One Montgomery County Realtor, Jane Fairweather, said homes in her market are selling in an average of 23 days because inventories are way down and demand is strong. The number of listings in Montgomery County were down 41% in April from 2011. In April of 2011, one third of the listings went under contract. In April of this year, 67% went under contract, according to CNBC.
Homes going as quickly as they did during boom | HousingWire.
Early estimates suggest the tragic tornado outbreak in Oklahoma this week resulted in $2 to $5 billion in insured property losses, according to weather risk-monitoring firmEQECAT.
But calculating accurate property damage estimates in the wake of a tornado remains a challenge for analysts, insurers and the mortgage industry.
CoreLogic Spatial Solutions is currently working on a new modeling system that aims to expedite and more accurately assess tornado property damage in the days following a storm.
But tornadoes remain a challenge for scientists on the property damage front.
When compared to hurricanes and earthquakes, tornadoes are less predictable — and the damage is not equitable, making it hard to simply declare losses in an entire neighborhood without sending out ground troops to separate total losses from homes that were only partially damaged.
There is no rhyme or reason to how a tornado hits; it hits one house and leaves another, creating an inconsistent trail of destruction that is difficult to study by simply analyzing property values within a given parameter, says Tom Jeffery, senior hazard scientist at CoreLogic Spatial Solutions.
EQECAT made its initial estimate after the National Weather Service confirmed 16 tornado touchdowns on May 18, another 29 on May 19 and 31 tornadoes on May 20.
“Advance tornado forecasts and warnings were not sufficient to reduce the loss of life from these events,” EQECAT said in its report.
Jeffery says his group “was originally created to provide mortgage and insurance industries with an idea of where the risk is and where the potential for the highest amount of damage is going to be.”
The company has a large database of parcel boundaries and can use that information to easily estimate the number of properties damaged within an impacted area by combining that data with property valuation research.
But the inconsistent nature of tornadoes makes it much more difficult to get the best property damage estimate early on, Jeffery told HousingWire.
In a tornado, there will always be total losses sitting next to homes that are not damaged or only 10% damaged, he said.
“This is where the feet on the ground is valuable,” Jeffery explained.
While hurricanes and floods generally have definitive boundaries where every property is mostly impacted in some way, tornadoes create an inconsistent path for researchers.
“When those events occur, we can usually put out an estimate fairly quickly,” Jeffery said. “They leave a definitive boundary. Unfortunately, tornado activity does not provide us with a nice clear boundary. There are going to be homes that are less damaged next door to those that were completely destroyed, so we are trying to work our way through an algorithm that will allow us to do that.”
Jeffery said the goal is to be as accurate as the firm can be in the wake of a tornado incident.
The housing recovery is now 54% back to normal in April, down from 56% in March due to the sharp drop in new home starts. Trulia‘s Jed Kolko writes that construction starts dropp to 853,000, down 16% from March. Existing home saled inched up slightly month-over-month, while non-distressed sales increased 25% year-over-year. The delinquency rates + foreclosure rates dropped sharply to the lowest level since September 2008.
To read the full report from Trulia ($29.47 0.2%), click here.
Housing recovery falls back to 54% back to normal | HousingWire.
According to MarketWatch:
Hovnanian Enterprises ($6.04 -0.06%) shares rose 2.7% after the Commerce Department said that sales of new homes rose 2.3% to 454,000 in April, the second highest post-recession level, on pent-up demand and low interest rates.
Toll Brothers ($36.75 -0.85%) closed up 1.4%, Lennar Corp. ($42.79 -0.61%) gained 2.6%, KB Home ($23.11 -0.29%) added 1.6% and Ryland Group ($48.46 0.36%) advanced 1.1%.
To see the full analysis by MarketWatch, click here.
Home builders buck market trend on Wall Street | HousingWire.
Financial markets experienced a few tumultuous days of trading after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before Congress this week, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Triple-digit gains in the Dow Jones Industrial Average turned negative at one point.
Bernanke must be thinking: “Was it something I said?”
