Archive for April, 2009

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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