congrats on all the money, here are some houses.

While the broader housing market is one Fed comment away from a nervous breakdown, luxury is doing fine, thanks for asking. Luxury home prices rose 3.6% this spring, compared to just 1.4% for the rest of the market. Which is a very elegant statistical way of saying rich people are still shopping and everyone else is just stress-eating while refreshing mortgage rates.

San Francisco is where it's most extreme. Pending luxury sales jumped 48% year over year, driven mostly by "AI money." Aka tech workers and founders riding the AI boom, suddenly entering the housing market with newfound liquidity and an alarming amount of confidence. The same market where first-time buyers are grieving yet another lost offer is also the market where a Pac Heights home listed at $4.3M sold for over $8M, while a Cow Hollow property went $8 MILLION over asking.

The Bay Area is starting to feel like two totally different markets. In one market, buyers are cautiously recalculating their monthly payment based on a 0.1% drop in rates. In the other, someone just accidentally overbid by the price of an entire house and didn't notice until they closed. So yeah, things feel very healthy and sustainable over here. 🙃 

america’s worst housing market has decent pizza

Berkeley was just named the worst housing market in America for homebuyers. Not California. Not the Bay Area. AMERICA.

At first glance, this feels like one of those studies designed to tell us things we already know. Homes are expensive. Inventory is tight. Everyone is stressed. Groundbreaking stuff. But Berkeley ranks so poorly for buyers because it's exactly the kind of place people want to live. Great schools. Walkable neighborhoods. Charming houses. Character. Culture. Community. Coffee. All the alliterations I can currently think of.

The problem is that there are way more people who want the Berkeley lifestyle than there are Berkeley houses. Which feels like a decent summary of the housing market. Everyone wants the same thing. And nobody wants the thing nobody else wants.

This is why perfectly normal people end up waiving contingencies, writing love letters, bidding hundreds of thousands over asking, and convincing themselves that a house with too much freeway noise is actually "great for commuting."

Scarcity not only makes people bid higher, it makes them rationalize harder. But then again, if I could walk to Cheeseboard everyday, I'd probably start rationalizing too.

beauty is in the eye of the mortgage holder

A lot of people in their late 20s to early 40s have realized they may never hit certain traditional milestones they were promised. House? Maybe. Kids? Debatable. Retirement? TBD. But lip filler, preventative Botox, and a Pilates membership? Gratifying in ways that a 30-year mortgage simply is not.

So a generation raised on optimization culture has redirected its energy toward the one investment that still feels somewhat controllable: themselves. Which, depending on your definition of ROI, may not be completely irrational.

A house builds equity slowly over decades, but an aesthetic upgrade pays in compliments by the next business day. One is obviously the smarter long-term investment (in my humble and totally biased opinion), but in a culture wired for immediate feedback, visible results tend to win.

Homeownership used to be the default status symbol. Now that it's become harder to attain, people are getting creative. Some buy luxury handbags. Some buy luxury skincare. Some spend what amounts to a car payment trying to look like they woke up like this. Because if you can't buy a $1.7 million bungalow with deferred maintenance, maybe you can at least become devastatingly hot.