Dave:
Trump’s terrorists just got canceled. Congress just actually passed a bipartisan housing bill. We’ve got updates on regional housing markets, the crypto markets, and more. This is on the market. Hey everyone. Welcome to On the Market. I’m Dave Meyer, joined by Kathy Fettke, Henry Washington and James Dainard. Thank you all so much for being here. I feel like James wore his football uniform today, so we have to give him a minute to gloat about the Seahawks.

James:
See what this is. This is Super Bowl champions.

Dave:
It was already like two weeks ago, but we have it recorded together. So good for you, James. As a new resident of Seattle, I’m jumping on the bandwagon. I’m excited about it.

James:
It’s just been a great week. I think it’s going to be a great 2026

Kathy:
And it’s the year of the fire horse. So what does that

James:
Mean? What? I have no idea what

Dave:
That means.

Kathy:
You

Dave:
Guys don’t know. You can’t just casually drop. Oh, it’s the year of the fire horse.

Kathy:
What’s that mean? Okay, well, it’s Chinese New Year, just on a couple days ago, and last year was this year of the snake, so it was shedding, letting go of things that are heavy that you don’t need anymore, and this year it’s the fire horse. So the energy is like, go get it. You kind of shed all this stuff from last year and now it’s just going to be a fiery action packed year.

Henry:
Does that mean Venus is in microwave or whatever?

Kathy:
Oh yeah. I think that’s exactly it. Yes. You’ve been doing your homework. Yeah. All

Dave:
Right.

Kathy:
Well with that,

Dave:
I think that we need to take action and actually get to the podcast.

Kathy:
We should probably do that too.

Dave:
Alright, well we are doing a headline episode here today. Each of us brought one headline related to the housing market. I was going to do a total deep dive into the regional housing analysis, but I woke up this morning and found out that the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s global tariffs in a ruling six to three today. Basically saying that the Emergency Powers Act, which is the legal justification Trump has been using to implement tariffs sort of all across the globe, is unconstitutional. It’s basically not in the president’s power to do. The Supreme Court has said Congress reserves the right to be able to implement these kinds of tariffs because as we’ve discussed, tariffs are taxes and Congress has the responsibility of implementing taxes. So that is really big news. I do think Trump, frankly, is probably going to look for more ways to justify tariffs and we might not see the end of this legal battle, but I think we’ve hit peak tariff because all the other ways that he can implement tariffs are not as sort of robust as this option. And I have some thoughts about what that means. But before I get into that, I’m just curious what you guys make of this. Are you happy to see tariffs gone, Kathy?

Kathy:
Yeah, I just did a report recently on how those tariffs actually ended up really being quite a tax consumers. There’s mixed reviews on that, but I think at the end of the day, of course

Dave:
The studies I saw said 90 to 96% of the costs are being borne by American consumers and companies,

Kathy:
So that’s bs. So it’s great for me in the construction industry and for all our projects we’re stoked. I still have 10 homes I got to build in Park City and we’ve got these developments all over the country and this is just great news for us.

James:
I think the question is will the pricing actually come down though?

Dave:
I actually think in commodities, yes, like timber, lumber, aluminum, anything that’s commodity will probably, but consumer goods are not going down.

James:
This is what happens to construction all the time. It was even after the COVID pricing increase, materials came back available, but their pricing stayed the same.

Dave:
Yeah, exactly.

James:
It wasn’t inflation, it was like, oh, limited supply, limited supply, and now I can, everything costs more, so the damage might’ve already been done. Hopefully we see some relief, but I don’t think we’re going to on at least that. At least we know it might not keep going up, but

Dave:
Yeah, that’s where the relief will come. It won’t go up as fast.

Henry:
I think it’s just going to be a bit of a delay. I think companies are going to need to get through the fiscal year and see what actually happened in terms of profitability. If they were able to raise prices and not lose profitability, I don’t think they’re going to drop their prices now that the tariffs are gone, but if they actually ended up in the red or they lost money because prices were high, then I think you might see some of those companies shift pricing. But other than that, and you won’t see that right away.

