Above, Brad Case
After past positions at the Federal Reserve, Nareit and Fannie Mae, Brad Case brings a breadth of experience to his newly appointed role as chief residential economist at portal giant Homes.com. With more than 35 years of industry expertise, in his new role he will serve as the company’s leading voice on market, financial and economic trends shaping the U.S. residential real estate landscape.Â
Case will offer insights and data-driven analysis on home prices, inventory and affordability, as well as housing construction patterns, the ongoing buy-versus-rent dynamic and the effects of interest rate cuts on housing demand.
In a wide-ranging interview with RISMedia, Case delved into his daily routine collecting and interpreting all kinds of data, what his prior roles were like and the challenges when working in such an inexact science and always-changing economic environment.
Michael Catarevas: First, can you provide your state of the housing market for 2026?
Brad Case: What we have seen recently is a little bit of an improvement in availability of houses for sale, and some price stability, and that is likely to help potential buyers make the decision to be active in the market. There are certainly things that could hold the market back. There are problems in affordability that are likely to be exacerbated by increases in the costs for insurance and property taxes. But aside from that, I think that we are seeing a little bit more of a meeting of the minds between potential buyers and sellers, and that’s a good thing for seeing more transactions.
MC: I see. What kinds of reports are you looking forward to creating for Homes.com?
BC: We have analysts in 30 cities around the country, and so to a great extent, what I’m trying to do is produce what would be helpful to them so that they can support their activities locally. To some extent, what I’m working on will be driven by the questions they are asking about markets. It’s not like I’m going to dig down into individual local markets. That’s their job, but the questions that are important in their local markets, they’ll sift up to me and I’ll address those.Â
One thing I’m especially interested in developing is when we talk about what’s happened to, say, median prices in the home market. If a median price goes up, that doesn’t tell us the whole story. For example, it could go up because everybody’s house prices have gone up. It could go up because the people with the most expensive houses have become more active in the market. We’re seeing more sales at that end of the distribution, but that doesn’t tell us what’s happening to the rest of the market, or it could go up because there’s been a real surge in home improvement activity. We saw that, for example, during the pandemic. So I’d like to be able to talk about what is driving changes that we see in prices across the country, and of course in any given market as well.
MC: What is the process you go through research-wise in order to form opinions regarding economic issues?
BC: Let me answer that sort of in a normal time, which is to say when data that are regularly published are not being either delayed or left unpublished. I actually have a model, a very sophisticated model which predicts the probability of whether the national economy will go into recession over the next 12 months. That model is based on 12 or 13 variables, and I update the model five times a month when those variables are released.Â
So I’m anxious to get back to it. The idea of that model is that I don’t want my opinion of the overall economic situation to be affected by one data item or by what other people are saying, because there are a lot of people whose opinions are affected by one data item or by their preconceived expectations. So I want to impose discipline on that.
I look at the outcome, but that’s not fully the answer. I have to apply my own judgment. So for example, two or three years ago I was using this model and a lot of other economists started saying we’re going into recession. I didn’t see it at all. Later on, my model suggested the probability of recession was going up sharply. I didn’t believe that. So sometimes I believe what my model says because I think it’s imposing the discipline. Other times I’m taking into account what the model says but that’s not the whole story.
MC: Your model is something you’ve developed for yourself over the years?
BC: Yes.
MC: Would you say it’s different from what other economists might have been doing?
BC: Yes, absolutely. Number one, some economists use data that seemed to have been helpful in the last several years. The 12 or 13 variables that I use, I start with a few hundred variables, all of which have monthly data going back to the late 1960s. So I don’t want to explain what’s been happening the last few years. I want to explain what’s been happening the whole time. But it also uses a different approach than most models do. It’s called relevance-based modeling. And so I’m asking what are the past time periods that looked most similar to our current time period, and what happened after that? Most people give equal weight to all past periods. My model gives more weight to past periods that are more similar to the current situation.
MC: Talk about how you may or may not keep abreast of other economists and their predictions and opinions.
BC: There are certain economists that I pay attention to. One of them, unfortunately, just announced his retirement. That’s Raphael Bostic, the president of the Atlanta Fed. I feel as though he and I see eye to eye on the overall economic situation. He and I used to work together long ago. I look at what other economists say as well, a broad variety. But there are certain ones that I’ve identified that I think have written down what I’ve been thinking.
MC: Would you say there’s competition to try to be right on some of these major issues?
