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January 14th, 2008 11:21 AM

The National Association of REALTORS forecasts a steady housing market for the next several months with a gradual rise in home sales later on this year and into 2009.

However, the trade group says the opposing forces of pent-up demand from four million jobs added to the economy during the past two years versus buyers holding back on purchases makes it difficult to predict exactly when a full recovery will take place.

Housing market imbalances generated during the boom were corrected to some degree during the 2006-to-2007 housing downswing. To address flagging demand, many sellers of new and existing homes cut prices and offered a variety of non-price sales incentives. At the same time, median household income grew at a healthy rate - about five percent per year.

As a result, house price-to-income ratios have fallen in most places and standard measures of affordability (incorporating prime mortgage market conditions) recently have been on the rise in all major regions of the country.

On the supply side of housing markets, builders have cut back dramatically on production of new housing units, dropping single-family starts by more than 50 percent from the cyclical high two years ago. These cutbacks have led to modest reductions in unsold inventories of new homes, and inventories also are off recent highs in the existing-home market.

In mortgage markets, the unsound practices that helped fuel the boom generally were weeded out during 2007, and we're not looking for further tightening of mortgage lending conditions in 2008.

All of the above is evidence that now is a very good time to purchase real estate.

Posted by Brian Banak on January 14th, 2008 11:21 AMPost a Comment (0)

Market Stats

January 3rd, 2008 7:52 PM

When all is said and done, 2007 will go down in history as the year with the fifth highest number of transactions (5.92 million) which is down from 6.48 million in 2006. 2008 home sales are projected to be 6.27 million.

This weeks CHFA rate has dropped to 5.375% with 1 point. This is the lowest that it has been for the last couple of months. Not a bad rate for first time homebuyers.

Nationally, total housing inventory declined 3.6 percent at the end of November to 4.27 million existing homes available for sale. This represents a 10.3 month supply at the current sales pace which is down from a 10.7 month supply in October.

Accross the country, the median existing single-family home price was $208,700 in November, down 3.7 percent from a year earlier.

The median price in the Northeast was $258,300, down 3.2 percent from a year ago.

Posted by Brian Banak on January 3rd, 2008 7:52 PMPost a Comment (0)