Market thoughts
Slow start to the summer season, with the June being a chilly then rainy month. This 4th weekend doesn’t look that promising either, though it’s a tricky one as an employer, with the Holiday falling on Tuesday, you feel you should give the Monday off but you also feel you shouldn’t. We just gave our team a 4 day Memorial Day weekend, so it’s hard to justify the same action a month later - we aren’t the Gov’t.
Lots of articles out about the decline in Airbnb bookings. A little hard to get to the facts, since the headlines are focusing on the few big markets that are seeing a serious decline and making good headlines. Airbnb in an article I read today is claiming only a 3% across their platform. I’m sure each market has it’s own story, and the story of the Hudson Valley has always been unique.
I could dive into the stats - there are several publicly available databases which purport to shed light on the short term rental market (STR) - but I’ll leave that to someone else. What I know, and of what I speak, is just general observations.
My local banking colleagues have said they have scaled back on lending to these types of business plays. It was clear to me that it seemed 2 out of every 3 people who bought a home up here were planning to rent it in order to offset their expenses. And just like in the 60’s and 70’s when tourism in the Catskills was decimated by alternative choices, once again the main client of choice - the NY metro family - is back on the road, the air, able to get around and go where they want, post-covid. Meaning, mostly, less local travel to the Hudson Valley. Don’t get me wrong - it’s still a busy place since Covid.
I don’t follow Airbnb rates - and I’m not a big Airbnb patron - I like hotels - and
I’m always shocked at how quickly a night room rate gets expensive. Fees, cleaning, this, that, jeez. $$225 turns into $360 before you know it and $400 become $600 before you blink twice. And you only realize it once you’ve decided, reserved, gone thru all the hoops and ready to book. It’s annoying. And frankly, I’ve stayed in as many bad ones as good ones, and I don’t have the time or bandwidth to really figure out where value meets form best. I know one thing - most of them are not what you see in the marketing and advertising.
What’s been interesting as I’ve been mulling over this pending student loan payback restart, is once again how predatory the lending environment is across the board. 72 months or more for car loans when a car loses half its value in 2 years. Student loans with insane terms for very inexperienced borrowers. Loans of all sorts - boats, motorcycles, RV, mortgages - being made to applicants without taking into consideration the paused student loan monthly payment obligations. The student loan mess is criminal - those loans never should have been made in the fashion they were - and once again, you see how corrupt the system is - think about it, the system and lawmakers and colleges are so corrupt they are willing to shackle 2 generations of kids to endless and crippling and non-dischargeable loans. There is no reason why kids with no borrowing history, credit score, or much of a clue should be able to borrow $10k, let alone $100k or more. It’s disgusting.
So kudos to Joe Biden for having this on his radar. But, why put it on your radar and try and give some forgiveness while you are still allowing and making the exact same loans today?
Dave Ramsey is feeling some heat, and I know he’s feeling the heat because he feeling the need to be defensive, about his attacks on millennials and similar demographics for living at home and being cuddled.
This really articulate rednecky (at least that’s how is presenting himself) put out a tiktok that went viral, and continues to, countering Dave’s point that Millenials living at home are lazy, cuddled and need tough love.
This guy makes a great case that the Millenial generation has been dealt a pretty shitty hand of timing and luck. First, they were victims of a predatory student loan program, perhaps the first group really exposed to the rising cost of college and the scams out there to pay for it. 2, that everyone was encouraging everyone to go to college, and ‘invest in yourself and your future’ and let’s admit it, not going was considered 2nd class. 3, when they came out, needing to pay off this big predatory debt and get a job, the deepest recession the country has seen since the great depression arrived, and lingered and languished for years. Then, when they were hitting their early 30’s Covid, job losses, then inflation, then housing and rental prices that were 10x inflation compared to wages that rose incrementally.
Taken all together - great recession, burdensome student debt, inflation, housing price increases - he makes a good point about the stresses and callouses this group has endured. I can agree with him, and disagree - since I know of a few millenials who do live at home and carry around Louis V handbags and very nice clothes and cars.
He makes another great point when he points out how ‘easy’ we had it. Dave Ramsey is a little older than me, but the system was more or less the same. College was cheap, degrees were easy to get, Unions were strong and paid good wages to non-college grads, not going to college was not a black mark against you, starter homes could be had for $100k, health insurance was available and affordable. You could fail for awhile and even end up succeeding because not everything was stacked against you.
So it’s all pretty interesting, and why it’s so important to get information from varied sources and challenge your assumptions. One day I was nodding my head in agreement with Ramsey, the next day I’m like Wow, Ramsey’s an idiot, and I end up somewhere in between.
One thing that is becoming clear to me - remote work is scary for the soul. I’ve now met a few people who have been remote working for a few years, and I have to tell you, they really seem lost - they may or may not be able to do their job, but they are stuck in this anti-social, non-peer reviewed universe without the checks and balances that being in the office and out and about entails, and to be honest, it’s not healthy. Like people or not, it’s important to be out there navigating them. This one friend I met, works for a company, from home, that knows when she is in front of her computer and when she is not - so she literally sits at her kitchen table, alone, with her computer, with big brother monitoring her key strokes and time online - aware of every time she steps away - it was a truly frightening existence that was clear in her digressing social interactions.