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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Earlier in the spring, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) announced that, starting in late May 2025, H-1B visa holders and other non-permanent residents would be banned from taking out new FHA mortgages. The result? Non-permanent residentsincluding H-1B visa holderssaw their share of FHA mortgage locks crater from 3.8% in September 2024 to 0.2% in September 2025, according to Optimal Blue. This sharp pullback comes after their share of FHA mortgage locks had spiked between 2020 and 2024. Keep in mind that FHA mortgages make up a much smaller share of overall borrowers than, say, GSE conventional borrowers. Indeed, Optimal Blue data reviewed by ResiClub shows that FHA mortgages accounted for 22.0% of total U.S. mortgage-purchase locks in September 2025. Meanwhile, according to the New York Fed, as of June 2025, FHA mortgages represent just 12% of the nations $12.94 trillion in mortgage debt. While FHA has pulled back on lending to H-1B visa holders, as far as ResiClub can tell there hasnt been a similar changeat least not yetin the conventional mortgage space (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac). This squeezes entry-level homebuying in some key housing markets already dealing with weak sales and too much supply, writes Eric Finnigan, president of Demographics Research at John Burns Research and Consulting. (JBREC published a report in October on the topic for its clients.) As an example of a potentially affected housing market, Finnigan points to Fayetteville, ARwhich is where Walmart is headquartered. Walmart HQ has reportedly paused new H-1B hiring in late 2025 after the Trump administration announced itd impose a $100,000 fee for certain new H-1B applications. Walmart HQ stops new H-1B hiring due to $100K fee. Lines up with research we sent to clients last week calling out Walmart HQ’s metro [Fayetteville] as 1 of ~15 local housing markets most exposed to H-1B changes, based on analysis of loan-level data by citizenship status, wrote Finnigan in October. While growth markets in the Southparticularly those with the higher levels of homebuilding, such as Dallas, TX; Fayetteville, AR; and Durham, NCmight feel a sharper housing-demand contraction from this specific FHA policy change, they arent necessarily the markets that would see the greatest softening if there were a broader pullback in H-1B activity. To run an apples-to-apples comparison that accounts for market size, ResiClub calculated H-1B visa petitions per 1,000 residents. The states with the highest exposure to high-salary H-1B workersand the housing and rental demand they generateinclude Washington, California, New York, New Jersey, Texas, and the District of Columbia. Click here for an interactive of the chart below Zooming out to the big picture, we are in something of an international migration bust following a boom in 2021-2024. Between summer 2021 and summer 2024, the U.S. sa a substantial upswing in net international migrationmuch of it coming through the Southern Border. As of July 2024, the U.S. population stood at 340.1 million, up 3.3 million from 336.8 million in July 2023. Of that population increase, 2.8 million (or 85%) came from net international migration. That international migration burst, of course, is behind us now. Recently, border crossings have plummeted. A July forecast by researchers at AEI expects that net international migration in 2025 will be somewhere between +115,000 and -525,000. What does this international migration slump mean for the U.S. housing market? All else being equal, an immediate and direct housing impact of fewer immigrants coming through the Southern Border, in my view, is lower aggregate rental demandspecifically at the lower end of the marketthan if that burst had continued. Rental markets likely to see the biggest impact are in metro areas that have experienced the most international immigration in recent years. In particular, major markets such as New York City, Miami, Dallas, and Houston could feel the greatest effects.