In the midst of heightened concern over the hazards of overreaching government agencies, this may be a propitious moment to review the Fed’s outsize role in determining the price and availability of capital.
Whether managing PPC marketing yourself or hiring an agency, before you start spending money advertising on search engines, carefully consider what you are trying to achieve.
Of course everyone wants sales but unless you are running an e-commerce site where visitors can buy from you right then and there, you should ask yourself what you expect in return for your PPC marketing investment. Look at how you advertise today, consider what works and what doesn’t and then think about how can you carry a successful sales model into a place where you get to advertise directly to prospects who are already interested in what you are selling.
This question is important because without a goal, you cannot measure whether your PPC marketing investment is working for you. Over the years, I have created thousands of campaigns for customers and although the goals may be similar, they are never exactly the same for each campaign. Every business need is unique. Every marketing goal should be unique your business needs.
If you answered yes (don’t worry, everyone does) you are partly right, but you need more specificity. Lofty goals are great, but in the real world success more often comes from setting goals that are realistic, achievable and measurable. Are you capable of running a four minute mile? What about a marathon? Although most people could never run a four minute mile (the unrealistic goal), most people could finish a marathon if they were willing to make the investment in time, resources, dedication and perseverance. The same holds true for PPC marketing. Just like dedicating yourself to running a marathon, dedicate yourself to investing the time it takes to set goals, learn what works for your unique business and adjust your goals as you move ahead.
What is your goal when advertising? Is it to put your ad in front of people who are in your market and are in need of your services to pick up the phone and call you? What about setting a goal for the number of people you want calling or when you want them to call? Do you put a value on each call? Do you break it down by the type of service they are interested in?
Each business will have their own unique set of PPC goals. Some example search engine PPC goals are:
With prices rising every week, lenders as strict as ever, interest rates rising, inventories at decade-low levels and competition for homes breaking their hearts, more and more buyers are reaching their frustration limits.
Two things most every buyer participating in the latest Redfin Real-Time Home-Buyer report agreed upon were prices are going to keep on rising and low inventories are a real pain. Forty-eight percent of buyers listed rising prices as a major concern, up from 40 percent last quarter. Sixty-five percent cited low inventory as a major concern in the first quarter, down slightly from 66 percent last quarter.
Twenty-three percent of buyers expect home prices in their area to “rise a lot” over the next twelve months, up from 22% last quarter; 57% expect prices to “rise a little,” the same as last quarter. Thirteen percent expect prices to “stay the same,” 5 percent expect prices to “drop a little,” and less than 1 percent expects prices to “drop a lot.”
When asked about “major concerns with buying a home this year,” the most common response was still “not enough good homes for sale,” at 65 percent in the second quarter. “General economic concerns” fell yet again, dropping from 19 percent last quarter to just 16 percent this quarter, while “prices are increasing in my area,” shot up from 40 percent last quarter to 48 percent in the second quarter.
Thus it’s no surprise that twice as many buyers believe now is a good time to sell as opposed to a good time to buy. The share of respondents who believe now is a good time to sell shot up again in the second quarter, rising to 67 percent from just 48 percent in the first quarter. Meanwhile, the share of respondents who believe now is a good time to buy fell yet again, decreasing from 40 percent in the first quarter to just 31 percent in the second quarter.
So are these hacked off buyers ready to throw in the towel and negotiate a long term lease with their favorite landlord? Not quite yet.
Looks like more would rather go deeper into debt. Recognizing prices are going to keep going up, 41 percent of buyers said they were “ready to pay more”-if they can get the financing. That’s actually an increase of 34 percent from last quarter. The percentage of buyers who are “taking a break” dropped again this quarter to 30 percent, down 2 percentage points from last quarter. Meanwhile the percentage of buyers who are expanding their search to new areas fell to 44 percent, down from 51 percent in the first quarter.
Those tracking trends say Oakland is getting hot. It may have started with Oakland’s emerging restaurant scene or perhaps it was the buzz created by those First Friday gatherings. Now Oakland is on a list of most attractive cities for tech startups.
