Navigating the Housing Market’s Mixed Signals

A housing market deep dive with predictions and more. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe, and today I'm going to be joined by longtime Fool contributors John Kloss and Matt Frankel. Now, I know we call it earning season, but earning season never really ends because there's always somebody reporting something. And we've actually had a couple of home builders report recently. So we're going to use this as a chance to dive into the industry and we'll also wrap up today with stocks on the radar. But we're going to start the day with a fresh serving of news that Starbucks is planning a major restructuring. The company announced it will cut its North American store count by about 1% layoff of about 900 employees, and it's all part of a $1 billion restructuring program to hopefully recharge a brand that perhaps people thought that the coffee had got a little bit stale of Starbucks. Now, guys, I have conflicting thoughts about this. On the one side, not throwing good money after poor returns is always preferred, hence the store count reduction. But I don't think contraction was really on people's minds when they brought Brian Nickel in over from Chipotle to write the ship. So where do you land on this news? And bonus to the question, what is your preferred coffee spot and preferred order? Well, Tyler, I think that Starbucks Optimist had hoped that we could keep all of these Starbucks stores and just simply get better efficiency out of them. I think that was the hope bringing in Nickel that it would just be better operations for all the stores. Nickel is basically saying that some of these stores don't fit into the vision for the company going forward, so not all of them can be saved. They really want to promote this coffee house vibe where you come in, you stay a while, and some of the stores he's saying are not conducive for that. So they're going to go, this is a pricey move, a billion dollar price tag. Much of it is going to happen this year, but there's going to be some ongoing expenses into next year. So not exactly what we had hoped for, but maybe a thing that has to happen, and they are saying we're going to get back to net unit growth next year. So maybe it all is a net positive in the end. I'm generally a fan of this move as a Starbucks shareholder. Brian Nickel, he previously has already said that not all of Starbucks stores have a place in his new vision for Starbucks. For example, there are a bunch of stores that are drive through and pick up only and don't have anywhere to sit, and that's not what he's going forward with the back to Starbucks plan. It's also important to mention that, yes, it's contraction, but this will only reduce the North American store count by about 1%. So it does appear to be very targeted. And I can tell you myself, there are about 10 Starbucks within a 20 minute drive of where I'm standing right now. And there are a couple of them where I go in and I say to myself, how does this place make any money? So I'm totally a fan of if there's no reasonable way to turn it around to get rid of a location. The company did say that its store count will resume growth in fiscal 2026. So this does seem temporary. And to me, directing the company's resources at parts of the business that have the most potential is a good thing. Now about my coffee order, admittedly, I was sipping a Starbucks cold brew while I was prepping for this show, but I generally prefer smaller independent coffee shops. I was in New York City this weekend and I went to a place called 787 Coffee and got a horchata latte that was delicious. So generally the independent coffee person. And we still don't know what John's order is. Man, y'all are way too fancy for me. What is black coffee at the gas station? Well, I mean, my preference is a double espresso black. So I'm not that far off from you. And I don't know if that makes me a preferred or a hated customer at Starbucks. So decent ideas, some good, some bad here. Let's put some actual conviction behind these views here, guys, based on Nickel's plan here, some restructuring, some of the vision for bringing back that third place vibe that Starbucks kind of really wanted to achieve early on in its vision of the coffee house and may have strayed from that. Are you bullish on Starbucks the stock over the next three to five years after Nickel gets to implement this plan? Or if not, are there alternative coffee or restaurant stocks that you think will do better than Starbucks? Well, I'm certainly not bearish on Starbucks. I mean, Starbucks is such a great brand. It's been a great brand for a long time. And then in Brian and Nickel, you have a great operator. So I think it's hard to be bearish with that combination. That said, it's hard to be overly bullish, as in market beating bullish for Starbucks right now, just because of how many unknowns there are still with the business. There's still ongoing inflation with coffee prices. It's trying to make moves with its China business. But what exactly that's going to be, we still don't know. And maybe there's still some pricing adjustments that need to happen on the menu. That's one of the problems from previous management that Nickel might be still working out. So it's hard to know for sure how much upside there is with Starbucks, but certainly I wouldn't bet against it. Yeah. I bought Starbucks in the time since Nickel joined, generally on price drops and corrections. And I'm generally bullish. I don't think he'll replicate his Chipotle returns. That wouldn't be a very realistic target. But I'll go on record here as predicting Starbucks will beat the market over the next five