Dave:
Yeah, I agree. I do think overall, I think this is a positive thing for the housing market. If this reduces overall inflationary pressure, that is really good for mortgage rates, that is the thing that is keeping mortgage rates up is fear of inflation. Now, I’m not saying it’s going to go away altogether. Inflation has already started to come down. That’s good, but this is just another thing that could help move inflation down, which will hopefully take mortgage rates down with it. It can help bring down bond yields. That will take time. It’s not going to happen overnight, but I do think overall if the market in general becomes a little less concerned about inflation because of this, that is good news

Kathy:
And it’s interesting. I read something about a lot of that has to be paid back, so ouch.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s

James:
Interesting. Wait, they got to give the money back.

Dave:
They didn’t decide. Yeah, they didn’t decide, but there are going to be a lot of lawsuits about this.

Kathy:
Oh, there already are. They’re launched, and again, I’m here in California. Our attorney general has had like 30 plus lawsuits against Trump and has won a lot of ’em over 20. So attorneys are going to do very well.

Dave:
Yeah, well, I think it was Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the dissenting opinion about this and he basically said that the treasury shouldn’t have to pay it back because it would be too complicated, which doesn’t

Kathy:
Exactly sound like a legal argument to me. Yeah, I feel like companies are like, I’m going to uncomplicate this for you. Yeah,

Dave:
He said it could be a mess with significant consequences to the US Treasury, so we’ll see. Yeah. Let’s move on to another government issue, Henry, I think you have something to talk about.

Henry:
So I wanted to talk about this new bipartisan housing bill that passed Congress. So on February 9th, 2026, the housing for the 21st Century Act passed the US House of Representatives by a vote of 390 to nine. So extreme bipartisan support, which is amazing, especially right now when we don’t seem to be bipartisan on anything. But this housing policy is aimed at boosting supply and affordability, so it’s got legislation in there to help modernize some of the federal housing programs, essentially making it easier for people to get different developments through federal programs, cutting timelines, cutting some of the red tape, streamlining approvals, increasing financing flexibility, so allowing for increased loan limits for multifamily projects and improving access to other financing tools for both developers and lenders support for local zoning changes. So in other words, the zoning regulations are typically local, but this has federal support to help ease some of those zoning regulations. Also allowing for FHA loans at lower loan amounts and then also allowing people to get FHA loans for things like modular homes or mobile homes. Love that one. That would be awesome. Which I mean that’s aimed directly at housing affordability, which
Is
A huge impact on our housing market. So I know Dave did a whole episode on this, but I wanted to hear everyone’s thoughts on this legislation. If you think it’ll pass, if you think it’s actually going to move the needle,

Kathy:
I say bring it on fire horse, bring it on. I’ve been trying to build a manufactured housing here on own a lot in Malibu, so it’s got houses next to it. There’s no reason there should be any difficulty getting a house on this lot where it’s a residential neighborhood. We’re not talking like the top of a hill in the middle of the Santa Monica mountains or something like that. And it’s still, I talked to builders who said, forget about it. It’s going to take you 10 years to try to get that built. And when looking at manufactured housing, it turned out it was really not much cheaper, and we talked about this before, so it’s like, ah, you just feel so stuck and this is one of the worst places for affordability, and yet it’s just impossible. There’s actually an affordable apartment going in just over the hill and there is just so much backlash around that.

Henry:
NIMBYs.

Kathy:
Yeah. Yep, NIMBYs. So anyway, I love the manufactured housing. That’s the solution and maybe the firehouse is AI in secret. That’s what it really is. It’s going to try to make this go faster,

James:
But doesn’t it come down to specific counties? I get the, it’s going to be releasing, but it just doesn’t. I actually love manufactured home investing if it didn’t take so dang long. It’s a simple process. You buy a piece of land, you get the utilities there, usually it’s going to be a septic, you get the power brought in, but getting approval for that septic system or the onsite is like some of these counties, it’s like four years, two to four years.

