comment from Carrie here. Anything under $300,000 is trash in the Midwest. A budget under $250,000 realistically, so can't find a decent affordable home. Renting past 13 years. So, Carrie, I will tell you a couple of things. First of all, hang in there because for the first time over the last few months, we are seeing a lot of sellers that are willing to negotiate because they ran up so much during the COVID era, but now they need to sell. Estate sale, divorce, job loss, just want to move to be near the grandkids. We're seeing negotiating for the first time in a while. So don't be afraid to drop an offer out there. And even if it feels low, you will find that perhaps that seller is willing to talk to you, an owner-occupant who wants to live in that community. And I can say that as a REALTOR®, it's no fun writing lowball offers, but sometimes you do what you have to do because you don't know what the other side's going to say. And I have had plenty of home sellers who like seeing a name on the offer to purchase. They don't care what the name is, but they're glad it's not a housing LLC out there. Like, well, I'll give this person a chance. They see that preapproval letter, know you're getting a VA or an FHA loan, and they can tell that you're going through the hoops. Don't give up. And also don't be afraid to ask about negotiating. And it's probably not all trash, but remember, paint and YouTube go a long way. There's so much you can do to make something cute. And especially when it comes to curb appeal, I have found over all my 26 years that Buyers really want a cute exterior, but there is a guy on Instagram that everybody should follow. His name is Uncle John, and I think it's J-O-H-H-N or J-O-H-N-N. I think he's in Mississippi, and he does all of these improvement projects on people's houses because he has a heart of gold and his wife helps him too. I watch his channel and it's kind of amazing what could be done with some sweat equity. So don't give up and don't be afraid to vision cast a little bit for yourself, because if it feels like trash today, it can feel like treasure tomorrow. And I think about my first house because it had popcorn ceilings and it was dated. It was from the '70s and the carpet was brown. And I mean, like, brown. The cupboards were the same brown. And you know what? It was mine. And when I moved in, I got busy doing what I could do. So did a lot of the smaller things and You know, it got better over time and I loved it anyway. I loved its quirks. And let's see, something is out there for you, by the way. So I will take your comment down. And when you're looking for 1.5 years, I'm just going to remind you that at some point, I'll tell you what I tell all mine, because I'm a mama bear kind of a realtor. You're going to have a list of needs and a list of wants. And when you look at houses, you got to get real honest with yourself. Is it on the want list or the need list? Because the need list should be a roof that's not leaking. Heating and air that works, windows that work, and bedrooms and bathrooms. And then you start figuring out you can work your way through a lot of things. Now, rotted band seal, we need a good band seal. We need a dry crawl space. But do we want to have nice flooring? Of course we do. Do we want to have good paint? Of course we do. And I'll point one thing out on paint that I learned from my friend Andrea up in Hendersonville, North Carolina yesterday. Her husband is a contractor and we were talking about how high paint's gotten. And yes, we're very exciting people talking about the cost of paint.. But it looks like Valspar is cheaper at the Lowe's. And you know, Valspar is less expensive, but it's also cheap. Sherwin-Williams is more expensive and also it's better paint, but your contractors get that contractor discount from Sherwin-Williams. And so if you have a contractor or you have done enough paint, you might qualify for one at some point. And then the upgrades you do to your house are going to be better than you started off with. So anyway, that's our commentary on all things real estate today. Let me know in the comments if there's something you want me to cover. Share this with a friend, and most importantly, come back and see me again because I'll keep reading the headlines and telling y'all what I find out. Because obviously it's a lot to take in, but it's worth fighting for.
