Business

One persistent complaint about the housing market is that higher interest rates have kept a lot of would-be sellers from putting their homes — with their 3% mortgages — up for sale. Because they’re gonna pay a lot more than 3% on a new mortgage.

Well, according to the latest monthly real estate report from Zillow, those sellers seem to be getting over their hesitation.

The higher mortgage rates haven’t gone anywhere. But Guy Cecala from Inside Mortgage Finance said impatient sellers who’ve wanted to move for several years seem to be pulling the trigger now.

“If you want to downsize … you can’t wait forever. Would-be sellers who sat on the fence have said, ‘OK, it’s time to move,'” he said.

There is also good news for the yearslong housing shortage because fewer sellers are looking to buy another house. That’s partly because their median age, 63, is the highest ever. They might be moving in with family or into assisted living. Or their other home.

“People have second homes, a smaller retirement home that’s in a nice vacation area, and they’re just going to move there full time,” Cecala said.

The homes that are going on the market have gained in value, thanks to the housing shortage. Timothy Savage, a professor at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, said that means even if sellers need to buy another home, it’s worth selling anyway.

“Sellers are motivated, even in the face of high mortgage rates, to lock in the equity gains that they’ve earned,” he said.

Zillow also reported a record number of price cuts in last month’s listings. That might seem odd, given the housing shortage. But Savage said that’s actually just another sign of motivation.

“Sellers are eager to sell and take small haircuts, essentially to lock in the equity gains,” he said.

The other surprising piece of this: It’s happening in the dead of winter.

“Winter months are always more sluggish,” said economist Jessica Lautz with the National Association of Realtors. “People don’t want to put on their snow boots to look at homes.”

Which could mean even more movement in the housing market is on tap for the busy season in the spring.

A key priority for the Trump administration and Congress is reducing the number of federal rules and regulations. One target area? Home appliances.

In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said he plans to roll back energy efficiency standards for a variety of things we use in our homes every day.

“There’s a wide range of appliance standards and products, and so it includes light bulbs, dishwashers, furnaces, shower heads, HVAC and things like that,” said Sapna Gheewala-Dowla, associate vice president of policy and research with the policy advocacy group Alliance to Save Energy.

Energy efficiency standards for household appliances and even smaller items like light bulbs have been around for decades. But critics say they’ve gone too far and limit consumer choice.

There are a few ways Republicans can unwind these rules, according to Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“This will start with reviews of the most recent Biden administration regulations, which can be most easily undone later on,” he said. “This may move towards legislative changes that would limit future such regulations.”

But there are some limits to what the Trump administration can do, said Andrew deLaski, who runs the advocacy group the Appliance Standards Awareness Project.

“The statute prohibits the Department of Energy from setting new standards that are weaker than the existing standards,” he said. “So there’s a very strong ‘no roll-back’ provision in statute.”

In addition, many of the companies making these products already changed their product lines in response to the new rules.

“The manufacturers have already started moving towards and making the improvements,” said Shanika Whitehurst, associate director for product sustainability, research and testing at Consumer Reports. “And, you know, those that did not — I guess what the rollback will do is just allow them to stay on the market.”

Most consumers have adjusted to the updated standards, as well, already swapping out their incandescent bulbs for LEDs and buying Energy Star-rated appliances.

“Rolling back some of these appliance standards is basically going to decrease the amount of effort the manufacturers have to put in to increase efficiency in the technologies that they have available,” noted Gheewala-Dowla at the Alliance to Save Energy.

But it probably won’t motivate manufacturers to bring back old models or get consumers to give up their LED, app-controlled mood lighting, she added.

The vacancy rate among retail spaces nationwide is 4.1%, according to a new report out Thursday morning from the commercial real estate firm JLL. That’s near a historic low for the retail sector, and it’s been stuck there for awhile. 

Despite low vacancy and high demand, construction of new retail space has been sluggish too.

There’s pretty strong demand for retail space, so rents have been climbing, according to JLL’s Keisha Virtue. But new retail — in desirable locations — is still pretty expensive to build. 

“Material costs, labor costs, land costs all those factor in,” she said.

