Len Kiefer

Helping people understand the economy, housing and mortgage markets

If housing inventory is so tight, why are so many homes vacant?

LET US REVIEW SOME INTERESTING TRENDS IN HOUSING VACANCIES for the United States. Earlier this year we talked about how limited housing supply was helping to drive accelerating house prices across the country. In such an environment you would expect to see housing vacancies decline. Indeed, if you look at the rate of rental or homeowner vacancies you see a substantial reduction. The chart below shows the homeowner and rental vacancy rates reported by the U.

Hello Hugo! Hello Blogdown!

ALL RIGHT! LOOKS LIKE WE’RE BACK ONLINE. I took the opportunity to try out the newly released blogdown R package and migrate my blog over from Jekyll to Hugo. This blog has been up for just over two years and Jekyll was working fine, but I never felt really comfortable. I’m guessing that the Blogdown package will become enormously popular and it seems that Hugo has more flexibility for me.