Walker Webcast: Amherst’s Sean Dobson on Housing: Rates, SFR and the “Cleavers”

Amherst CEO Sean Dobson said there are plenty of reasons for caution in today’s housing market. The good news: He isn’t seeing a repeat of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC).

Dobson spoke with Walker & Dunlop Chairman and CEO Willy Walker on Sept. 17 during the 2026 Zelman Housing Summit in Boston. The conversation was broadcast as a Walker Webcast on Sept. 23 and covered topics ranging from Federal Reserve policy and legislation to why Amherst remains committed to single-family rentals.

The Fed Continues to Fight Yesterday’s Inflation

Dobson said the Federal Reserve has been “late” in responding to economic conditions, keeping rates too low before and after the GFC and then responding to COVID-19 with what he called excessive monetary and fiscal stimulus.

“When you do that, housing takes the brunt of those mistakes in both monetary policy and fiscal policy,” he said. “I think that raising rates today is fighting inflation that was caused a couple of years ago.”

The action has also increased the cost of capital.

“America’s cost of capital has gone up about 100 to 150 basis points, which is a lot,” he said.

But This Isn’t Another 2008

Dobson said the current housing market lacks a critical ingredient of the GFC: a catalyst that would create a massive wave of distressed supply.

The problem in 2006 and 2007 wasn’t simply that home prices had exceeded fair value, he said. Millions of homes were temporarily financed through adjustable-rate and payment-option mortgages. When those loans reset, borrowers could no longer afford their payments, creating a wave of defaults and excess inventory.

Fast-forwarding to the post-pandemic years, Dobson said the fiscal response was “ridiculously too large,” while long-term interest rates remained at 2% and 3% for an extended period. Buying power increased, as did home prices.

“With the GFC, you only had the fiscal side that caused the problem,” Dobson said. “On this one, you’ve got both the fiscal and monetary issues.”

The current situation likely won’t trigger another GFC because fewer people are buying homes. Many people earning $80,000 a year can’t qualify for a mortgage large enough to buy a large home, Dobson said.

At the same time, the market faces a shortage of tradable housing. Millions of owners with low-rate mortgages are reluctant to sell, making the number of homes available for transaction, or “float,” considerably smaller than the overall housing stock.

An Outdated Mortgage Model

Dobson also offered a blunt assessment of the mortgage market.

Eighty-five percent of families aren’t homebuyers, though they’d like to be homeowners. “Maybe they’re not married, maybe there are two sets of kids involved, maybe the buyers are just roommates, or maybe it’s a single mom with some kids,” he said.

The problem, Dobson said, is that the mortgage market hasn’t kept up with today’s reality.

“The mortgage market is still looking for the Cleavers, and there’s a lot of families that don’t look like the Cleavers,” he said.

Additionally, today’s young families are expected to take on debt and bet on a single asset in a single location to buy a home.

“Now, there’s a bunch of societal benefits for people to think and act like owners in their community and in their neighborhood,” Dobson said. “But I would tell you for the families that we call ours, they are not to be disrespected.”

The other issue is that elected representatives seem to ignore non-homeowners.

Dobson said that when he raised the topic of renting families during sessions on the Road to Housing Act, the response was that lawmakers don’t care. While the government provides grants on 98% of mortgages in the United States, “they won’t finance my families,” Dobson said.

The SFR Bet

The dynamic helps explain why Amherst remains committed to single-family rentals (SFR), even as the industry has struggled to grow since the company entered the business in 2011.

Dobson said Amherst initially saw a large pool of renters who had been banned from homeownership by tighter post-GFC mortgage standards. The company believed single-family homes could be operated much like commercial real estate, creating a long-term rental sector between a traditional two-bedroom apartment and an owner-occupied three-bedroom house.

However, while Amherst has “run as tight a ship as your best multifamily operator,” it ran into higher costs of capital.

“As the cost of capital came down, we could expand a bit more, but then we ran into COVID and the interest rate spike,” Dobson said.

“Those two things have really been heavy headwinds against the industry, but we’re confident that we’re getting it to where it will be part of the housing ecosystem.”

The Housing Caveat

For Amherst, the next biggest worry is stagflation, with the combination of rising oil prices, higher interest rates and declining incomes potentially damaging most financial assets. Dobson said the risk could be real, especially if the Fed keeps fighting yesterday’s inflation.

“So the biggest concern is, are we going to drive up the cost of capital at the same time we drive down the economy?” he said. “Also, how does this war, oil, a larger government and federal deficit conspire to bring down GDP and drive up inflation?”

Dobson said Amherst anticipates a 12% chance of stagflation or a recession.

“It’s not that high now,” he said. “But it’s one of those things that, if it gets high enough, you have to pay attention to it.”

On-demand replays of the September 23 Walker Webcast are available through the Walker Webcast channels on YouTube, Spotify and Apple. Subscribe to get invites, replays and articles for new Walker Webcast episodes every week.