The problem is developers can likely make more money right now building other kinds of properties, per Brandon Svec, the national director of U.S. retail analytics for the CoStar Group.

“If I’m going to have a higher return by building multifamily, by building medical office, that’s where I’m going to going to choose to allocate my time and resources,” he said.

A bunch of store closures might free up more retail space soon — think Walgreens, Party City and Macy’s. That’s happening, Svec noted, because there were fewer closures post-pandemic lockdowns, as cash-flush consumers flocked back to stores.

“Certain businesses that maybe had business models that were lacking, or store fleets that that were underperforming, were able to mask that because of this large overall boost in consumption,” he said.

Now, consumers have gotten a little more discerning with their money, so more chains are closing locations. And that means that retailers that are growing are working with what they can find, per Anjee Solanki, national director of retail services and practice groups at Colliers. 

“I think the retailers are getting much more sophisticated on their store operations, allowing them to be more nimble in going larger or going smaller and adapting to what’s available in the marketplace,” she said.

Meaning you might soon see a Five Below or Dollar General in a former Walgreens. 

Over the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has escalated a trade war with China, threatened to start one with Canada, Mexico and Colombia, and announced a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports from every country across the globe. To quote the president as he signed the orders Monday in the Oval Office: “It’s a big deal.”

As a trade consultant, Sarita Jackson, founder and CEO of the Global Research Institute of International Trade, tries to help businesses figure out how to navigate those volatile global markets. “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal asked her how her clients are responding and how the landscape is changing. 

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. 

Kai Ryssdal: Explain to me, would you, the life of a trade consultant here in February 2025.

Sarita Jackson: Wow. Well, the best explanation, I could say, is kind of like being in the middle of a storm, if you will. Just really staying on top of what those changes are on a regular basis, I would say 24 hours. Sometimes it’s less than 24 hours.

Ryssdal: Well, a woman’s got to sleep, right? But, but look, other than what the heck is going on, what are, like, the top three things that people are asking you?

Jackson: Well, the main thing is, what does this mean for my product in a particular market? For example, some of my clients, one of the clients, and actually we’re scheduled to talk again soon, toward the end of last year, you know, I had worked with her. I said, “Hey, why don’t you consider having your product, or part of it, manufactured in Mexico as opposed to China? Because we’ve had these tariffs already, and then we’re hearing about more tariffs. So why don’t we shift to Mexico because we have the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement?” Well, then there were concerns about, “OK, what does this mean for me now that I am looking at Mexico for my production and there still are going to be these tariffs?”

Another issue that has really come up is pertaining to funding. Some of these clients, I just had this conversation yesterday, actually, [about] if there’s cuts to the funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, and that’s how I’m able to expand overseas, what does that mean for me to still continue to remain globally integrated in 2025?

Ryssdal: Do you have many, or any, companies saying that because of the present tariffs and whatever tariffs may come, they are going to reshore their production and bring it back to the United States?

Jackson: You know, that is one of the interesting things that I was waiting to hear. And as of yet, I have not heard that. What has impressed me, and these are smaller companies, by the way, what has really been interesting, at least with the companies that I’ve spoken with now — maybe someone else may have a different story — but they still are focused on going global or remaining globally integrated and just saying, well, we just need to adjust and figure out the best strategy with the resources that are available. 

Ryssdal: Right. Two more things, and then I’ll let you get back to work because I know you have client calls. The first one is, just very broadly speaking, clearly now the United States, as a matter of policy, is going to be trying to go it alone in global trade. And I realize that’s an oxymoron because you can’t go it alone in global trade, but we’re certainly going to pull back a good deal. What’s that going to mean for the American economy?

Jackson: For the American economy, the one thing I can definitely say is, prices will go up. The business owner will have to carry those costs. And then, guess what? Some of those costs will be passed on to the consumer. And then, if you are an exporter, if that’s what you depend on to grow your business, and you’re exporting to countries and then other countries are retaliating, well, that makes it more difficult for you to grow your business and to enter other markets and provide much-needed goods or service in that market. That has an effect both on the businesses and the consumers. 