years. The early results are strong. Yes, same-store sales declines are continued. They've moderated nicely, and all the numbers are trending in the right direction. So I'm very optimistic. All right. Well, we got one person on record saying we got a market beating stock in Starbucks here. Coming up next, we're going to make sense of the really mixed signals we're seeing from the housing market coming up after this ad. Hey, Fools, we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsor for today's episode. Real estate. It has been the cornerstone of wealth building for generations, but it's also often been a major headache for investors, with three AM maintenance calls, tenant disputes, and property taxes. And it fund rises flagship fund, a $1.1 billion real estate portfolio, with more than 4,000 single-family homes in the Sunbell communities, 3.3 million square feet of in-demand industrial facilities, all professionally managed by an experienced team. The flagship fund taps into the sum of real estate's most attractive qualities, long-term appreciation potential, a hedge against inflation, and diversification beyond the stock market. Check, check, and check. All without the complex paperwork, massive down payments, and soul-sucking landlord duties. Visit fundrise.com/fool to explore the portfolio, check out historical returns, and see just how much easier investing in real estate can be. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the fund rise flagship fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com/flagship. This is a paid advertisement. For longtime listeners of Motley Full Money, having Matt, John, and myself is a relatively new experience. But I do want to give fair warning. We love talking housing. So this isn't the first time, and definitely won't be the last time we're going to be dicing into housing and home builders. And home builders tends to be a hidden gems-esque type investment out there with a couple certainly in the hidden gems universe, there's some home builders. So we get permission to do that since they're in the universe. I think it's fair to say that housing has been giving a lot of mixed signals lately. I mean, there's persistent reports about shortages of homes somewhere in the millions. But then we look at existing home sales that are at the same seasonally adjusted pace we saw in the depths of the Great Recession or in the early 1990s, when there were like less 100 million fewer people in the United States. You know, there's a lot of factors here. We got interest rates, we got employment, wage growth, home price inflation, et cetera. So we really wanted to get into a deeper dive of this topic, and it gave us a really good time because we've had a couple of recent earnings reports from Lenar and KB Home really before earnings get to kick off. So we get to focus on this a little bit more than we normally would. So Matt, I want you to kick us off after reviewing KB and Lenar's most recent earnings report. Well, some of the things that stood out to you in these earnings reports, and did they send any like significant signals to you about the broader market? You know, first of all, I love these companies that have irregular fiscal years that keep us busy between earnings season for sure. Overall the market environment still seems to favor new homes versus existing ones. John's going to talk about some of the incentives in a minute that are in the market, although mortgage rates are still relatively high and are keeping things generally slow overall. But while existing home sales were virtually flat month over month and year over year in August, new home sales soared by 20% from July to August to a three year high, much better than was expected. Now, the recent results are mixed. You mentioned KB and Lenar, KB just reported earnings and revenue. They exceeded the company's guidance, although home sales declined by 7% year over year. The company has been a great capital allocator. They bought back 11% of their outstanding shares this year. That's pretty remarkable. On the other hand, Lenar reported a 12% increase in new orders, although they're using more incentives so their sales prices were down significantly. Yeah. I wanted to give a little extra context on that new homes booming existing home sales kind of stagnating. This is one of those I today, I'm this year, many years old when I found out like, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, homes owned without a mortgage recently hit the highest recording since they started keeping track of it back in the 1980s. That will mean that somebody's probably been in the residence and for 30 plus years have paid down that amortizing mortgage downsizing something that used to be more common for home old, older homeowners isn't really happening and so we have all these owned homes out there and that's really, I guess you could say, putting sand in the gears, excuse me, of the existing home market and new homes have to fill the void. So John, how are the home builders doing when it comes to filling that void? Yeah, it's interesting. You do need to bring new buyers into the market. Shout out to KB Homes. It seems to be doing pretty well in that regard. It said that half of its home buyers are actually first-time home buyers. So doing a good job there. But one of the things that these home builders are doing is incentivizing these purchases for a new home and this is according to the National Association of Home Builders. More than one-third of builders cut their prices in August and two-thirds offered incentives and that incentive deal was actually the highest in five years. So we're seeing an uptick there. Let me give you a real-life