Kathy:
It’s hard.

James:
If I could do this in an efficient time, I would probably do a hundred year. You can easily buy these things for 150 grand and deliver ’em, and they’re great places to live. They’re actually laid out really, really well. It’s just honestly, I think the financing piece and those parts of this are going to be beneficial, but I don’t know if this does anything because at the end of the day it’s just so state regulated and there’s not enough people working at these departments. That’s really what it comes down to. If they go, Hey, we’re going to start funding these cities more to get ’em, be more efficient in these counties, I actually would have more hope than even this right here.

Dave:
I agree with you, James. I feel two ways about it. I am encouraged. I think this is a step in the right direction. Is it going to change housing supply fundamentally? Probably not. But as we’ve talked a lot about on the show, I personally just think all the demand side fixes where it’s like we just give more money to home buyers is never going to be the long-term solution and this is a step in the right direction. There are actually some good ideas here, but I think you’re right, James, that ultimately probably 90% of this comes down to state and local regulation, not federal regulation, and they stopped short of doing anything like zoning. They’re publishing, part of it is publishing zoning best practices, but they don’t know states have to do anything. It’s not going to stop. It’s not going to stop all these town hall meetings that people debate. So it really does come down, I think, to local people talking to their own governments and insisting that this stuff happens. But we know that that gets countered by Nimbyism at the same time. But

Henry:
I think support at the federal level is the first step. I mean, hopefully down the road we start to see some of those things loosen. Maybe there’s some sort of incentives they can give local communities to open up the zoning regulations for housing. I know we have about four cities smashed on top of each other here, and each city has its own different perspective in own different zoning regulations on infill housing and some cities and one city’s very progressive about it and some of the other cities are absolutely not. And I think it’s going to take something at the federal level to start getting people on the same page about what we’re trying to accomplish in the housing market as a country.

Dave:
Well said. Just so everyone knows, this hasn’t actually passed the Senate yet. I think it’s pretty likely that it is going to, but we will let you know if anything changes in that process. With that, we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back with more stories from James and Kathy. Welcome back to On the Market. I’m Dave Meyer here with James Henry and Kathy talking about the latest headlines we talked about Trump’s tariffs being struck down by the Supreme Court, a new bipartisan bill making its way through Congress. James, what do you got for us? My news

James:
Article today is the Seahawks. Were crowned Super Bowl 50 champions dominant performance. The article that I brought in, this is always interesting to me. I don’t get the whole crypto world. I would say I’m very behind in that. I don’t understand it, but there’s an article from Business Insider and it’s a crypto firm, which ties to Trump will tokenize some of the president’s real estate empire. And I don’t think this is the reason I felt like this article was interesting, not just because it was Trump doing it. Is this going to be a sort of way that companies are going to start fundraising and trying to do, and is this really the big test? And what it talks about is tokenizing means converting loan revenue into blockchain based crypto tokens that can be bought and traded. As I was kind of reading through this, I was like, I’m not a hundred percent understanding this, but basically it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s like, okay, so you can get a token based on future earnings, but then it seems like there’s unlimited tokens that can be purchased.

Kathy:
It’s very confusing and it just sounds like there’s so many SEC laws about investing in real estate and this seems to bypass all of it. It’s like, yeah, I don’t get it either.

Dave:
That just does not sound good to me. Can you underwrite the deal or what are you buying?

James:
You do know what you can buy. I mean, because buying into specific real estate assets or the token is backed by those assets, but I think for most consumers, they’re just buying the token. They’re not going to actually go in and look at, it’s almost like a way to hide your PM. It’s like, hey, we got this token is tied to this real estate and this real estate is tied to this guy named Trump who’s good at real estate supposedly. And then you kind of put the money there instead of looking at it logically like, Hey, I’m going to buy this asset even if this is syndication, and then get, here’s the performance and projections. And I feel like this is just a terrible idea in general because I mean, at one point, how much were some of these, what were those things called? They weren’t tokens. They were the NFTs. NFTs.

