Housing recovery blossoms

[Ptarmigan]

Housing recovery blossoms
http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/19/real_estate/home-construction/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

[Eupher]

A couple comments from the article:

Honestly, the only thing I needed to read to know I could ignore this article completely was the author's name. I have not read one single article by Les Christie since the start of the housing crisis that didn't imply that "NOW is the BEST time to BUY!".

Perhaps that's not intentional. Perhaps the author suffers from a heavy dose of over-optimism. But I do not take major purchasing advice from people who wear rose-colored glasses.

Not sure where the hell the market is picking up ! MPLS sure the hell isnt. Tons of empty foreclosed homes everywhere and in well off neighborhoods. Just because some people are chosing to build because the market is at an all time low and would rather have brand new over a foreclosed one doesnt mean the market is picking up. Still seeing thousands of foreclosure notices daily ! And thousands weekly losing their jobs. Like to know where the price of homes are back to PRE ? Mine was over 300,000 and now worth 80. Please tell us all !

Funny how we get "good" news six weeks before the election.

[Lacarnut]

Sounds like bullshit to me also. Would not surprise me if several hundred thousand new hires happened in Sept and Oct. Gotta get the Magic Negro re-elected.

[thundley4]

Sounds like bullshit to me also. Would not surprise me if several hundred thousand new hires happened in Sept and Oct. Gotta get the Magic Negro re-elected.

They will  find some way to make the unemployment numbers drop below 8% and they are still considering opening the Strategic Oil Reserves to lower the price of gas.

[CG6468]

Hardly anything blossoms without a load of bullshit.

[J P Sousa]

Hardly anything blossoms without a load of bullshit.

Hi5

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[Ptarmigan]

It sounds dubious to me.

[Zeus]

Housing market turning a corner? Signs of hope for homeowners
By Mark Trumbull | Christian Science Monitor –

Rising home values and declining foreclosure rates indicate a slow but steady recovery for the US housing market. Obstacles remain, however, including negative equity due to 'underwater' mortgages.

The positive national trends include:

• Home prices. House values are rising or stabilizing – and this is occurring without the kind of special support that home-buyer tax credits offered back in 2010. A widely watched price index from the Federal Housing Finance Agency posted a gain of 3 percent in the second quarter, compared with a year earlier. The Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller indexes have recently improved to show month-over-month gains in all 20 major cities tracked.
The pattern also shows up on maps from Zillow.com, a company that follows local real estate markets. A year ago, the typical metro area was largely red, indicating still-falling prices. Now, the common color scheme includes prominent patches of green ZIP Codes, with positive year-over-year price changes.

• Delinquency and foreclosure. Loans that are at least one payment past due stood at 7.58 percent of residential mortgages at the end of the second quarter, nearly a percentage point lower than a year ago. In addition, some 4.27 percent of loans were in some stage of foreclosure, a historically high number but also down a bit from a year before, the Mortgage Bankers Association reports. Aiding the decline in distressed loans: Negative equity has also begun to decline, thanks to the turn in home prices.

• Demographics. The Great Recession slowed the rate at which young people move out of parental nests and form households of their own. But that creates pent-up demand for housing. "At 84.7 million strong in 2010, the echo-boom generation is already larger than the baby-boom generation at similar ages," notes a report from Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, referring to the generation whose oldest members are now entering their mid-20s. The report adds that this generation "is likely to grow even larger as new immigrants arrive."

• Affordability. Although much depends on people's individual job security, the economics of buying a home are favorable in much of the country, economists say. Home prices have fallen substantially, to an average now about 20 percent above their historic trend line, relative to overall inflation, according to data compiled by Robert Shiller of Yale University. Together with low interest rates, that has brought home affordability to a four-decade high since the recession, a National Association of Realtors index shows.
"You probably will never see a better time to buy than right now," says Mr. Newport, in Lexington, Mass.

• Construction. Home building is starting to revive. Combined with the turn in home prices, which provides a wealth-effect boost to consumer spending, this means that housing is now contributing about 0.5 percentage points of growth to the economy this year. That estimate, from Moody's Analytics, contrasts with six straight years in which housing had a negative impact on gross domestic product.

Amid the overall trends, conditions vary substantially from one locale to another – and even within different parts of a given metro area.

[Wineslob]

My neighborhood? The houses that have been on the market for the last several months, are still there.

[J P Sousa]

Just under 100 houses abandoned in my township. 

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