David Singelyn
Analyst · Zelman & Associates. Please proceed with your question.
Well, you can have people on the sidelines, but they also have to be able to afford the offering. And when you think about interest rates rising and you go with a home mortgage and you go from 3% to 5.5%, it's a significant increase in the payment, reducing affordability. And this is not about demand. I mean, I'll give you a comment on demand in a second. But it's all about the pricing of the homes based on affordability to me. I -- you mentioned 10 years ago the concept of recession, at least a housing recession back. And that's when we built this company when we had tremendous opportunities. There is dislocation in the housing market. I think you're going to see dislocation in this housing market as well, giving us tremendous opportunity. It will be driven by different factors. But when I look at demand, I guess it's demand on two sides. Demand for rentals. Demand for rentals has always been strong. Over 40 years, I do not know of a year in those 40 years where there has been a decline in rental rates on a national basis, and occupancy has always been strong in the 1990s. We came through a pandemic very, very strong. Affordability, as Bryan indicated today, is tilted towards the single-family rentals. And if you look at our platform, and you look at American Homes, it's a diversified platform. It mirrors much better to a national average, but it's also better than the national average because we are in the markets where the migration trends, where the population is growing, where the employment is growing, it's where America wants to live. And we're going to see very, very strong demand. And that is -- that's the long-term view of this opportunity. All we are talking about right now is a very short period of time to allow the market to recalibrate. And as it recalibrates, all the demand functions that you talk about, Dennis, are going to play in and it's going to facilitate a very, very strong growth for this industry, for American Homes 4 Rent in the long-term. But it's -- we're in a just a reset period of time, a very short temporary thing, and it's got nothing to do with the long-term future. The long-term future is fantastic in this industry.