2024 Year in Review: How AVLmeetup, Asheville Mortgages, and Rentals Actually Performed

AVLmeetup opened 2025 by turning the mic on itself. At the January 14, 2025 meetup, 2024 Year in Review, at The Mule at Devil's Foot Beverage, 82 people heard a recap of the community's 2024 numbers, then three back to back ten minute updates: Kim Winters on mortgage rates, Rodrigo Afanador on Asheville rents after Hurricane Helene, and Zac Ruiz on the hub and spoke framework for business data.

Key Takeaways

AVLmeetup averaged 86 RSVPs and 61 check-ins per event in 2024, a headcount around 100 once walk-ins were counted, plus 35 first-timers a meetup and just shy of 5,000 hours of combined education and networking.
Rodrigo Afanador's Vesta Property Management manages 163 units in the Asheville area and handled 41 turns in 2024. It took an average of 61 leads to generate 5 showings and 34 days to a signed lease.
Homes that rented for $1,700 or more in 2022 and 2023 were re-renting in the $1,500 range by late 2024, a trend Rodrigo tied to a supply glut plus a demand drop after Helene.
Kim Winters said the personal consumption expenditures measure the Fed watches was near 9% year over year 18 months earlier and had fallen to 2.8%, with unemployment at 4.1% and predicted to rise to 4.5-4.6%.
Job revisions from January to November 2024 showed 1.1 million fewer jobs created than initially reported, which Kim tied partly to "ghost openings," the same remote job posted and counted in multiple states.

AVLmeetup's 2024 Numbers

Zac Ruiz opened with the community's own data before handing off to the guest updates. Hurricane Helene knocked the meetup out for two months, but the year still closed with a healthy newsletter: a 60% average open rate and zero spam complaints all year, built on roughly a weekly email in the run-up to each event. He teased the group's data-driven 2025 lineup, including Hospitality in WNC the following month, shaped by attendee requests.

Why Mortgage Rates Have Not Followed the Fed Down

Kim Winters, of the Kim Winters Team at Movement Mortgage, walked through why a Fed rate cut does not move a 30-year mortgage the way people expect (see Questions below). She also flagged how shaky the incoming labor data is: job openings had fallen from 8.8 million a year earlier to 7.7 million through October, and unemployment sat at 4.1%, predicted to climb to 4.5-4.6%. "Information is power," she said, "but you need accurate information."

What Happened to Asheville Rents After Helene

Rodrigo Afanador's update came through what he called the Vesta lens, since there is no rental MLS the way sales data exists. His company, Vesta Property Management, manages 163 units mostly in Buncombe County and handled 41 tenant turns in 2024. The leasing funnel: an average of 61 leads produced 5 showings, and getting from there to a signed lease took 34 days, a pace he compared to the slower, more sales-driven rental market of 2014-2015 rather than the easy 2020-2023 years.

Cash flow softened because supply rose and demand fell at once. New construction added inventory, and short-term rental owners who lost bookings after Helene converted units to long-term rentals, generally winning on amenities against existing landlords. Demand did not rise to match it, and inside Vesta's portfolio, homes renting for $1,700 or more in 2022 and 2023 were re-renting around $1,500 by late 2024.

Rodrigo's 2025 call was rents holding roughly flat with a small late-year uptick, trending back toward 2023 levels by spring or summer 2026, with insurance and tax costs rising faster than rents recover in the meantime. His advice was locking in 24-month leases now for stability, then reassessing once the market resets. Small changes beat renovations: a fenced yard that allows pets, a garage as a bonus. His line to the room was blunt: "buy when you can, sell when you must."

Owning Your Business Data: The Hub and Spoke Idea

Zac Ruiz, who runs the Ruiz Report and REMC.co, used his second segment to describe a framework he called hub and spoke, built around 2020 Builders, the home construction company where he is director of technology and strategic growth. The company completed 111 homes in 2024, on pace for 130 before Helene slowed the year. His argument: most businesses keep their data scattered across separate software tools, meaning "your data is in someone else's database" and can only be used the way that software allows.

Hub and spoke pulls data from every stage, listings, offers, due diligence, construction tracking, into one central system so a business sees performance holistically rather than tool by tool. He built that system for 2020 Builders on top of tools like BuilderTrend, then offered a low-cost version anyone could start with: export data from each source into its own spreadsheet tab, then link the tabs into one pivot table. Structured that way, the data becomes usable with AI tools, because the AI works from a business's actual numbers, not generic patterns scraped from the internet.

Questions

Why are mortgage rates not coming down even after Fed rate cuts? Kim Winters explained that Fed cuts move short-term rates like credit cards and car loans, not the 30-year mortgage, which tracks the 10-year Treasury. That spread normally runs 1.6 to 2 points but widened to about 3.1 points in October 2023 when mortgage rates hit 8%, and her 2025 forecast was high fives to low sixes as it normalizes.
Why does jobs data keep getting revised, and why does it move markets so much if it's wrong? Kim pointed to what she called ghost openings, state-level surveys counting the same remote job multiple times, part of why revisions showed 1.1 million fewer jobs created from January through November 2024 than first reported.
Where did rental demand go after Helene, when it seemed like every unit should have been full? Rodrigo Afanador said the opposite happened: seven tenants left one of Vesta's own undamaged houses because of the surrounding disruption, and much of the housing need that did exist was absorbed by insurance-funded stays in furnished short-term rentals or FEMA-backed hotel rooms rather than long-term leases.
Does a rental property cash flowing actually matter that much? Rodrigo framed cash flow as a defensive metric, closer to what keeps an owner in the game than what wins it, while the other benefits of owning houses do more of the winning over time.

AVLmeetup's next meetup that February, Hospitality in WNC, picked up the Helene recovery thread with operators from Asheville's hospitality industry.