Dave:
Remember those? I was NFTs. Remember crypto in the Metasphere or whatever. What was it called? Oh, the Metasphere land.

James:
The Metaverse.

Dave:
The Metaverse. Oh my God.

James:
What happened to the Metaverse? Did it go into receivership? It’s on a

Dave:
Thumb drive somewhere.

Kathy:
The one thing on the positive people are buying crypto with nothing backing it, so at least something’s backing it. That’s a little better. But then if you’re paying more, you’re selling it and someone’s paying more for it, how do you determine if the underlying asset has gone up? So I don’t understand it enough to even really speak on it, but it’s interesting.

James:
Yeah, this is a plan to tokenize loan revenue from the Trump branded Maldives Resort project. So this is for a specific, every

Dave:
Word in that sentence, resort makes me not want to buy

James:
This. I mean, the Maldives does sound interesting. I would love

Dave:
To go to the maldive. I’m going to take the money. I would invest in this and invest it in a massage and some scuba diving in the Maldives.

Kathy:
Yeah, there you go.

James:
And so basically it’s like investors are able to buy tokens representing pieces of the loan to fund the hotel’s construction. So that’s what I don’t really understand. So if it’s on a construction loan and then you’re buying pieces of the loan,

Dave:
What? It’s not like there’s upside on the loan. If you’re buying a loan or you’re lending, you should get a fixed return, right? Yeah.

James:
Yeah. This is why I was reading this article and I was like, I hope Dave can explain this to me. I did. This is weird, but all I know is it sounds just like a terrible idea. It was like that art or what was the monkey thing with the headphones where they were selling for a million bucks or whatever that was, and I don’t even think it’s worth it anymore. So it’s like, is this the next way that people are going to try to package up crap syndication deals, spin it on some sort of Bitcoin with funding and people get excited and it comes down to really about marketing your product than it does the actual performance of the asset.

Kathy:
Oh, there’d be so much of that. There’d be so much. But on the other side, let’s say you’ve got, let’s just take Trump out of it and just say, you found a great deal and you need investors. And the way we would normally do that is you’d open a fund and you would probably have to have accredited investors unless you filed a Reg A or some other way that you could have non-accredited investors in it. That’s the part, I don’t get how they’re getting around it, but there must be something. And now you’ve got a thousand investors in this fund and they have all contributed to the loan to be able to buy it. Now once you’re in that fund, you can sell your share to somebody else. It has to just depending on the operating agreement, how you do that. So it’s not that out of the realm of possibilities. It just sounds like the process of selling your stake would be easier.

Dave:
That’s true

Kathy:
Because in stake, no pun intended, talking Trump member of Trump stakes, but you can sell your stake either way and just have to go by the rules of the operating agreement. And sometimes it has to be approved by the manager or the manager has to have for se, or the investors have for se of who gets to buy that. So I guess it’s not that weird. It’s just tokenized and maybe an easier process for the sale.

Dave:
Yeah. I actually reading into this a little more. It’s not as bad as it sounds like, as I thought as first it said you can finance up to 70%, so it’s not unlimited, James. That to me changes the thing. It is a limited amount and the tokens are only available to accredited investors. So it is similar to a syndication.

James:
It is accredited, but so what I don’t receive is that they get 75% of the revenue for the token sales after cost. But then you’re buying into,

Dave:
Yeah, it’s super confusing. I still don’t understand why you would do this now instead of a syndication, there’s something that seems a little off about this.

Kathy:
It might be the same as a syndication, just a different way of trading the money,

Dave:
But it’s very unclear how you get paid back or what the token is backed by.

James:
I read this article twice and I was so confused by the end of it, and that’s why I brought it in. I had no insights. I was more confused. I was just like, this is weird. And I don’t know. I feel like these things go, if this goes through, we’re going to see a lot more of it and then we’ll never see it again and there’s going to be a bunch of nightmare stories. That’s just my read on it.