Ryssdal: And then finally, acknowledging that it took decades to build a system of international trade that we have had up until recently and also granted that there were deep flaws with it and it did some level of damage. But, you know, rising tide, all boats. How long do you suppose it takes to rebuild some kind of global trade order if we have 3½ more years of American isolationism?

Jackson: That is a really good question. Something I think needs to be discussed even more is the role of the international institution, the World Trade Organization. The WTO.

Ryssdal: Which you haven’t heard mention of very much at all lately anyway, right?

Jackson: Exactly, which people miss. Yes, you see sort of this isolationism or protectionism, but there is this whole international institution that sets rules. So for me, it’s hopefully not that the whole system will crash, but just that we are going through a unique period where we have some of these shifts, but that you have this international body that can continue to govern so that trade can continue and be beneficial in this so-called global economy.

The digital payment network Zelle announced that it serviced $1 trillion in payments last year — the highest volume ever, it says, for a peer-to-peer payment app. Almost three-quarters of consumers in the U.S. use mobile payment apps like Zelle, Venmo and Cash App, including more than 90% of Gen Z consumers.

What started out as a convenient way to pay your friends back for dinner is becoming a bigger part of how we make transactions throughout the economy.

Though they’re called peer-to-peer apps, these days they’re often used to do peer-to-landlord business.

“This is too convenient. I don’t understand why people bother with paper checks anymore,” said Zeanna Bunch. She rents out a couple of rooms in her house in Morgan Hill, California. 

Several years ago, at the suggestion of a tenant, she started accepting rent payments through Zelle and never looked back. “Even if they’re out of town, they just hit the app and send me the rent and … you get a little ka-ching noise on your phone,” she said.

Zelle General Manager Denise Leonhard said the network moved almost $2 million a minute last year. That’s a lot of ka-chings.

“We are now partnering with over 2,200 banks across the network,” she said. “This is enabling their customers to basically go through their daily tasks and be able to pay people that they know and trust.”

That’s landlords, but also babysitters, farmers market vendors, hairstylists, music teachers.

But as the amounts grow, so do concerns about mistakes and fraud, said Lisa Gill at Consumer Reports.

“There’s a lot of onus on the individual to sort out a problem,” she said.

The quick, irreversible transactions on these apps make it easier to send money to the wrong person or fall prey to scammers, Gill said. And there’s little federal oversight.

“They are not a bank,” she said.

Zelle payment systems are usually integrated into banking apps and only transfer funds bank to bank. Other apps can store value within the app, which Gill recommends against, suggesting users transfer funds to a bank account immediately.

Last year, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule that extended the agency’s oversight to include payment apps. It sued several large banks for failing to protect Zelle users from fraud.

Zelle called the suit “meritless,” saying it provides multiple backstops to help users avoid mistakes and scams.

2023 marked the all-time high for North American concert ticket sales, owing to the likes of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. 2024 was strong, too. And that’s one reason why concert promoters like AEG Presents and Live Nation are looking to tap into parts of the country long underserved by major touring bands.

Think mid-sized American cities.

Well, there’s a company in Colorado trying to meet that demand and their product is the venue itself.

For a long time in Colorado, to see a big epic concert you had to go to Denver. Maybe to Red Rocks, an outdoor amphitheater surrounded by sandstone cliffs. But last summer, the state’s second-biggest city, Colorado Springs, got its own venue.

Homegrown band OneRepublic was the first to play at the Ford Amphitheater. The outdoor concert space has room for 8,000 and it’s a boutique concept. Concert goers can sit around gas fire pits while big names play, and the sun sets behind the Rocky Mountains.

The Colorado Springs company behind the amphitheater — called VENU — wants to bring basically this exact high-end event space to dozens of mid-sized cities.

“Since there haven’t been new amphitheaters built in quite some time in general, let alone in these areas, the company is being very, very tactical in terms of selecting where to create something new,” said Dean Budnick, who writes about the live music industry for magazines like Billboard and Variety.

VENU’s pitch to cities is that these outdoor amphitheaters can bring millions of dollars in economic activity. The company often gets tax breaks or other incentives. Budnick said it’s a smart model. Big promoters like Notes Live and AEG Presents are building new concert spaces too, but they can’t build everywhere.

