Home prices and apartment rents in Austin, Texas, have fallen more than anywhere else in the country, after a period of overbuilding and a slowdown in job and population growth. Rents are down 7% while more home buyers searching sales listings are looking to move away from the Austin area than looking to move to it.
NYC Rentals
Median rents in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Northwest Queens hit record highs in February as New Yorkers grapple with an ongoing affordability crisis. New lease signings also climbed, setting year-over-year records in Manhattan and Queens and the second-highest record for Brooklyn.
Choice Wyndham
Choice Hotels is abandoning its hostile $8 billion takeover bid for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.
401(k) Withdrawals
A record share of 401(k) account holders took early withdrawals from their accounts last year for financial emergencies. Overall, 3.6% of plan participants did so last year, up from 2.8% in 2022 and a prepandemic average of about 2%.
S&P 500
The equal-weighted S&P 500, which measures each company equally rather than by its market capitalization, rose to a record this past week. Almost one-fifth of the stocks in the index hit new 52-week highs on a recent day, the largest share since May 2021.
Apartment Buildings
U.S. cities added more than 2,900 buildings with more than 200 apartment units between the years 2021 and 2023. That is 17% more than were built from 2018 to 2020. It also outpaced the increase in the number of smaller properties of at least 50 units.
Stock Correlation
Stocks have switched from moving in the exact opposite direction to Treasury yields in the second half of last year, both as yields soared to a peak of 5% on the 10-year note and as they came back down, to having a slight tendency to rise and fall in line with yields.
Rates Outlook
Powell said that rate cuts won’t be warranted until officials have “gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably” toward the central bank’s 2% goal.
2024 RevPAR
U.S. RevPAR is forecast to increase by 2.6% to $100.50 in 2024, driven by ADR growth of 3.1% to $160.50 while occupancy declines 0.5% to 62.6%.
Restaurant Costs
In January, prices for food eaten away from home were up 30% compared with the same month in 2019. Restaurants’ food bills have stopped their pandemic-era surge, but payroll costs are still climbing.