example of what that could look like. This is from realitor.com talking about a Dallas couple. They got a DR Horton new home and they got a lower rate at 3.9% versus 6.3% is what they should have gotten at the time. Their down payment was reduced from $20,000 to $13,000 and the final price of the home was reduced from $370,000 to $332,000. So essentially they were able to save $50,000 upfront and then hundreds of dollars per month on an ongoing basis because the interest rate was lower. So why are they offering incentives? Well they're trying to get people into the homes and it's interesting. I don't know, Matt, maybe you have thoughts here on whether or not this is a signal of weak demand counterintuitively. New home sales are going up but it's through the incentives. Another thing to note here is the Census Bureau noted that new housing starts were down 6% year over year in August. So what's going on here, Matt? You don't have to tell me about DR Horton's incentives. I'm actually standing in a DR Horton home as I'm recording this and it was because they incentivize us to buy it in a few different ways. To Tyler's point, home equity is at an all time high. It makes sense that a lot more people are in their houses free and clear. But I pushed back on the demand thing. It's not necessarily that demand is weak. The demand for housing, especially entry level homes for the younger generations, is off the charts strong but affordability is what's keeping people on the sidelines for now. Affordability and lack of inventory. Homebuilder incentives are a great tool for competing against the historically low levels of existing home inventory, giving people an attractive alternative like those incentives you mentioned. In a normal housing market, about 10% of sales are new homes. Right now it's closer to 30. When are even said in its earnings release that, quote, achieving these results required additional incentives? So it's definitely a big part of what's driving the growth for a lot of home builders right now. Look, I'm just going to throw this out there. Yes, it looks like they, you know, big price cuts, but, you know, there might be a possibility that the initial price that was given was perhaps a little bit high. So it could look like we're giving somebody a great big cut. So let's keep that in a little bit of context here because, you know, every once in a while you do things to grease the skids like that. So it kind of helps to really lay the background of what we're looking at the housing market right now. New home sales are slow, new home sales of volume is okay, but demand is really high. And but it's taking a bit of greasing the skids in the form of incentives, maybe making it look like people got a great deal, you know, just to get them to sign on the dotted line. Home builders are doing mostly better than expected. And look, if we're looking at stock prices, a lot of these trade for really cheap valuations, we're talking price to earnings ratios in the single digits, which is quite low. So let's put our necks out there. Do you two see the home builders as a sector going to outpace the market over the next five years? Tyler, I won't comment on the entire sector. Maybe I can just comment on KB home symbol KBH. And so you talk about greasing the skids. This is a company that doesn't seem to be greasing the skids, at least not as much as some of its competitors. It's not really offering those incentives, perhaps because it is more of a customized home builder. And it's actually trying to get those customizations up, those built-to-order homes. And so that's helping it with its profit margins. Yes, demand perhaps, or at least revenue maybe is a little bit down. But you look at the valuation of the stock, as you point out, quite cheap. It's been able to take advantage of this with strong profits and reduce that share count by 25% in recent years. So and it pays the dividend. I like KB home here. Yeah. Tyler and I have talked about this on previous shows that it's a really good profit environment for home builders. I think Tyler has put it-- you have to be an idiot to not make money as a home builder right now. The reason is that home prices in general, home values, have risen a lot faster than the cost of constructing a home. So builders have not only-- are they pricing some of that into their normal price? But there's a lot more room in the margins to wiggle around with. So it's still a good profit environment for home builders. As far as the next five years, I'd give that a big yes with the caveat that over the next five years, mortgage rates are going to be significantly lower than they are today on average. If that's the case, and we see some of this pent up demand for especially entry level homes come back into the market, there's a lot to like about the home building space right now. I'll put mine out there too. Look, as you said, I think that profitability has been great. And even the dumber of my two dogs could be a home builder CEO and probably make a pretty good return in this business. But I don't know if I want to put my neck out for the whole home builder industry because there's a couple of them out there that are run by my dumber dog. So I think there's a lot of great companies in this industry. And I think picking some of the group winners is going to do incredibly well. One company I have followed for a long time, and I know it's in the Hidden Gems universe is Green Brick Partners, ticker GRBK. But to stick my neck out there for a lot of the bad operators in this industry that could drag it down, no, I don't want to do that. I want to pick the good ones. With that in mind, we're going to take a quick