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E-Commerce
President Donald Trump has always been a master marketer. He is particularly adept at lending his name to products and buildings, which has proven to be a lucrative business. Now in office, he’s bringing that same licensing mindset to the very act of governing. Last week, the State Department said it renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) after Trump and put his name on its building in Washington, D.C. This comes after Trump fired the board members and nearly all U.S. employees of the USIP. The USIP’s open, natural-light-drenched headquarters was designed by Safdie Architects to symbolize conflict resolution. But it has ironically become the flashpoint of what former board members have described as a hostile takeover of the federally funded independent nonprofit in Trump’s second term. DOGE staff and police entered the building in March, but USIP took control two months later after a judge ruled the firings were illegal. Then a federal appeals court stayed the ruling in June. The building’s switched hands several times, and with it back in the Trump administration’s hands, they’re looking to make it formal with signage. The US Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C., on Friday, December 5. [Photo: Alex Kent/Bloomberg/Getty Images] The politics of unearned credit The building’s new “Donald J. Trump” signage is just the latest example of a larger trend where Trump has assigned his name to policies and initiatives that he once opposed. For example, Trump campaigned against the infrastructure bill signed into law by then-President Joe Biden in 2021, and yet Trump’s name went up earlier this year on new signage in Seattle for an Amtrak rain project funded by Biden’s bipartisan law. “President Donald J. Trump, Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure,” the bright “Make America Great Again” hat-red sign says. The words, “Funded by the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act,” are written in smaller type below. Then there’s the Nation Park Service (NPS), which Trump has taken an axe to, cutting staff 16.5% and the budget by more than a third. Still, Trump’s image is going on two designs for next year’s annual NPS passes. The Interior Department is also making Trump’s birthday, which falls on Flag Day, one of several “resident-only patriotic fee-free days” to parks next year while dropping it for MLK Day and Juneteenth. When Trump put his name on stimulus checks funded through the CARES ACT, passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it was unprecedented, the first time a president’s name had appeared on an IRS disbursement. Now, it seems, it’s just politics as usual. The man who once gave us Trump Steaks now seeks to gives us a Trump peace institute, and some might say its good politics. Biden called it “stupid” that he didn’t put his own name on stimulus checks funded through the 2021 American Rescue Plan. But with Trump’s approval at a second-term low of 36%, according to Gallup, these branding efforts don’t exactly seem to be working.
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E-Commerce
Judge a book by its cover, and you might think that American Canto, the memoir by Vanity Fair‘s outgoing West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, is destined to be a classic. The memoir, which chronicles Nuzzi’s drama-filled life and career as a political reporter in the Trump era, features a strikingly simple cover that serves as shorthand for the book’s ambitions. The intent was to give the book a clean, no-frills design that felt both classic and contemporary, says Simon & Schuster senior art director Alison Forner, whos also designed book covers like Ezra Kleins all-type cover Why Were Polarized and Garrett M. Graffs Watergate: A New History. [Cover Images: Simon & Schuster] Nuzzi’s book features a stark white cover with the title and her name rendered in a serif typeface inspired by fashion magazine typography of the 1980s. The typeface does a lot of work for the book, which appears to be off to a slow start amid the ongoing media storm surrounding its rollout. A political reporter since 2014, Nuzzi was fired last year from New York magazine following an alleged relationship with now-Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Her publisher Simon & Schuster describes the much buzzed-about book by what it’s not: “not a memoir, nor a tell-all, nor a book about the president,” but “a character study of a nation undergoing radical transformation in real time.” Critics have called it a “tell-nothing memoir” that falls short of its ambition and is less interesting than the scandal that surrounds it. [Cover Images: Wiki Commons] Typographic covers using a vintage-inspired font is a surefire way to evoke a classic mid-20th century look, like in covers for John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Profiles in Courage or Robert A. Caro’s 1990 The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. Most bestselling books today, however, use pictures and illustrations. On the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, just two books have type-led covers, and both have numbers in their titles and also use other visual elements. (Andrew Ross Sorkins 1929, about the year’s market crash, uses a cratering market line to divide the bright red cover, and the cover of former Vice President Kamala Harriss 107 Days about her 2024 campaign counts down in serif numerals from 1 to 107 on a blue background.) [Cover Images: PRH, Simon & Schuster] American Canto goes further, relying on just text and a subversively patriotic white, red, and black color palette to communicate its message. I wanted something simple and evocativered, black, and white give the jacket an urgent minimalism, Forner tells Fast Company. Olivia specified wanting a red without blue undertones, and I was more than happy to oblige. To capture the right shade of red, Nuzzi sent still photos of wildflower petals and cropped stills from films by director Martin Scorsese, including a scene in Goodfellas where a bodys in the back trunk of a car and the taillights are lighting up the fog. “When there’s no imagery to rely on, every detail becomes extremely importantfrom the typeface choices and letter spacing, to the negative space and color,” Forner says. “They all need to work on an almost subliminal level to become the ‘voice’ of the book.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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