“Venues are expensive to build,” Budnick said. “While it might be optimal to own the venue, if one had the resources, there’s a lot of value in just operating the venue.”

That’s the case here. AEG Presents brings in the bands that play the Ford Amphitheater. Colorado Springs was VENU’s first project, but the company has five more under construction in places like Oklahoma and Texas.

But plopping a concert venue in a place that’s not used to concert sound can cause problems.

“My family and I were enjoying our last night of summer with the kids outside, before they started school on Monday,” resident Cheree Hutchison told the Colorado Springs City Council in August. She lives close to the new venue.

“We had to cut our evening short as the band was screaming profanities that were blaring at us at over 70 decibels,” she said.

She’s one of hundreds of neighbors who have protested VENU’s amphitheater. Some residents say they can hear song lyrics loud and clear in their living rooms from miles away. Budnick said this is pretty common with new event spaces, that it can take some time to calibrate the sound levels at an outdoor amphitheater.

Even though the venue’s decibel levels might be legal, he said the sound “still could be just absolutely striking to the folks who live around the venue and never anticipated that and that can become a flashpoint.”

VENU is trying to be a good neighbor. In Colorado Springs, the company plans to spend $3 million dollars on sound mitigation measures like additional walls and speaker system changes. The issue makes headlines in Colorado Springs on the regular, but VENU CEO J.W. Roth said lots of other cities are not so concerned about neighborhood noise.

“They want my business there and they want us there,” Roth said. “So, many of them have gone completely out of their way to make it easier for me, not more difficult.”

He pointed out that two new hotels have sprung up next to the Ford Amphitheater and five new restaurants. He’s hoping residents eventually get used to the sound of the concerts and appreciate the business they bring. 

Oil company BP said it’s planning to announce a “fundamental reset” of its business strategy later this month. The company had a rough 2024 — its profits dropped by more than a third.

So what’s that “reset” likely to look like?

If recent moves — and analyst intel — are any indication, the company will be moving away from renewables and doubling down on oil and gas. 

It’s not just BP. Other oil companies, including Shell and the Norwegian company Equinor, are doing the same.

Just five years ago, oil companies were announcing big investments in renewable energy projects and setting climate goals.

“Oil and gas companies are trying to make money, and they have been following the political wind,” said Severin Borenstein at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

He said a few years ago those political winds “were pretty clearly blowing towards having more emphasis on renewables, and potentially restrictions on oil drilling. That’s changed.”

In Washington, the Trump administration is now encouraging more oil and gas drilling and rolling back clean energy incentives. Christopher Knittel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that’s changed the calculus.

“These companies are publicly traded companies that have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder wealth, and the profitability of oil and natural gas is increasing,” said Knittel.

And not just because of shifting political winds.

“Natural gas prices in Europe are still high since the Russia invasion of Ukraine,” said Knittel.

Oil prices have stayed pretty high, too, he said. So these companies can make good money doing what they’re good at.

“Getting oil and natural gas out of the ground. That’s what they’ve done for the last century. Whenever you pivot to an alternative product, there’s a learning curve. You may lose some of your comparative advantage that you enjoyed with the old product,” said Knittel.

That’s why Hugh Daigle at the University of Texas at Austin said policy and public investment matter.

“When you look at the history of any kind of emerging technology that has gotten a lot of initial government support early on, it takes a long time for it eventually to become profitable,” said Daigle.

And until it does, for-profit companies don’t have much incentive to invest on their own. 

The cost of shelter has been a persistent source of inflation in this economy. In Wednesday’s consumer price index report, shelter accounted for nearly a third of price gains from December to January.

Yes, that sounds bad. But rent inflation has actually been coming down lately.

The Labor Department’s definition of shelter costs includes rents. But it also includes what it calls lodging away from home.

“Just think of that as basically hotels when you go on vacation,” said Chen Zhao, head of economic research at real estate company Redfin.

She said those lodging costs went up in January. But rents have not been increasing so quickly, according to the Labor Department and Redfin’s own data.

“What you’ll see is that for the last 2, 2½ years, rents have been really flat. And in some parts of the country, rents have even been falling,” said Zhao.