In the shadow of Oakland’s Occupy riots and violent crime, the city has been quietly gaining accolades as the place to be.
“The attraction is the diversity of culture,” said Albert Rowe, a new Oakland resident.
The National Venture Capital Association ranks it the 11th most attractive city for tech startups like Power Hive. The solar startup is electrifying remote villages in Africa with micro-grids.
“I don’t think we would be able to be in Silicon Valley in an office space that we are in today and afford the kind of space that we have here today. So we’d probably be working out of our garages,” said Jane Oyugi, the Power Hive vice president.
Also this month, online real estate company Movoto named Oakland “The Most Exciting City in America.” Home sales are thriving and young professionals are flocking there.
“Oakland has changed a lot since the last time I was out here. Even Uptown is changed. There’s new bars and restaurants down here. It’s real nice,” said Zachary Gostlin, a new Oakland resident.
The Bond, a modern/classic condominium in Jack London Square reflects the fast selling pace of homes in Oakland. They started selling five days ago and they’ve already sold four condos.
The New York Times calls Oakland the fifth most desirable travel destination, and Forbes Magazine ranked the Uptown District ninth among the top hipster neighborhoods.
“There’s a tremendous shift going on right now in the Bay Area. Oakland is the hot market and we see a large number of people moving from the Oakland Hills and San Francisco into Downtown Oakland to take advantage of all the cultural diversity and excitement that’s going on here,” said Paul Zeger, president of the Polaris Pacific Real Estate Company.
Oakland’s real estate market heats up, becomes attractive to many | abc7news.com.
We’ve been hearing consistently good news on the housing front for a solid year now. Prices are up, sales are accelerating, and new construction is coming along. But while this week brought another round of positive signs, the United States is still a long way from what can be considered a “normal” housing market.
Both new and existing home sales improved last month. New home sales increased 2.3 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 454,000 homes (March was also revised upward to a 444,000 rate), according to a joint release from the US Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s a 29 percent increase from the level seen a year ago.
“Not only did we have the increase in April, about as expected, but we had upward revisions for prior months and an acceleration in new home buying even compared to last year,” David Berson, chief economist for insurer Nationwide, said in a phone interview. “The level of sales and pace is the best that we’ve seen since the middle of 2008, when the economy was just beginning to fall into the Great Recession.”
Existing sales, which are calculated in a separate survey from the National Association of Realtors, crept up 0.6 percent to a 4.97 million annualized rate (again, with a revision upward for March). “April’s existing home sales is evidence of continuing momentum in the residential real estate market,” John Tashjian, principal owner of Centurion Real Estate Partners in New York,” wrote in an e-mailed analysis. “We have watched the market move swiftly into the recovery stage of a cycle and predict continued growth in sales followed by price appreciation, throughout 2013 and 2014.”
“On existing homes, demand is coming form investors who are taking distressed homes off the market and renting them,” Mr. Berson adds. “But that helps on the new home side, too.”
Prices have also accelerated, driven by tight inventories of existing homes and increased buyer demand. Another hopeful sign: the sales percentage of distressed homes continues to fall, down to 18 percent of sales in April.
But Berson warns that the market still has a long way to go. “These are numbers that historically aren’t huge,” he says. “Even if you look in the ‘90s, new home sales ran in a range of anywhere between 600,000 and a million. We’re only at about half of where we should be, and it’s going to take a while. We saw 1.2, 1.3 million during the housing boom, but that’s unsustainable. We need to get back to a pace of sales justified by the demographics, say, 900,000″ annually.
Two things are going to make getting to that point a slow climb, according to experts. The first is inventory, which is tight for both new and existing homes. “Unsold new home inventory are pretty close to all-time lows, because builders are being cautious,” Berson says. In the case of existing homes, the inventory squeeze is having a marked effect on certain areas of the country.