Henry:
Well, it’s already been happening. There’s already a company that I won’t say the name of that actually does on chain real estate transactions. And so basically it converts all the documentation into the blockchain so everything’s captured and stored forever. The transactions are signed in DocuSign, but then they’re converted and tokenized and saved on blockchain.

Dave:
I’m sorry if I’m dumb, but what does that do?

Henry:
Yeah, I don’t get it. Essentially, it allows people to use cryptocurrency to buy real estate, and it allows the process to move a whole lot faster. It is really their sales pitch in this.

James:
So is the deed recorded on the blockchain or is it and the county or just the blockchain? Yes,

Dave:
And the county. It has to be

James:
Recorded by the

Dave:
County, so it’s just saving it somewhere else. I don’t know. I got iCloud. I’m pretty cool at that,

Henry:
But I was reading about this company when I was talking about this. Apparently they’ve done like 40 million in transactions, so somebody’s using it. I just don’t see the pitch

Dave:
Sales pitch. That’s like 80 houses. That’s like four

Henry:
Houses, right?

Dave:
That’s not that much. I’m really not a crypto hater. Just so many of the applications of blockchain are like, okay, that’s maybe incrementally changed. At least someone come up with a good reason for me to use it and I will use it. That is not a good enough reason for me to use it. You’re like, oh, it’s in DocuSign and on the blockchain. Well, I was fine with it just being in DocuSign. That was okay for me. It isn’t DocuSign store it forever, basically. You would think. So

Kathy:
The one thing I heard, and again, don’t understand this very well, maybe 10 years from now we’ll look back at this episode and laugh at ourselves for not knowing.

Dave:
Yes. We’ll,

Kathy:
But if you think about title in America and how easy it’s for someone to steal your title.

Dave:
That’s true.

Kathy:
And it’s going to be much more difficult once it’s on the blockchain as I understand it.

Dave:
I like that. All right, Kathy, thank you. Pulling in some good stats. I like it. All right, we got to take one more quick break, but Kathy’s going to share with us story when we get back. Welcome back to On the Market. I am Dave Meyer here with Kathy Henry and James talking about the latest news. Kathy, what do you got for us?

Kathy:
All right, so I thought this article was interesting from visual capitalist. It’s called Charted the US Cities gaining and losing corporate headquarters, and not surprising at all. What do you guys think is at the top?

Dave:
Okay, can I have three guesses?

Kathy:
Yes.

Dave:
Okay. Austin, Tampa, and Charlotte

Kathy:
Where headquarters are moving to.

Dave:
Yes. Yes, the winners.

Kathy:
Okay. James.

James:
I thought Dallas was a big one, and then I feel like it’s by Tampa, but it’s not Tampa. It’s not big enough. Yeah, Tampas probably not big enough where I was just reading in Florida. Florida has two of ’em.

Henry:
It’s got to be places with no state tech, so I’m guessing it’s going to be Texas and Florida. So I would also pick Dallas and then Tampa and Orlando maybe.

Kathy:
So you guys almost unilaterally got, well, Dallas at the top a hundred new headquarters moved there from 2018 to 24. Austin was second with 81.

Dave:
Nice.

Kathy:
Nashville. Nobody mentioned that. Oh, wow. It was 35.

Dave:
I’m surprised by that. Okay.

Kathy:
And then Phoenix 31. And Houston 31.

Dave:
Okay.

Kathy:
What do you think was the worst?

Dave:
Oh, it’s got to be in California, la, San Francisco, San Diego, all of the above.

Kathy:
San Francisco Bay area had 156 headquarters move out with most of them going to Texas.

Dave:
All right. Henry’s going to make fun of me for being a nerd, but I’d like to see this done per capita because obviously the biggest cities have the most moving in and out because they’re just relatively bigger. That’s why Nashville surprised me, which is impressive. It’s a smaller city.

Kathy:
Yeah. The second worst was the greater Los Angeles area, losing 106. There you

Dave:
Go.

Kathy:
And then third New York City, which probably next year will be even higher. I think.

