2020 housing lessons EasyKnock CEO says we need to know

In this interview, EasyKnock CEO Jarred Kessler joins HousingWire Junior Digital Producer Victoria Wickham to discuss housing market trends in the U.S., how he thinks a second stimulus bill could impact Americans, 2020 housing lessons we can learn from and what may be ahead in 2021.

Here is a small preview of the interview with Jarred Kessler and be sure to watch the full interview above. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: Do you expect to see trends like low interest rates to continue going into 2021?

Jarred Kessler: I don’t see a scenario where interest rates are going to go up in 2021. The delay in the stimulus bill alone will lead to another four million jobs estimated to be lost. So, the economy is struggling as the rest of the world, is it pretty much in a negative interest rate environment? I don’t see this trend reversing anytime soon.

Q: 2020 was a crazy year with a lot of unexpected changes. As we move into 2021, do you think there’s anything from this year that we’ll need to keep in mind?

Jarred Kessler: There’s a lot that we have to keep in mind for this year. As it relates to the housing market, I think the biggest thing that people have to understand is there’s millions of people in this country, as we just spoke about before, that have bought themselves some time with a forbearance program or eviction program. I think understanding what’s happening in the underbelly of the economy with that is something that we’re going to have to really pay close attention to because we can have a scenario where the housing market goes from short supply to fire sales going on, massive foreclosures, and massive evictions. I do believe that we have to learn and understand what happened in the last six months due to the pandemic and how we prevent what happened in other crises.

At the end of the day, if you’re telling people that they have a holiday on rent, the landlords are going to increase penalties, and then, they’re just delaying the problem. They’re not fixing the problem, and the economy in my mind is not getting better, it’s getting worse right now.