Housing analyst Conor Sen launches The Housing Frame on Substack, calls bottom in Florida and Texas markets

Conor Sen launches The Housing Frame

Conor Sen is betting that the US housing market is entering a new cycle, and that it needs a dedicated long-form voice to cover it. His new Substack, The Housing Frame, is his attempt to fill that role after a decade writing about housing, economics, and demographics for Bloomberg Opinion.

His background spans both ends of a full cycle: he worked on credit and mortgage derivatives at a San Francisco hedge fund during the financial crisis, then relocated to Atlanta after the bust. That positioning, inside the machine during the collapse and on the ground in a Sun Belt rebuild market afterward, shapes how he reads the current moment.

Calling a bottom in Florida and Texas

Sen's central view is that the US housing market is bottoming, though unevenly. In Florida and Texas, the hardest-hit states over the past few years, he sees inventory dropping and new home builder orders rising, which he reads as a classic early-recovery signal. San Francisco he treats as a leading indicator, drawing a parallel to its behavior in 2010-2011, when it moved ahead of the national cycle.

The K-shape in the market is stark. In Nashville, home sales for properties above $2 million are up 32% year-to-date, while sales under $500,000 are essentially flat. Buyers who depend on a mortgage and a single income are largely frozen out; buyers with significant stock wealth are barely affected by rate levels.

“The hardest hit states over the past few years, places like Florida and Texas, now see inventory dropping and new orders for home builders are rising. San Francisco is clearly a market that, very similar to 2010 and 2011, is leading the country in terms of what this expansion looks like. Home sales in Nashville for homes over $2,000,000 are up 32% year to date; for homes under $500,000, basically flat.”

Rent, vacancy, and the 2026-2027 risk

Apartment vacancy rates are falling, and Sen flags this as an underappreciated pressure building for next year. When vacancies tighten, rents typically follow. If renters start pricing in 20% rent increases over the next two or three years, some will decide that overpaying for a house is the rational hedge, even at current prices. He frames that dynamic as a 2026-2027 story rather than an immediate one.

Financing, not permitting, as the binding constraint

On the policy and supply side, Sen points to equity financing as the more binding near-term constraint on new apartment construction. Investors who poured money into real estate in 2021-2022, when cap rates were low, got badly burned as rates rose and valuations fell. With that equity wiped out and capital now flowing toward data centers instead, deals are hard to assemble even as the apartment market starts to turn. Public-sector mechanisms, whether subsidies or tax incentives, could help fill that gap, though no specific vehicle is in place.

On legislation, Sen says a housing policy expert told him the more important output from recent congressional efforts is identifying a bipartisan voting coalition, even without passing major bills. That coalition can be used again in future sessions, with incremental gains likely over time.

Foreign buyers and private equity: smaller factors now

Private equity buying was a more meaningful market force 15 years ago, particularly in Atlanta, where investors absorbed distressed inventory when qualified buyers were scarce. Sen argues the timing was defensible even if the optics have soured. Today, he says institutional buying is not a primary driver.

Foreign buyer demand gets similar treatment. He notes that H-1B visa policy changes under the current administration appear to have quietly weakened demand in the outer Dallas suburbs, since that buyer cohort was a meaningful part of new home sales in those areas. He flags it as something to monitor but not currently a major overall factor.

The semi-analysis model for housing

Sen's stated ambition is long-term category ownership. He points to Bill McBride's Calculated Risk, which he built over 20 years into the go-to resource for housing data, and to Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis, a solo-started newsletter that became essential reading when its sector heated up. Sen's thesis is that housing will get hot again, and The Housing Frame can be the destination when it does.