break. And then after that, we're going to do stocks at our radar. Using your new Dell PC, powered by the Intel Core Ultra processor. It helps you handle a lot, even when your holiday to-do list gets to be a lot, because it's built with all-day battery, plus powerful AI features that help you do it all with ease, from editing images to drafting emails to summarizing large documents to multitasking. So you can organize your holiday shopping and make custom holiday decor and search for great holiday deals and respond to holiday requests and customer questions and customers requesting custom things, and plan that perfect holiday dinner for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet. Luckily, you can get a PC that helps you do it all faster, so you can get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Get yours today at dell.com/holiday. Terms and conditions apply. See dell.com for details. I'd say it's a little early to say this is your tradition, because we're only a couple months into our hosting of Motley Fool Money, but we're going to do our best to make Stocks on Our Radar as a regular part of our Thursday hidden gem show. So we're going to go around the horn, and actually this week, I'm going to start off with Stocks on Our Radar, and the company that's been really piquing my interest lately is Miami International Holdings, ticker MIAX. This is actually a company that I peoed not too long ago, I think a couple of months ago recently. This is a company that has established exchange markets for equities, options, futures, commodities and all the other things that we love to trade on a given basis. You probably don't see a lot of stocks listed on the Miami exchange, like you would the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, but MIAX is a big player in the options exchange game, where it's actually the world's third largest options trading platform actually above the New York Stock Exchange. It's also been making inroads with derivatives and ETF trading through its partnership with Bloomberg to build out indices. And the multi-strategy head funds like Citadel and Susquehanna, some of the largest option traders in the world by volume, are 5% owners of the company. I find this company fascinating because exchange market companies like Intercontinental Exchange, S&P Global, NASDAQ, the business, they've been great businesses over the long term. So I'd like to see if Miami International could be one of the companies that replicates the success we've seen with exchange markets. So with that, John, you're up. Yeah. I love that, Tyler. That one's going on my watch list now. Thank you. I'm going to stick with our home theme and I'm going to go with Floor and Decor Holding Stock. This is symbol FND. This is a stock that I think will double in value over the next five years. And that's especially if the interest rates go down like Matt is talking about. So if you look at the stock price as of this taping, it is only up 3% over the last five years, but let's watch the business, not the stock. So revenue has doubled over the last five years, even though the stock price is essentially gone nowhere. You look at what it's wanting to do here. This is a home improvement retailer specializing in flooring products. Has just over 250 stores now. It's looking to double that footprint over the next seven-ish years, let's say. So there's a growth opportunity here and it trades at essentially the same price-to-sales ratio as lows. It's much cheaper than Home Depot, even though its growth prospects are much better. I think that as interest rates come down, historically that's when people can tap into that home equity, take out a he-lock, replace their flooring, do these projects. I think this is going to be a boom at some point over the next five years as it grows this store print as well. So this is one that I really like here. It's one that I already own, but it's one that I'm thinking to add to at these prices. I love John's Pick because I've said this before on shows. I think as mortgage rates fall, the refinancing boom we're going to see from people who bought homes at 7%, 8% mortgage rates is going to be huge and there's a lot of companies that can benefit from that. For me, the Trade Desk, TTD is what's jumped to the top of my watch list lately. Even after its post-earnings plunge, the stock even got worse. Now it's about 67% below its 52-week high. The "disappointing third-quarter guidance" wasn't nearly as bad as it looked. It was really a tough comp because the Trade Desk benefited from a lot of the election cycle advertising in the same quarter in 2024 that didn't get in 2025 for obvious reasons. I think the fears about Amazon stealing its market share are ridiculously overblown and it's essentially trading where it was in mid-2020, kind of like Florian Decor or like John said, although the business is far stronger now than it was back then. So that's one that I am watching very, very closely right now. So there you have it, Miami International, Trade Desk and Florian Decor for stocks on our radar. That's all the time we have for today. Check in tomorrow, where John's going to be joining the team for tomorrow's show along with Travis Hoyn and Lou Whiteman and they're going to cover something. But for today, Matt, John, thanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas. I'm going to hit the disclosure and let's get out of here. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved for advertisers. These are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check it out in our show notes. Thanks to our producer, Bart Shannon. For Matt, John and I. Thanks for listening and we'll chat again soon.