House Price and Sales Data
Trading Places, Maybe. “A new niche of home-swapping Web sites offers to help desperate sellers unload their homes. These sites aim to match two sellers based on their requested criteria -- say, the number of bedrooms each home has or whether it's located in a specific school district. The homeowners then arrange to trade properties… Danielle Babb, a real-estate analyst and professor at Northcentral University in Arizona: Since the subprime meltdown began, around 90 home-swapping sites have launched… Pad4Pad.com, launched just over three months ago, already has around 2,500 listings. And [says] listings are growing about 30% a month.” (Wall St. Journal, June 15th)
NYC Housing Market Showing Cracks - Barron's. “Barron's: Luxury, multi-million dollar apartments-- which account for 5% of the market-- are selling well [in Manhattan.] But middle-to-low-end apartments are being reduced, and could go down further. In Q1, Manhattan apartments sold for 97.5% of their original asking price on average. Inventory is rising and an online brokerage tracker has seen numerous 5%+ price cuts since May. Expected financial firm layoffs and tighter lending standards could make things even worse. Q1 sales increased 318% for $10 million+ apartments, Wall Street bonuses haven’t fallen as sharply as feared, a weak dollar encourages foreign buyers and rental rates are rising. Most encouraging? Manhattan’s decline may indicate the national housing slump is almost over.” (Seeking Alpha, June 15th)
Chart of the Day: Oakland vs Berkeley Housing. “Berkeley, like Manhattan, is one
of the very few areas of the country where marginal house prices are set by what people are willing to pay, rather than what they are able to pay. In Oakland, as in most of California, a would-be homebuyer… finds out how much money their lender is willing to extend, and then buys a house for that sum. Right now, the lenders are basically not willing to lend at all… In Berkeley, homebuyers are much less likely to max out their finances on a home purchase… As a result, I'm sure there have been very few foreclosures in Berkeley, compared to Oakland, even as the demand for Berkeley housing remains unabated.” (Portfolio.com, June 15th)
John F. Wasik: Housing Bubble Didn't Burst Everywhere In U.S. “Some home markets… are benefiting from employment, population surges and moderate increases in housing prices that are close to or below the national average… Dallas [is] one of the top producers of jobs — followed by the San Francisco Bay area, and Seattle-Tacoma, Wash. — it leads in the total number of people moving in. [Census Bureau].Even better is the… housing value you will get in Dallas… Dallas lagged behind the half-decade U.S. home- appreciation rate through last year… Other top markets with low risk include Bethesda, Md.; Stamford-Norwalk, New Haven and Hartford, Conn.; Providence, R.I.; the Boston-Worcester areas; and Lexington, Ky., according to homesmart-reports.com.” (Asbury Park Press, June 15th)
Luxury Home Builders Left With Their 'Dreams'. “Outside Oregon City, six supersize Street of Dreams [million-dollar] homes [were] built in 2007 [by homebuilders]… Normally, two or three homes sell during the Street of Dreams show and most are sold within a year. But nine months after the Street of Dreams show, none has sold… One Street of Dreams builder tried unsuccessfully to auction his home. Two builders now own their homes and one of them lives in his. Subcontractors who worked on four homes have filed liens to get paid… Regional Multiple Listing Service: Through April 2008, eight homes sold across the Portland market for more than $2 million. (The Oregonian via The Olympian, June 15th)
Riverside Home Prices, Sales Slide. “Florida: DataQuick Information Systems: Riverside median home prices and sales for January-March: Of the 50 ZIP codes in Clay, Duval, Nassau and St. Johns counties, Riverside's 32204 stands out for its 59% drop in median price to $135,000 and its 68.3% decline in home sales to 13.” (Jacksonville.com, June 13th)
UBS: Atlanta, Charlotte and Texas Will Be First to Recover. “UBS analysts David Goldberg and Alexander Goldfarb selected Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and Houston as their top picks for markets that will lead in a housing recovery… Those five markets exhibited stronger positive trends in demographics, economic growth, affordability, and inventory than the other eight markets examined. Based on these same metrics, Orlando, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Riverside, and Tampa fared the worst. For-sale inventories and declining home sale prices have increased competition among single-family builders, a fact that also poses hurdles for apartment fundamentals. San Diego, Los Angeles/Orange County, and Washington, D.C., were… somewhere in between market leaders and market laggards.” (Big Builder Online, June 12th)
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One thing that limited the bubble in Texas is a law prohibiting second mortgages. So if you owned a property in TX prebubble, you didn't experience price inflation as dramatic because new buyers couldn't get piggyback mortgages for purchase, nor could existing homeowners obtain home equity loans for cashing out illusory equity.
Troubling trends in other places, though.
Thanks for correcting me.
These homes were built 5 miles outside Oregon City in rural Clackamas County in an area called Redland. They were lined up like barricks on a narrow country road and priced up to $3 million in an area where typically homes sell in the $400-800K range. Redland has no services to speak of and no prestige as say a Lake Oswego address. They over-built and over-priced the area and now can't sell there wares...what a shock!
The article doesn't mention the gentlemen who sold the property under these homes also built a home that is for sale, nor the other two homes that have been built. One sold and was promptly put back on the market during this "Street of Dreams" but has not sold (A flipper got stuck maybe) and the other has been sitting vacant for 18 months.
To our amusement, another builder has started yet another home and quickly added another "for sale sign" to the forest of signs. PT Barnum would be howling.