BC: There’s certainly competition not to be wrong, but the thing is you can have a good forecast that turns out to be wrong. With forecasting, you’re trying to explain how people are going to behave. Economics is a behavioral science, and sometimes people don’t behave that way. So for example, a lot of economists have said since the beginning of the year that the likelihood of recession is up based on policies that are coming from the federal government. And it doesn’t matter whether those policies do in fact increase the likelihood of recession. What really matters is that there has been no sign of it. We’ve really seen very, very minor signs of weakness in the economy.Â
If you get ahead of yourself and say, oh, the recession’s coming, then the question is, did you make a good forecast or did you make a poor forecast? What I’ve been saying all year is there is an increased risk of various things happening, but the data aren’t showing any significant weakness in the economy, and you just have to recognize that you don’t want to get ahead, get out over your skis.
MC: It would be very interesting to know what it was like to work at Fannie Mae as director of economics.
BC: Well, so one of my main responsibilities at Fannie Mae was to prepare their monthly macroeconomic forecasts. And another was to prepare a weekly internal summary of important events that might affect our business. So in the process of doing both of those, I would have a lot of conversations with people who are actually on the trading floor.Â
Fannie Mae produces financial instruments and then looks for buyers of new financial instruments, so is paying attention to the market on a minute-to-minute or second-to-second basis. But again, I don’t want my overall view to be colored by the conversations that I’ve had most recently. I want to impose that discipline. So a lot of it is the same process that we’ve been talking about. Select your variables, pay attention to other things, but focus on those variables and see what they’re telling you.
MC: On a similar note, what was it like to work at the Federal Reserve?
BC: When I was there my responsibility was a little bit different. We were working on something called Basel Two. The idea was to make sure that banks that were making loans either for single-family mortgages or income-producing real estate or commercial real estate were taking into account the riskiness of those mortgages, but not at the individual-mortgage level.Â
They do a pretty good job of that. But at the portfolio level, what we were trying to do in effect was head off what became the great financial crisis. We wanted to do that not by saying, let’s all be conservative, because who knows what might happen, but instead by saying, let’s do a really, really good job of analyzing the data. That way we’re asking banks to take into account the amount of risk they’re taking on, not simply trying to get them to be conservative. That was not the goal. So that was a different and very difficult and very important project that I was working on.Â
When the great financial crisis happened, it wasn’t because the Fed was unprepared, it was because the Fed was trying to do a good job of preparing for that. Meanwhile, there was a lot of pressure for the banks to be making riskier loans. And when I say banks, I’m talking very broadly, because a lot of those were not banks but were other parts of the financial industry.
MC: When you were at the Fed, did you have to understand the personalities of the governors or was it all purely business?
BC: Well, the work of individual economists determines which of the governors you are interacting with most. Most of my interaction was with the vice chair of the Fed, who at the time was Roger Ferguson. He was an impressive guy and asked very good questions. In terms of the chair of the Fed, I overlapped with two of them. The first was Alan Greenspan, and with him, I didn’t have very much interaction. Lots of meetings where I was a participant, but not a focus of the meeting. The second one I overlapped with was Ben Bernanke. I had more interaction with him, but that’s partly because he wanted to have interactions with a lot more economists on the staff.Â
MC: How does what you provide Homes.com impact the company?
BC: Our goal is to be the source of data on real estate, on all types of real estate, and actually globally, not just in this country. Homes.com is of course in this country, and specifically for the owner-occupied part of the market. So my goal is to make Homes.com the go-to source of information, whether it’s data at the property level, data at the market level or articles that help potential buyers and potential sellers understand how to be active in the market. I will contribute to all of those to help other people provide the content at the local level that helps potential buyers and sellers, and to be providing context at the national level that makes the entire process easier.
MC: Can you provide some thoughts on the current situation at the Fed regarding President Trump’s continued pressure on Fed Chair Jerome Powell?
BC: I don’t want to comment very much on that because of the political aspects of it. But the Federal Reserve, as I said before, it’s sort of a collection of both governors and staff who are trying to get this right, not pursuing an agenda. They take very seriously their dual mandate. They want to encourage full employment and price stability. Every staffer at the Fed, regardless of the level they’re at, is working toward achieving that outcome.
MC: Even with all your experience, do you still find ways to learn new things about the economy?
BC: Absolutely. For example, one of the pieces of data that are not in my model that I use to predict recession probability is the employment-to-population ratio among vulnerable groups of workers. By that I mean Black and Hispanic workers, women, youth and also adults who have less than a high school diploma. The idea is that those workers are likely to be the first ones laid off, so they provide an early warning system of weakness in the economy. That’s a way of looking at the economy that I didn’t have at my disposal five years ago. I started wondering about it and paying closer attention to it. And now it’s one of the things that I really do pay attention to, even though it’s not on my model because the data don’t go back so far.