A lot of newly built apartments are finally coming online, said Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank. This is happening the most in the Sun Belt, “where there’s lots of undeveloped land and where homebuilding is cheaper and faster to do.”

But in other parts of the country, the pipeline of new apartments is still pretty constrained, especially in the Northeast and coastal West.

“We’re likely to see faster rent increases in markets that are adding less supply, where construction is more expensive,” said Adams.

The numbers of apartment construction projects and building permits have been trending lower.

Chen Zhao at Redfin said some contractors don’t want to keep building apartments if rents are stagnant. “They’re also facing very high financing costs because interest rates continue to be high,” said Zhao.

All of that means the supply of new apartments could start to dwindle, said Ben Ayers, senior economist at Nationwide.

“You know, a year from now, two years from now, we might be back in a similar situation, where we’re talking about constrained housing supply, because we’re just not building enough to keep up with the amount of demand in the market,” said Ayers.

That means housing costs could put even more pressure on inflation.

Wall Street is a maze that is often too easy to get lost in. Even just learning the acronyms alone can be a monumental feat. The dictionary on financial content site Investopedia boasts more than 13,000 definitions for different financial words or phrases.

To jump the educational hurdle, many Americans rely on financial planners to advise their investing. But they cost money, and hiring a financial planner can be a costly measure for potential investors.

Instead, many Americans are turning to a free source of information: social media. Every day investors are putting their trust in financial influencers to choose where to put their money.

Isabella Kwai, a reporter for the New York Times, recently wrote about these “fin-fluencers” and the advice they give. “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Kwai about who they are and why their viewers should think critically before listening.

Kai Ryssdal: Just generally speaking, who are these financial influencers out there?

Isabella Kwai: So financial influencers can be really anyone who is online and sharing information about investing or personal finance, or it could be something from a celebrity who has a big profile and is partnering or working with, you know, financial services or products. And I think that is something that is really interesting about financial influences, or “fin-fluencers.”

Ryssdal: I’m sorry. “fin-fluencers”? Is that we are calling them?

Kwai: Yeah, it’s very sleek. People have really combined these words, but financial influencers, or “fin-fluencers,” they really can be anybody. And I think that is part of the concerns around them.

Ryssdal: Let’s talk more about that, because we’ll get to the possible upsides. But, “on the internet, they don’t know you’re a dog”, right? That’s the famous Far Side cartoon. So, it could be anybody is the point, right?

Kwai: Right. And one of the issues that makes this field quite difficult is it’s so vast. There are people who are giving you information who may not be qualified or certified financial planners, and there is potential there for misinformation to spread. In the most serious examples, you have influencers who have been accused of hyping pump and dump schemes or promoting high risk assets, and it can be really hard for your everyday person or your everyday investor to look at all these different influencers online and work out what is going to be handy information for them and what is potentially dangerous information.

Ryssdal: So let’s get the caveat in here that if you’re going to follow a “fin-fluencer,” I can’t believe I just said that, you have to do some due diligence and find out who they are. But part of the reason they’re so popular is because they’re accessible, right? They probably cater to underserved groups, people who might have been shut out of this sort of wealth industry as it were, right? I mean, there’s lots of things that are appealing.

Kwai: Absolutely, and what some financial influencers are good at is putting it in everyday terms that people can understand. And there are influencers out there who I spoke to as part of the story, who are certified financial planners themselves or certified financial advisors, and they do share information that helps people become more literate when it comes to their finances. But you know whether they are qualified to do that, experts have recommended you really should be thinking about this.

Ryssdal: Yeah, absolutely. Given that social media is, generally speaking, a vast unregulated wasteland. I imagine there aren’t too many regulations protecting people from acting on this bad advice, right? If you act on questionable advice from an influencer, you’re kind of on your own right?

Kwai: Well, not entirely. One thing that is interesting to explore is what’s the responsibility here? And in the U.S., the SEC, for example, has pursued some high profile celebrities for not being honest about whether they were paid to promote an asset or not. But ultimately, one big challenge in this is jurisdiction. People can be following advice from someone in the U.S. while they’re, sitting, like myself, in London. And the question being, would this fall under U.K. jurisdiction? And that makes it difficult for regulators to pursue some people who are perhaps spreading misinformation.