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California Markets Top Turnaround Towns | Mt Kisco Real Estate

Oakland, Calif.; Orange County, Calif.; and Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Lompoc are leading the nation in recovery according to realtor.com’s quarterly ranking of top turnaround towns.

For Q2 2013, the median age of inventory dropped 14.4 percent over the past year, with typical homes selling in 83 days between April and June of this year. Median list price rose 5.4 percent year-over-year, to $196,000, in the second quarter of 2013. The number of homes available on the market dropped across the country by 10.3 percent year-over-year, with an average of 1.8 million homes on the market on any given day in the second quarter of 2013.

Detroit ranked seventh. Though plagued by the city’s recent bankruptcy filing, the market nonetheless posted strong improvement in the second quarter. Its median list prices on realtor.com^® are 37.8 percent higher for the quarter than they were a year ago, while inventories are down 26.5 percent. The market’s median age of inventory is just 45 days, down 25 percent from the second quarter in 2012.

“Detroit has made remarkable progress in the last year, shrinking its inventory of unsold homes by more than 26 percent and becoming one of the most balanced markets in the nation,” said Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Move. ”We’ll be watching the inventory levels in the months ahead, but if this past quarter is any indication, Detroit won’t be giving up without a fight.”

Q2 2013 Rank	Market	Qtrly Year/Year Median List Price	Qtrly Year/Year Median Age of Inventory	Qtrly Year/Year Inventory
1	Oakland, Calif.	41.3%	-53.1%	-34.4%
2	Orange County, Calif.	29.4%	-43.3%	-36.6%
3	Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Lompoc, Calif.	34.3%	-30.9%	-27.8%
4	San Jose, Calif.	25.0%	-64.0%	-35.4%
5	Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash.	17.2%	-55.8%	-29.9%
6	Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif.	30.3%	-27.2%	-28.9%
7	Detroit, Mich.	37.8%	-25.0%	-26.5%
8	Portland-Vancouver, Ore.	12.0%	-45.8%	-23.5%
9	San Diego, Calif.	21.1%	-26.4%	-28.5%
10	Reno, Nev.	26.0%	-32.3%	-29.1%

Top Five Turnaround Towns

#1 – Oakland, Calif.: Oakland has been well on the path to recovery for more than a year. In the second quarter of 2013, listings in the Oakland market fell more than 34 percent from year-ago levels. Oakland led the nation in year-over-year list price increases in the second quarter of 2013 and houses in Oakland are staying listed on realtor.com^® for only 15 days, which is the youngest inventory in the nation. The median list house price in Oakland has risen from $339,000 a year ago to $479,000 in the second quarter of 2013.

#2 – Orange County, Calif.: With record numbers of foreclosures just four years ago, home prices inOrange County rose 29.4 percent above year-ago levels. In the second quarter of this year, Orange Countyhad the fastest declining inventory in the nation, with listings on realtor.com® down 36.6 percent. The median age of Orange County homes on realtor.com^® in the second quarter of 2013 was 51 days, far below the national median of 83 days and 43.3 percent lower than a year ago.

#3 – Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Lompoc, Calif.: Santa Barbara’s strong prices catapulted it into third place on the list. In the second quarter of 2013, this market’s median price was up 34.3 percent over a year ago to $685,000. Though Santa Barbara inventories were still extraordinarily low – down 27.8 percent from the second quarter of 2012 – they have started to recover. The average time that Santa Barbaralistings spend on realtor.com^® (56 days) dropped 30.9 percent from the second quarter of 2012.

#4 – San Jose, Calif.: Inventories in San Jose dropped 35.4 percent compared to the second quarter of 2012, the second-largest drop in the nation. Year-over-year San Jose prices were up exactly 25 percent in the second quarter of 2013, another sign that the market is returning to normal after a combination of historically low inventories and strong demand powered prices in San Jose and several other Northern California cities to huge increases.

