Welcome back to Home Economics, a newsletter about the American housing market. This is The Week in Review, my weekly recap of macro and real estate news. Articles with a ◎ are free. Those with a ◉ have free previews but are only accessible in full for paying subscribers. Upgrade your subscription here:

I’ve not written in a couple of weeks. Moving from Brooklyn to Manhattan, preparations for the baby (arriving mid-November!), and my consulting work have sucked up all of my time. I’m sure things will settle down once the baby arrives 😬. I want to thank my paying subscribers in particular for your patience—and promise there is a lot of analysis, including paying subscriber-only content—in the pipeline.

I made a podcast about housing. A few weeks ago I created Housing Policy Analyst, a ChatGPT chatbot. The Analyst is trained on a repository of 20 of the most widely-cited academic papers related to housing, especially affordability, zoning regulations, land-use policy, and the economics of housing (it’s available for paying subscribers here ◉). But maybe you don’t have the inclination to delve so deep. In that case, you might like this: an NPR-style conversation about the research, generated using Google Notebook LM…

Listen now · 10:55

Next week is relatively data-light, with only the Fannie Mae Home Purchasing Sentiment index (HPSI) on Monday and CPI inflation data on Thursday.

Some quick previews:

• HPSI: Homebuyer sentiment hasn’t been boosted by falling mortgage rates as much as some may have expected. This doesn’t bode well for future readings beyond this month, which will reflect a renewed surge in mortgage rates.

• CPI: Inflation remains above the Fed’s target, but mainly due to lagging prices—things like housing, health care, and car insurance—falling more slowly than prices elsewhere. But these are falling, and it seems the labor market, rather than inflation, is the marginal driver of Fed policy these days anyway.

Paying subscribers can download the housing economic data calendar (a Google calendar) here ◉.

News: Nonfarm payrolls crushed expectations
Views: The Fed will cut 25bp in November, rather than 50bp

Payrolls Friday is always fun. This one was more fun than usual. Nonfarm payrolls rose 254k, absolutely crushing the consensus estimate of 150k. The unemployment rate declined one tenth of a percent to 4.1%.

Had this happened 6 month ago, it would have been bad news for markets: inflation, rather than slowing growth, had been the main concern. The regime we were in back then was one where “good news is bad news.”

But inflation continues to fall and the labor market has weakened. These days, the marginal driver of market sentiment, and of monetary policy, is jobs. To the extent investors and the Fed had recently become more worried about slower job growth, yesterday’s NFP data is a case of good news being straightforward, unadulterated good news for risky assets. The S&P ended the day almost 1% higher.

The read-through for housing markets is less clear. Higher incomes stemming from a stronger labor market will drive transactions and prices up. But higher mortgage rates will act in the opposite direction. Following yesterday’s data, 30y fixed rates rose to over 6.5%, from around 6.2% the day before. I’ll have more analysis about the relative influences of incomes and rates in the coming weeks.

Nobody Wants This. My household has enjoyed some dark TV recently—Ripley, The Bear, Baby Reindeer, Slow Horses—so Nobody Wants This is a nice, upbeat change. Kristen Bell plays Joanne, an outspoken agnostic podcaster, Adam Brody is Noah, an unconventional Jewish rabbi. It’s on Netflix, here ◎.

Google Notebook LM. After experimenting with lots of AI tools over the past year, I do almost everything through ChatGPT. But this new tool from Google is terrific. You can upload huge amounts of data into “notebooks”—I mainly shove PDFs in there—and then interact with it, for example asking the AI questions, or getting summaries. You can also generate NPR-style radio/podcast conversations based on the content you uploaded (like the one I posted above). AI continues to knock my socks off.

• Paying subscribers can access my housing repository in ChatGPT here ◉ (email me if you want access to the Google Notebook version).

• Google Notebook LM is available here ◎.

Thanks for reading. I hope you’re having a great weekend.