Archive for the 'Economy' Category

Local housing experts say 2009 may be sluggish, but with interest rates at historic lows and looming inflation in 2010 and 2011, it’s time to buy.

A panel of five residential industry leaders shared their analysis and forecasts of the Dallas-Fort Worth housing market at the Residential Real Estate Forum held at the Fort Worth Convention Center. Though many of the experts had different theories as to how government efforts to improve the nation’s declining housing market are faring, all said they had seen indicators of a strengthening economy.

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By Steve Brown, The Dallas Morning News

Apr. 24–The Texas housing market is likely to be one of the first to recover when the nationwide building slump is over, the head of the country’s largest homebuilding association says.

Joe Robson, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders, was in the Dallas area Thursday talking with local builders and helping kick off a home tour to replace this year’s Parade of Homes.

Robson, a builder from Tulsa, Okla., who heads the trade group based in Washington, D.C., said Dallas and Texas in general have held up very well during this recession. “All over Texas, they’ve done a pretty good job of keeping housing inventories in check.”

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By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

Dallas-area neighborhoods took their biggest hit yet in the first-quarter housing market.

Sales fell more than 30 percent in a dozen residential districts. And several neighborhoods saw substantial declines in median sales prices during the first three months of 2009.

Some of the biggest price drops were in close-in areas such as North Dallas, East Dallas and Oak Cliff, where median sales prices fell by more than 30 percent from the first quarter of 2008, a study of North Texas home sales shows.

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By Alison Rice.
Sales for new homes just barely declined in March, slipping 0.6% to a seasonally adjusted pace of 356,000, according to numbers released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. On an annual basis, that represents a 30.6% drop in sales activity.

But the relatively small monthly decline gives some hope to economists and others. “We believe that the bottom is at hand and that sales will begin turning in the second half of this year,” Patrick Newport, chief economist for research firm IHS Global Insight, said in a statement analyzing today’s numbers. But, he noted, “we are hardly going out on a limb in making this projection. As previous recessions show, demand for new homes does not evaporate altogether, even in the hardest of times. Moreover, sales remain near record lows.”

And those sales are taking longer and longer to happen. The median number of months for sale rose to 10.2 in March, according to the Census. In comparison, that figure was 9.2 months in 2008 and 6.2 months in 2007, illustrating how builders are carrying new homes for longer and longer, despite a decline in the total amount of new-home inventory. At the end of March, there were just 311,000 new homes for sale in the country, a 33.7% drop compared to the same month a year ago.

At the current sales pace, that translates into 10.7 months worth of new-home supply.

Prices declined 3.5% to a median of $201,400 nationally.

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Dallas based homebuilder Centex, one of the nation’s biggest, is being purchased by its larger competitor from Michigan, Pulte Homes. KERA’s Bill Zeeble has more

The deal’s valued at 3.1 billion dollars. It includes an exchange to Centex shareholders of Pulte stock, with more than half the purchase amount assumed in debt. Pulte’s CEO, Richard Dugas Jr said by combining the two industry leaders, a return to profitability would be accelerated.

Both companies have lost millions in the down economy that’s hit homebuyers, and therefore homebuilders especially hard. Pulte expects to save 350 million dollars in efficiencies over the next 3 years. Some of those savings usually come from layoffs, but there are no specifics on that yet.

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Last Sunday, Wes and Kalee Seymour loaded up their family and drove from Greenville to Dallas for the chance to buy their first home.

The Seymours and almost 200 others crowded into an airport hotel for an auction of about two dozen foreclosed houses.

“We came to another one but weren’t successful,” said Wes Seymour, who lives in an apartment with his wife of just over one year and their 8-month-old son. “We have been looking at auctions because you can get properties cheap.”

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. mortgage applications jumped last week as record low interest rates spurred a surge in demand for home refinancing loans, data from an industry group showed on Wednesday.

The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage applications, which includes both purchase and refinance loans, increased 32.2 percent to 1,159.4 for the week ended March 20. Refinancing accounted for 78.5 percent of all applications.

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Check out our Fort Worth Texas Real Estate blog.

By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News

Most Texas home markets continued to eke out tiny increases in home prices in early 2009, according to a new report by First American CoreLogic.

Texas home prices were up by just less than 2 percent in the California-based housing analyst’s latest survey released Monday.

While Texas prices rose, nationwide home prices in January fell by 11.6 percent compared to a year ago to the lowest level in almost five years.

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By Timothy R. Homan

March 23 (Bloomberg) — Sales of previously owned homes in the U.S. unexpectedly increased in February as record foreclosures pushed down prices and lured first-time buyers into the market.

Purchases rose 5.1 percent to an annual rate of 4.72 million from 4.49 million in January, the National Association of Realtors said today in Washington. The median price slumped 15.5 percent from a year ago, the second-biggest drop on record, and distressed properties accounted for 45 percent of all sales.

Stocks, already up after the Obama administration unveiled details of a plan to buy up to $1 trillion in troubled assets, extended the rally after the report. The president’s proposal, combined with last week’s Federal Reserve initiative to commit as much as $1.1 trillion more to unclog credit markets, is raising speculation the global economic slump may soon ease.

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By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
stevebrown@dallasnews.com The pace of home price declines increased in Dallas at the end of 2008.

Dallas-area home prices were down 4.3 percent from a year earlier in the December Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

The Dallas decline – while higher than in previous months – was just a fraction of the record 18.5 percent nationwide home price decline, according to the report released Tuesday.

“The broad downturn in the residential real estate market continues,” Standard & Poor’s David M. Blitzer said in the report. “There are very few, if any, pockets of turnaround that one can see in the data.

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