Happy Tuesday morning! Back to our usual Tuesday programming.
Congrats to the Seahawks on a decisive Super Bowl win! That Bad Bunny halftime show, though??? I spent an hour yesterday on Instagram watching breakdowns of every cultural reference. Approx 26 million Americans call in sick the day after the Super Bowl. If you're just getting back to work today (like me) — no judgment.
Quick word count: ~1,318 words… 6 min read.
This week: the housing market is frozen from both sides, Congress passed a big housing bill that isn't as big as you think, and AI just blew a $285 billion hole in the software industry.
Looking to level up your business with AI? Join our upcoming “Fundamentals of Claude for Business” cohort live, at the end of this month. Sign up here by this Friday for a special discount.
Rents are at a four-year low. It's never been harder to buy a home. Both can be true at the same time. Here's why.
Why it matters: The housing market isn't one market right now. It's three overlapping markets all moving in opposite directions. Confusing, right? Once you see the framework, it changes how you might think about housing affordability in 2026.
The three different markets:
The Renter's Window. Between 2021 and 2024, developers built a historic number of apartments. Those units are all hitting the market at once — that's the "multifamily wave." Result: 32 straight months of falling rents, down 1.4% year-over-year. If you're apartment hunting, you have leverage you haven't had since before the pandemic.
The Owner Freeze. The average homeowner has lived in their home for 8.5 years — the longest in at least 25 years. Why? Rate lock-in. If you bought with a 3% mortgage in 2020, selling means trading into a 7% mortgage. See my writing last week on the standard 6.0%+ mortgage for homeowners now. Your monthly payment nearly doubles for the same house. So everyone stays put.
The Buyer Desert. Owners won't sell, so there's nothing to buy. Sellers are offering the biggest discounts in 13 years and homes still sit. J.P. Morgan says no Fed rate cuts in 2026. The math isn't improving.
The bottom line: We have "affordable rents" and "unaffordable homeownership" in the same zip code. That's not a contradiction — it's a bifurcation.
Apartment investors: The soft market is temporary. The multifamily wave peaks and then trails off. The concession cycle of “first month free + half-off on your lease application fees” has an end date, and it’s probably coming soon.
Buyers and workforce housing operators: The math is tilting toward renting in more cities than at any point in the last decade. That's not a judgment — that's arithmetic.
Policy watchers: This freeze is the backdrop for everything coming out of DC. See the Numbers section below for the latest big bipartisan bill that just came out of Congress,
This isn't a bad market. It's a split market. Know which side of the freeze you're on.
Join our “Fundamentals of Claude for Business” Event, later this month!
Looking to level up your business with AI? Join our upcoming “Fundamentals of Claude for Business” cohort live, at the end of this month. Sign up here today for a special discount.
Fundamentals of Claude for Business, happening Feb 25 and Feb 26.
Signal vs. Noise.
SIGNAL: the “DiSaaSter”
Anthropic released Claude Cowork — 11 AI plugins for legal, marketing, and finance — and wiped $285 billion off SaaS stocks in a single day.
By the numbers: Thomson Reuters dropped 15%. LegalZoom fell 20%. Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow down 7-11%. SaaS means "Software as a Service" — the monthly subscription tools we all pay for.
Why it matters for housing: Every property manager, lender, and developer pays for a stack of SaaS subscriptions. CRM, compliance, document management. AI agents are coming for all of it. I'm living this right now — more below.
Go deeper: Axios Markets
NOISE: Crypto
Every week someone DMs me about Bitcoin and housing. I love you. But stop. For real, LOL.
Bitcoin fell to $70,000 — down 45% from last October. There's volatility. There's drama. There are tweets. There is zero actionable signal for housing investors in 2026.
When crypto moves real deals, I'll cover it. Until then, just noise in my opinion.
The Numbers: 390 - 9
That's yesterday’s vote on the Housing for the 21st Century Act.
When 390 members of Congress agree, it tells you what both parties are willing to do, and what they're not willing to fight about.
What's in it (plain-ish English, sorry could not explain without some acronyms):
Faster federal environmental reviews for small housing projects — months off timelines for some of the key federal government financing mechanisms for affordable housing (LIHTC, HOME, and CDBG)
If an apartment passed LIHTC inspection last year, it now satisfies voucher requirements too. That means less friction for landlords and tenants
Cities taking federal money must publicly report their restrictive zoning policies
New FHA pilot for mortgages under $100K in rural markets
Banks can invest 20% of capital in affordable housing deals, up from 15%
What's missing: No new subsidy at scale. No voucher expansion. No federal zoning override. Local governments can still block housing with zero consequences.
The bottom line: Congress just passed the housing equivalent of fixing the DMV, yes the place where you get your car registration. Useful and overdue? Yes. But not remotely on the same scale of the underlying problem.
The frozen market above I talked about in the Big Idea at the top is a 10/10 crisis. This bill is a 5/10 response.
Built in Public. OpenClaw the path to a $1B, 1-person company?
Last week I wrote about OpenClaw being the future of AI. This past weekend, I took my own advice. I absolutely believe this is the first step towards the future of a one-person, $1B company.
I spent about three hours on a Saturday and Sunday getting it running on a 7-year-old Dell my wife hasn't touched in years. Definitely not plug-and-play, and certainly takes some technical experience. I needed Claude Code to configure everything. But once it was up, it was up.
Above is a quick org chart schematic I wrote in Claude Code, prepping my Open Claw suite of AI teammates and executives. Pretty impressive stuff. I set up my AI co-CEO.
As of this Tuesday morning, I’m now running it across my real estate, affordable housing, and lending businesses. Cost: $11 in the first 24 hours on Claude alone. Already testing other cheaper LLMs than Claude to bring that cost down. Moving to a cloud VPS today.
If you're going to recommend something to 10,000 people (this newsletter’s audience), you better be willing to run it yourself first! I’ll report back over the coming weeks as cool things come up in my OpenClaw set-up.
Indelible Impact.
Maggie Lena Walker: The Woman Who Built a Bank to Build Homes for Black Families.
Celebrating Black History Month by highlighting Black pioneers who shaped the housing and tech.
In 1903, Maggie Lena Walker opened the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia, becoming the first Black woman to charter and run a bank in U.S. history.
Why it matters: The bank's mission was home mortgages for Black families every other bank refused to serve. Industry standard required 50% down payments. Walker's bank accepted 10%. She kept it open nights and Saturdays so working people could actually get there.
By the numbers: 600+ mortgages issued to Black families by 1920.
The bottom line: The tools have changed since 1903. The problem hasn't. Access to capital still determines who builds wealth through homeownership. Maggie Lena Walker didn't wait for permission. She built the bank herself.
Final Thought.
The market's frozen, Congress is tinkering, and I'm spending $11 a day on an AI co-CEO, until I figure out how to use Kimi to bring the cost down. Just another Tuesday in housing!
If you're feeling the freeze in your home buying search or in finding affordable housing to rent, hit reply and tell me what you're seeing. I read everything.
Cheers,
-Evan