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Homebuilder Woes Have More Than One Cause–And More Than One Effect
Homeowners, of course, aren’t the only ones who have suffered during the U.S. housing decline; and reports of builders struggling to make ends meet as residential construction dwindle are growing more frequent. But lower community home prices and reduced sales of local homes aren’t the only factors to blame. Take, for example, Texas. The state withstood much of the housing decline and actually added construction jobs: 23,000 since the end of 2006. But in the first three months of the year, builders broke ground on 5,218 homes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. That’s less than half of the construction starts…
Why Aren’t Lower Prices Translating into Higher Sales?
The hotly-anticipated National Association of Realtors report on home sales was released this morning–and, as expected, it showed that home sales fell last month. Sales of pre-existing homes declined to an annual pace of 4.89 million. The good news: That’s only a 1 percent fall from March’s revised 4.94 million reading. The bad news: The existing home sales rate is still almost 18 percent less than April 2007. That includes single-family homes, townhomes, co-ops and condos; and it suggests the housing slump is dragging on, even as we approach the year’s halfway point. That news wasn’t encouraging–but it wasn’t the…
The One Thing That Can Turn the Housing Slump Around in Seriously Troubled Markets Is …
The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight released data today that showed home prices had yet again dropped in the biggest quarterly decline since the OFHEO started keeping records 17 years ago. A few highlights: Home prices dropped 3.1 percent in the first quarter compared to 2007. Prices declined in 43 states. California (-10.6 percent), Nevada (-10.3 percent), Florida (-8.1 percent) and Arizona (-5.5 percent) showed the most severe depreciations, according to USA Today. The culprit? That pesky housing supply of unsold homes. "The large overhang of real estate inventory awaiting sale continues to force price declines in many areas,…
Will Deals on Homes Help Fix the Housing Market?
Homes are more affordable than ever, and buyers have more reasonable financing options for high-priced properties, according to recent reports. But what does that mean for the overall market? Falling prices are making homes more affordable than ever in some cities, according to he latest Housing Opportunity Index released Tuesday by Wells Fargo and the National Association of Home Builders. Families earning the median household income–$61,500–could afford 53 percent of all homes sold in the first three months of 2008 in the U.S. In the same period in 2007, just 44 percent of families could, according to CNNMoney.com. Homes prices,…
A New Resident Who Could Cause Big Problems (Or Help Buildings Run Smoothly)
On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article about neighborhood-based social networking Web sites and their impact on the rental/multifamily community. This isn’t a new phenomenon–shortly after moving into my condo building nearly three years ago, I was told we had a message board-based Web site for unit owners, which I promptly joined–but the article got me wondering about the long-term success and potential impact of such sites. One of the online communities listed in the article–LifeAt–currently only has five Chicago properties on its roster. I don’t live in any of them. So I checked out another one of…
Does the Rise in Multifamily Starts Indicate the Slump is Over?
The Commerce Department announced Friday that multifamily housing had helped new home construction grow 8.2 percent in April, just one day after the National Association of Home Builders said homebuilder confidence currently is hovering only one point above its lowest-ever level. Welcome to the mixed-signal housing market! Multifamily housing starts rose an impressive 36 percent in April after falling 35 percent the month before. That helped balance out the news that single-family home starts dropped to a 17-year low in April–and, despite the single-family decline, led some to call the Commerce Department data proof that the housing market might finally…
How Money-Strapped Unit Owners May Be Killing the Condo Market
Today’s New York Times article about the problems condo owners are facing as the economy slows sheds light on a growing issue: Defaults and foreclosures and the multifamily market. For months, we’ve heard about how bad foreclosures can be for a neighborhood of single-family homes: Unprepared to deal with property maintenance, banks sometimes let foreclosed properties fall into disrepair. A foreclosed home drags the value of areas homes down and can hurt the neighborhood–for every one foreclosure out of 100 properties, the violent crime rate grows by 2.33 percent, according to a 2005 study by Dan Immergluck of the Georgia…
The U.K. Housing Market: A Mix of Demand, Declining Prices–And a Possible Slump?
It looks like the housing trouble across the pond is growing–could it echo the U.S. housing decline in a matter of months? Maybe. The housing market in the U.K. has been slowing for awhile–and just yesterday, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) released survey results that showed 95.1 percent more surveyors found home prices had fallen, rather than risen in April–a 79.4 percent increase from March. And today, one of the biggest U.K. builders, Redrow, became the first to cut jobs because of the decline, according to the Telegraph. Redrow to date has axed 15 percent of its staff….
NAR Home Price Survey Raises Big Questions About the Jumbo Market
The National Association of Realtors released its quarterly home price survey today–and the trade group says median home prices dropped in two-thirds of the cities it surveyed. Median prices for pre-existing single-family homes fell in 100 of 149 metropolitan areas in the first quarter, NAR said; 48 urban areas posted price gains. One lone metropolitan area had no change. The national median home price also fell, dropping 7.7. percent from the January to March 2007 period to $196,300. The former median sales price was $212,600. NAR has been characteristically optimistic as of late about the housing market improving–let’s face it,…
Which Gender Is Recession-Proof–And Which is More Likely to Buy One of Your New Condos?
The slowing economy has affected a number of industries in a number of ways–and it’s affected women and men differently, too. According to new data, women are faring better than men: From November through April, women in the U.S. age 20 and up added nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two female-concentrated fields, education and health care, are growing, which has helped; some analysts have suggested that women also are a better fit for the knowledge economy because of their sensitivity, intuition and ability to act as a team, BusinessWeek says. Men, during the same period,…