MC: Can what happens economically in other countries help you predict what may impact the U.S.?
BC: Yes, absolutely. It’s not a dependable relationship, but if I don’t pay attention to what’s happening in other countries, then I’ve failed at least to raise questions that I should be looking at more closely in this country. For example, I have a counterpart who’s our chief economist in Canada. He and I know each other and share ideas, even though we’re looking at different economies. And then of course, CoStar is pushing into several countries in Europe and also in Australia. So I have to pay attention to those for CoStar’s purposes as a company. But more generally, just this morning, for example, I was looking at data from the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) on what’s happening in European economies, because I want to see any early warning signs that I should be looking at in this country.
MC: Yours doesn’t seem like it’s a 9-to-5 job, especially with all that’s going on in the world. Can you ignore things globally for a week here and there?
BC: I don’t ignore things, but I have no trouble looking at something and saying, let me look at that more closely tomorrow. Many of my best ideas come when I am watching a football game or taking a shower or something like that. So it’s not a 9-5 job, but it’s not disruptive. I let the ideas come whenever they do.
MC: Where are you located?
BC: I’m in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C.
MC: What advice would you give our thousands of real estate agents, brokers and executives going forward?
BC: Buying or selling a house is a very difficult process and a very costly process in time and money. Our goal as a company is to reduce the costs. And to the extent that we are able to do that, it’s going to make it easier for everybody to transact more frequently. So for example, if I am currently a homeowner and I get another job offer in a different market area, am I going to give up that offer because it’s so difficult to sell my house and so difficult to buy another house in a market where I don’t know the neighborhood and may buy the wrong house?Â
The idea is to give everybody the confidence that they can go ahead and take that better job, and they can do a good job of both selling their house and figuring out where to buy another house, then making those transactions. The advice is to look at the information that’s available at a place like Homes.com.
We have educational content, checklists and things like that. What are the things that you need to do when you’re buying or selling a house? What’s the order? How does it work? Who do you need to talk to about each of those steps? Because to the extent that you can get good information from us, that reduces the likelihood that you’ll make a mistake, because a mistake could be very costly.
MC: I always like to ask people to explain what their day-to-day is like.
BC: Mine is fairly hectic because we are always looking at new pieces of data that we have put together and want to release, but have to control the quality. So I have to pay attention to the new types of data being produced, then very quickly evaluate the quality. I have to have tools set up ahead of time so that the data go directly into those tools to make it easy to say, for example, let’s look more closely at San Antonio. There’s something weird there.Â
So a lot of my day is that sort of thing. But a lot is also trying to write about the pieces of information coming out that affect buyers or sellers or real estate agents who are affecting the housing market in general. If new information comes out about certain components that go into building housing, like wood, I need to see that right away. I have various triggers that say pay attention to this now. So do I need to pass along that information to somebody? Do I need to write about it?
MC: Do friends and relatives ask you for advice?
BC: They do. Sometimes they ask, is this a good time to lock in my interest rate? And I say, look, if I were confident that I knew the answer to that, then I’d be trading on that information. I’m smart enough to know that that’s a very difficult question to answer. And in fact, the last time somebody asked me if they should lock in a rate, I knew that he and his partner were looking to buy a house. I said the reason to lock in a mortgage is so that you and your partner can be worrying about other aspects of buying a house, not worrying about whether it’s a good time to lock in.
MC: Is most of your day spent working solo, or are you always interacting with people?
BC: I am always interacting with people, and the ones I interact with most closely are actually located in Atlanta. So I spend a lot of my time with headphones on, but I’m also talking with our analysts in 30 cities around the country. Then I’m talking with reporters, and I’m talking with internal people about topics they want to write about. So a lot of it is sitting alone, but not very much of it is being alone.
MC: Who will judge your work, and what will be the parameters for how they decide whether they feel like you’re doing a good job?
BC: Well, to be honest, the most important judge of whether I’m doing a good job is someone like you, because if this is our last conversation, then I’ve done a bad job. If this is the first of many conversations, that’s something on which I judge my performance. That’s fundamentally what it’s about, providing content that people care about. So when I write an article, are people actually reading it? Are they using whatever information I put out there? Because if it’s not good information or if it’s good information but I haven’t provided it in a way that’s easy to deal with, then I haven’t really accomplished anything.Â
