Continue Reading May 19th, 2009
A new survey from Zillow.com confirms what I’ve been saying for months: There is a huge amount of “shadow inventory” in the housing market. Except the shadow is even bigger than I imagined. Here’s how Zillow’s vp for data and analytics, Stan Humphries, puts it in a blog item today:
Almost one-third of homeowners (31 percent) said they would be at least somewhat likely to put their homes on the market in the next 12 months if they saw signs of a recovering real estate market …. We here at Zillow expect to see a long, drawn-out bottom, with any upward bumps in value tempered by new inventory coming into the market.
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Continue Reading May 19th, 2009
The stock market’s in a tizzy. The Commerce Dept. reported that housing starts fell 12.8% to a record-low pace of 458,000 in April from a revised 525,000 in March. This crucial measure of new home construction is down more than 54% from a year earlier and 79.8% below the 2.27 million peak in January 2006.
Obviously this is not good news for the economy and construction jobs but folks looking at housing starts as an indicator of the health of the real estate business are missing what’s really going on in the market. Nobody’s buying new homes because existing homes are so cheap.
Look at the stats released today from MDA DataQuick: Southern California homes sold at a faster pace than a year ago for the 10th consecutive month. A total of 20,514 new and resale houses and condos closed escrow in the six-county Southern California marketlast month. That was up 31.4 percent from 15,615 a year ago. Last month’s sales were the highest for that month since April 2006, when 27,114 homes sold.
Foreclosure resales – homes sold in April that had been foreclosed on in the prior 12 months – accounted for 53.6 percent of all resales last month. “The deep discounts associated with foreclosures have created stiff competition for builders, who last month sold the lowest number of newly constructed homes for an April since at least 1988,” DataQuick said.
The number of single-family houses that resold last month was at record or near-record-high levels for an April in many of the more affordable, foreclosure-heavy inland markets. They included Palmdale, Lancaster, Moreno Valley, Perris, Indio, San Jacinto, Lake Elsinore and Victorville. The sales picture was dramatically different in many older, high-end communities closer to the coast, where foreclosures and deep discounts are less common. Sales of existing houses remained at or near record lows for an April in markets such as Beverly Hills, Malibu, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Manhattan Beach and Pacific Palisades.
Among the reasons high-end sales remain so sluggish: The “jumbo” mortgages needed to buy such homes have been more expensive and much harder to obtain since August 2007, when the credit crunch hit. Before then, nearly 40 percent of Southern California sales were financed with jumbo loans, then defined as over $417,000. Last month it was 10.9 percent, DataQuick said.
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Continue Reading May 19th, 2009
Initial construction of U.S. homes and building permits both sank to record lows in April, according to a government report released Tuesday, but the same report also showed signs of stabilization in the single-family core of the housing market.
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Continue Reading May 19th, 2009
Even as difficult economic times continue, KKE Architects Inc. sees opportunities for growth. Although development has slowed down, the firm is busy with more than 15 million square feet of projects, including a proposed 2 million-square-foot mixed-use development, The Marketplace at El Paseo, which is set to break ground in El Paseo, Calif., in 2010. The firm is also working on a 3 million-square-foot expansion of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.
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