A hawkish Jackson Hole debut, another sticky inflation print and the end of RE/MAX as an independent public company made for an unusually dense week. Here is what RealtyWire covered, and where each story stands.
The Fed set the tone
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivered his first Jackson Hole keynote on Friday and told the audience that housing is strained but inflation comes first. He acknowledged the pressure on affordability without offering relief on the timetable for rate cuts, and left the door open to a move in either direction if the data does not cooperate. The Fed publishes its speeches as delivered.
The speech landed on top of a week in which PCE inflation stuck at 3.7% in July while real consumer spending stalled β a combination that gives the Fed little room to ease and gives households less cushion to absorb costs. The Bureau of Economic Analysis release was the last major inflation reading before the September meeting. Mortgage rates spent the week near their highs for the year, hovering around 6.66%.
The data was mixed to weak
New home sales fell 10.5% in July, with Midwest sales dropping by roughly half β the sharpest regional swing in the Census Bureau’s monthly report. Builders are still carrying inventory into a market where the marginal buyer is acutely rate-sensitive, and incentives have not closed the gap.
Price data pointed the other way, but unevenly. Home prices gained 1.5% in June, with the spread between the strongest and weakest large metros widening to nine percentage points between Chicago and Seattle. The national headline number increasingly obscures more than it explains; the same index now describes two quite different markets depending on the metro.
On the rental side, just 41% of newly completed apartments leased within three months, the lowest absorption rate since 2023. Supply delivered out of the 2022β2024 construction wave is still working through the system, and lease-up timelines are stretching accordingly.
Two deals reshaped the industry map
Real completed its takeover of RE/MAX Holdings on Aug. 24, and Real REMAX Group began regular-way Nasdaq trading the following day under the ticker REAX. The combination β announced in April at roughly $880 million in enterprise value β brings together more than 180,000 agents worldwide, with RE/MAX contributing about 145,000 agents in nearly 8,500 offices. RE/MAX and Motto Mortgage were retained as operating brands, and Real’s Tamir Poleg leads the combined company as chairman and chief executive.
In lending, Velocity Financial agreed to buy KKR-backed Toorak Capital’s lending platform and to manage its roughly $3 billion book of business-purpose loans, with the transaction expected to close in the fourth quarter. Toorak, founded in 2016, finances residential investors buying, renovating, building and renting property.
And a long-running antitrust fight ended abruptly
Zillow and Redfin settled the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case on the morning the trial was set to begin in Virginia, ending a challenge to the companies’ rental-listings arrangement before any evidence was heard.
More of the week’s coverage is collected on RealtyWire’s Housing Market and Agents & Brokerages pages.