Dave:
I would just like to keep this all on scale though. New York City lost 27 total headquarters in six years. That’s four year. It’s not that crazy. I think the San Francisco and Dallas hundreds seems like a marginal one, but it really falls off quickly after the California ones.

James:
I think we could see this in Seattle next. We have a big income tax possibly getting passed. It’s going to be on higher earners. People that make over a million dollars a year, it’s going to be a 9.9% tax on your personal income. But there’s going to be a second tier to this too, though, that really will, I think it’s going to be in the fives or 6% where is going to hit the tech sector. And then the b and o tax threshold is increased from a hundred thousand to 2 million in taxable revenue. And so there’s a lot of different tax changes happening in Washington state, and I think these are things that you really got to pay attention to
Because I can tell you my goal was to go get 10 burr properties over the next 12 to 24 months in Seattle. And now I’m looking at other states to get those because these are things that I think can slow markets down dramatically. We see it in California. I mean, the real estate market has slowed down since all these businesses have left. And as you’re looking at investing, you really do got to pay attention to these things because I think these are going to have some serious impacts in Seattle. We’ve had quite a bit of tenant law changes over the last 12 months, and now this income tax could really affect what we see in house values here. I think these are big, big changes that people really need to pay attention to in the states that you’re in, because I think this could be detrimental for Seattle’s real estate for a short amount of time. We could see a pretty big pullback.

Kathy:
Oh, absolutely. You’re

Dave:
Probably

James:
Right.

Dave:
Yeah, I think you’re right.

Kathy:
I think that the issue is that people don’t understand that money is fluid. And so if you are in an area where people are making a lot of money, then they are spending it in all kinds of ways. And so if you want to have a small business, let’s say you want to have a massage parlor or nail salon or just any business at all, do you want one where there’s people who have money or people who don’t have money? So if you want to have a business, you need to be around people who can afford what you have. And guess who pays income tax? All the companies that rich people are working with. So there’s lots of revenue that’s collected when money is circulating, and the faster the money is circulating, the more tax revenue is collected. But you need money. So if you’re just going to tax the people who have it and they leave, it is very detrimental to the areas. I mean, if you look at back in time, Detroit was a New York City at one time, what happened there?

James:
That was all the union pushing. That’s just what it was, right? Companies were trying to grow and the unions were getting in the way of their growth. And at some point, businesses, you decide to leave. It becomes unenjoyable.

Kathy:
Yeah. If you can’t do business, you leave. Yeah, I

Dave:
Don’t know. I think corporate profits are at an all time high right now. American workers are getting the lowest share of corporate revenue since 1945. I don’t really think that’s necessarily a good thing. Business climate overall in the United States is pretty darn good. It’s pretty good for corporations these days. I think regular people are having a much harder time than corporations. If you want to just look at the numbers. The other thing is, I agree that these things do have impacts, and people love hating on California. California, fourth biggest economy in the world. It’s bigger than every other economy other than Japan, the United States and China. So clearly something’s going right for the business economy in California.

Kathy:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Still for investing, it is going to be very difficult to invest in California because the prices are high. So if you’re looking for cash flowing market, it’s good to look at where these businesses are moving, and that’s a clue for you. Dallas, Austin, Nashville, Phoenix, Houston, it’s where a lot of businesses are moving,

Henry:
And especially if you look at some of those markets where businesses are moving, where real estate is down right now, that’s an opportunity for people to get in, get a discount. Obviously companies see something in those markets, which means they’re going to bring people to work there, boost the economy. So it’s a good time to get property in some of those markets where their pricing like Phoenix, where pricing is down.

Dave:
Alright, any last thoughts before we get out of here? James, you want to shill the Seahawks one more time?

James:
It’s going to be a great year for the Seahawks. We got the fifth most cap space in the league. We can lock down some talent and I look forward to Super Bowl 51. Okay.

Dave:
Alright, well thank you all so much for joining us on this episode of On The Market. We’ll see you next time.