Marketplace Roundtable #55: Reading The Real Estate Macro Tea Leaves With Hoya Capital Real Estate

Today's guest on The Marketplace Roundtable Podcast  is the Founder, President and Director of Research & ETFs at Hoya Capital Real Estate, Alex Pettee. Hoya Capital Real Estate is a Connecticut-based registered investment advisor that is working to make real estate investing more accessible to all investors. In that vein, Hoya Capital advises ETFs and individual accounts by investing in portfolios of publicly traded commercial and residential real estate companies.

Alex also goes by the moniker Hoya Capital Real Estate here at Seeking Alpha. He’s been a contributing author since 2015 - around the time he founded Hoya Capital - building up a following of more than 12,000 investors with his unparalleled analysis of the U.S. real estate market. In August, he joined the team at the iREIT on Alpha marketplace service, run by Brad Thomas, to provide the macro side of the real estate investing equation.

In March of this year, Alex launched the Hoya Capital Housing ETF (HOMZ), which is really the first fund to offer exposure to the entire U.S. housing market in a single fund. Alex and I cover the U.S. housing market from both a top-down and bottom-up perspective including how the macro analysis he provides to  iREIT on Alpha is a great compliment to the single name analysis Brad Thomas specializes in.

Topics covered:

2:45- Hoya Capital’s Backstory: How did Alex become “obsessed” with real estate as an asset class and come to launch the Hoya Capital Housing ETF.
5:30 - A year of firsts: Alex joins the iREIT on Alpha Seeking Alpha Marketplace service as the “Macro real estate” specialist.
10:15 - Lower rates vs. recession concerns: Which trend has the upper hand in the U.S. housing market?
18:00- When will the backlog of “deferred household formations” among Gens X and Y finally enter the housing market?
22:00 - Viewing current homebuilder valuations in light of the massive run-up YTD (XHB) (ITB).
25:00- Current dynamics in the rental market (REZ).
29:30- HOMZ - The entire U.S. housing market in a single ETF.
32:30- Looking under the hood: Understanding sector caps and weightings within HOMZ.
37:00 - HOMZ: More of a capital appreciation or an income play?
40:15 - Creating an ex-U.S. equivalent to HOMZ is harder than it seems.
43:00 - In search of a higher quality higher-yield real estate product.