I think that mortgage applications are going to go a lot lower. I think the entire market is pretty much gonna blow up and a good example of what's coming was the earnings that came out today from Zillow.
Zillow stock was down almost 27% on the day it actually closed just below $30 a share. The high this year was $65.70 so obviously the price of Zillow has been more than cut in half since this summer and I remember specifically on this podcast criticizing a move that Zillow made that is partially responsible for the plunging stock price.
What Zillow decided to do was actually go into the business of flipping real estate. They were not just gonna provide a platform for people to list their homes and for realtors to prospect for clients and all that, they actually were gonna get into the housing market by buying houses themselves and then listing them for sale. So, basically kind of like market making in homes, trying to pick up bargains and then sell their own houses on Zillow rather than simply act as a middleman. And I said this was a very risky move for Zillow to be making at a very bad time when you had the housing market topping, when you had mortgage rates rising.
I said this was a huge mistake, an indicative of a top and that is exactly what's happening. In fact if you look at their earnings, Zillow has bought a lot more houses than they've been able to sell so they now have a huge inventory of houses that they own, that they're trying to unload and of course they're not going to be able to do it because the buyers are just not there.
