Recovery just around the corner… or here?
Experts have been calling a bottom for the housing market ever since the bubble began to collapse in 2006… and they’ve been uniformly wrong. So, are we finally there?
David Stiff, chief economist of Fiserv, the financial-services technology company that produces the widely followed Case-Shiller indexes, says ‘yes.’ House prices nationally are expected to stabilize by the end of summer and start to rise by an annualized rate of 3.9 percent over the next five years.
Seattle-Bellevue-Everett market
For the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett metro area, prices are seen rising at a 5 percent annualized rate.
Jon Talton, Seattle Times, May 12, 2012
New home sales
And the latest news from Reuters is also affirmative: new home sales are up year-over-year by 9.9% with the median price of a new home rising to $235,700 last month, up 4.9 percent from a year ago.
New home sales last month were buoyed by a 28.2 percent jump in the Midwest. Sales in the Northeast rose 7.7 percent, to the highest level in over a year, while in the West sales soared 27.5 percent. Sales were down 10.6 percent in the South.
Home resales
Home resales hit a two year high, getting a boost from investors who continue to see good value. The Federal Housing Finance Agency showed house prices in March were up 2.7 percent from a year ago, the largest gain since November 2006. The increase reflected a 1.8 percent rise in March from February, the biggest monthly jump on records dating to 1991.
Still fragile…
So, are we out of the woods yet? Signs are encouraging, yet the balance is still fragile. Time will tell.
What is for sure (for the moment) are the interest rates, which continue to stay low thanks to the uncertainly around Greek-Euro crisis - and that’s critical for buying a home. But that is not predicted to last… Stay tuned for more information predicted for the future of interest rates.
