Yearly Archives: 2011

For the week of December 27, 2011 – Vol. 9, [...]

For the week of December 19, 2011 – Vol. 9, [...]

The housing recovery may be proceeding slowly, but things are definitely not at a standstill. Earlier this year, an industry rent vs. buy index found it is more affordable to buy than rent a two-bedroom home in 72% of America's 50 biggest cities. In fact, renting was less expensive than buying only in New York, Kansas City, San Francisco and Seattle. And in 10 of the cities where renting was relatively affordable versus ownership, people felt buying may still be a financially sound long-term decision.

Austin Mortgage Market Update - For the week of December 5, 2011 - Enough people were motivated to buy new homes in October to push monthly sales up 1.3% to a 307,000 annual rate. Even better, the motivation was strong enough to send the median price to $212,300, UP 4% over a year ago. Going forward, what should motivate everyone is that the supply of new homes fell to 6.3 months. Nonetheless, new home sales need to get to an annual rate around 950,000 and some observers say that will take another few years.

The patient approach advocated by the 1st Marquess of Halifax is proving to be the right tactic for mastering today's housing market. Last week, October Existing Home Sales inched up to an annual rate just under 5 million units. And although things appear to be improving only slowly, existing home sales are actually UP 13.5% from a year ago.

Like life, the situation in the housing market depends on what we make of it. Last week, both options were covered in the latest quarterly report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The good option: home sales in Q3 rose in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The negative: the median existing single-family home price rose in only 39 of 150 metro areas, declining in 111 of them. Yet the NAR chief economist pointed out that the sales data was encouraging, because "Home sales need to recover first--only then can prices stabilize."

For the week of October 31, 2011 – Vol. 9, [...]

What didn't make sense last week was the way the media reported the latest housing data. Housing Starts were UP a strong 15% in September, hitting a 658,000 annual rate. But the media chose to emphasize that the gain was mostly from multi-family starts which shows a big trend toward renting. Actually, multi-family units also include condominiums, which do make sense for first time buyers who don't have to deal with selling. The media also skimmed over the data that single-family starts were UP almost 2% for the month and starts overall are UP over 10% versus a year ago.

One dream that, happily, doesn't seem to be going away is the one we Americans have of owning our own home. In fact, in spite of all the negative news we hear about housing, the percentage of Americans who own their home is still the second highest on record, according to the Census Bureau. Even better, new research reveals that up to two million people are planning to jump into the housing market in the next two years.

We did see some right results for housing last week, and hopefully we've been working joyfully and peacefully to bring them about. Realtor.com reported that inventories of homes, condos, townhouses and co-ops shrank in August for the fourth month in a row. They're now down 19% from a year ago, and rest at 2.27 million units. Dropping inventories do keep home prices from falling and, supporting this, the national median list price was unchanged from June and July and up about 0.5% from a year ago, at $189,900.