“Tight inventory – especially in the West, where the median price was up 17.5 percent from a year earlier – is clearly playing a role,” IHS Global Insight economists Patrick Newport and Stephanie Karol wrote in their e-mailed analysis. “Since housing starts are currently running well below underlying demand (1.3 to 1.5 million, according to our estimates), and since it takes on average about seven months to complete a home on getting a permit, inventories will probably remain lean through next year.”
The other culprit, at least according to the real estate industry, is stricter lending standards, which make it more difficult to get approved for a home loan. “We don’t want to go back to 2003, but it’s probably a little too tight today,” Berson says.
This housing recovery is different than others, he adds, in that in the past the generally reliable real estate market has been the sector that leads the economy out of recessions. This time, it was the area of the economy that was “hurt most by the recession and recovered relatively modestly this time.
Still, “the housing market will continue to improve and outperform the rest of the economy over the next few quarters,” Mr. Newport and Ms. Karol from IHS write. “Existing home sales should climb about 8.5 percent in 2013 and 12 percent in 2014.”
New home sales rise, but market still a long way from ‘normal’ (+video) – CSMonitor.com.
Canada’s housing market has been a wildly popular topic lately with experts sounding off on everything from house-market affordability to house-buying intentions to the effects of too-long, very-low interest rates. All this is keeping the debate about the soft landing, or crash to come, firmly on the minds of Canadians.
The common link is the Bank of Canada’s benchmark rate, which has been frozen at 1.0 per cent since September 2010. The market doesn’t expect the central bank to move higher — if it moves higher — until sometime in the latter part of 2014, or even later, so in some ways there’s a bit more time to sit back, wait and watch.
If you believe The Economist, Canada’s housing market is “especially vulnerable” to a major correction, according to a recent analysis on global property markets. It says house prices here are overvalued by 73 per cent compared to rental prices, and 32 per cent overvalued when compared to household incomes.
“Home sales in March were 15% down on a year earlier. Buyers are in short supply. A recent poll showed that only 15% of Canadians are likely to buy a home in the next two years, down from 27% last year—the steepest decline in the 20-year history of the survey. After a big boom, the housing bust will be a wrenching affair,” the magazine stated earlier this month. This is golden for those who are in the doom and gloom camp, and don’t believe house prices will bounce any time soon.
Now, combine that with a recent warning by the Canadian Association of Accredited Mortgage Professionals. This week the group said many Canadians are managing their debt responsibly, and warned Ottawa’s clampdown on mortgage lending rules has set the stage for up to a 30 per cent plunge in home sales by 2015, translating into massive job losses related to the industry and other negative things that could crimp economic activity. Think of all those first-time home buyers who may be on the sidelines.
But in findings that appear to contradict The Economist and other pessimistic views, an RBC Economics analysis stated that while Canada’s housing market still faces higher-than-usual stress, recent affordability measures don’t suggest a “significant nation-wide price correction is imminent.” In fact, the low mortgage rates helped make owning a house relatively affordable — though arguably a more accurate definition would be less unaffordable — in the first quarter of 2013, of course, with variations across regions.
At the same time, BMO housing confidence report showed consumers’ buying intentions were bolstered by low interest rates. This poll found some 45 per cent of Canadian homeowners say they are looking to buy a property in the next five years, also with results varying from region to region, in another bit of data to play up the good news story to reassure Canadians the sky isn’t falling. What’s more, it says first-time homebuyers could take advantage of low rates and shorter amortization periods for financial stability.
Given all the data, one can’t help but think everything is being held together — but just barely — thanks to low interest rates.
On that note, consider one final, powerful warning to add to the mix. The head of the country’s banking watchdog told a Bloomberg economic summit this week that a transition to higher rates could be really, really bad. That is, it is a greater incentive for banks to take on more risks when lending, business to depend on cheap credit and for borrowers take on more debt.
“No one can predict when, or how fast, rates will start to climb (or indeed, whether they will fall further),” Julie Dickson said in prepared text of a speech she delivered at the summit. “Yet dependence on low interest rates can become significant, meaning that transition to higher rates could be very painful.”
Is Canada’s housing market on the verge of a crash? | Insight – Yahoo! Finance Canada.