More Consumers Expect Rates to Rise | Mt Kisco Real Estate

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The share of consumers who believe interest rates will go up over the next year increased another 5 percentage points to 62 percent, the highest level in the three-year history of Fannie Mae’s July 2013 National Housing Survey. Consumers also expect home prices to climb 3.9 percent on average over the next 12 months, holding steady from the May and June survey results. At the same time, the share of respondents who say it is a good time to buy a house increased to 74 percent, while the share who say it’s a good time to sell a house increased to 40 percent, matching the survey high. “Consumers have taken the interest rate rise in stride. Expectations for continued improvement in housing persist, and sentiment toward the current buying and selling environment is back on track from its dip last month,” said Doug Duncan, senior vice president and chief economist at Fannie Mae. “These results are consistent with our own analysis of previous housing cycles, which finds that interest rates and home prices are not strongly correlated.” Homeownership and Renting

At 3.9 percent, the average 12-month home price change expectation increased slightly to match May 2013’s survey high. The share of people who say home prices will go up in the next 12 months fell 4 percentage points from June’s survey high to 53 percent, while those who say home prices will go down reached a survey low of 6 percent. The share of respondents who say mortgage rates will go up in the next 12 months jumped 5 percentage points to 62 percent, the highest level since the survey’s inception. The share who say it is a good time to buy a house increased slightly to 74 percent, and those who say it is a good time to sell a house increased 4 percentage points to 40 percent. The average 12-month rental price expectation fell to 4.2 percent, a 0.4 percent decrease from last month.

Fifty-four percent of those surveyed say home rental prices will go up in the next 12 months, a 2 percentage point decrease from June’s survey high. Forty-five percent of respondents think it would be easy for them to get a home mortgage today, a 2 percentage point decrease from last month. The share of respondents who said they would buy if they were going to move decreased slightly to 64 percent.

Rising prices widen homeownership availability gap | Mount Kisco Real Estate

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Across all 100 metros, less affordable markets tend to have high price gains. The correlation between the year-over-year price gain and the mortgage-payment-versus-wage measure is 0.3 (statistically significant at the 5% level). That means that homeownership affordability is becoming more unequal across the U.S. — the gap between more affordable and less affordable markets is growing. To see what this growing gap means for the housing market, read the full blog post byTrulia.

Rising prices widen homeownership availability gap | HousingWire.

Will higher mortgage rates kill the housing market? Maybe not! | Mount Kisco Real Estate

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Home prices have been soaring over the past year, the sharpest gains in seven years; construction activity is picking up nicely. Both trends have been driven in no small part by a steady drop in home mortgage interest rates, which have made homeownership too good a deal to pass up for millions of Americans.

But the trend on rates has reversed abruptly in the past few weeks. This chart shows the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage since the start of 2011; the spike on the right shows an increase from 3.4 percent to 4.1 percent since May 1.

Source: Bloomberg/BankRate

So what will become of our precious and long-awaited housing boom? Is it a fragile, delicate flower about to be crushed by the boot of higher rates? Or is the housing recovery now resilient enough that there’s no need to fear? Economists at Goldman Sachs have run some numbers through their models of how the housing market works and have come up with some promising answers.

Source: Goldman Sachs The Goldman economists, Hui Shan and Marty Young, start with an analysis built on home affordability. Take the median household income in the United States ($50,000), assume a buyer has a 20 percent down payment and that they can only afford debt payments equal to 25 percent of their income. This chart shows how much house they can afford at any given mortgage rate:

Source: Goldman Sachs

It also shows an initial reason for some optimism. At a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate of about 3.8 percent, the typical American homebuyer can afford a $279,000 house. That’s 45 percent more than the current price of houses. That suggests that affordability isn’t the thing holding Americans back from buying houses (instead, it may be such factors as tight credit standards, difficulty building up a down payment or lack of confidence in future job prospects). It also implies that slight increases in the mortgage rate shouldn’t completely undermine the improvement in the housing market; the thing to watch is not rates per se, but what happens on those other factors that are drags on would-be homeowners.

And that bodes particularly well: As we wrote last week, the rise in rates over the past month appears to be driven primarily by improving economic prospects. If that’s the case, even as homes become a bit more expensive, they will be doing so at the same time those other restraining factors dissipate. So rising mortgage rates, if they’re rising for good reasons, could actually be net positives for the housing market if they result from more people having jobs and being confident in their prospects.

Will higher mortgage rates kill the housing market? Maybe not!.

As Home Prices Rise, Consumer ‘Wealth Effect’ May Be Smaller | Mt Kisco Real Estate

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The “wealth effect” is a term coined by economists to describe consumers’ tendency to spend more when their wealth has increased. It spurred the U.S. economy forward for decades as the market value of homes rose. It was easy for Americans to take out new mortgages and pocket the proceeds for trips to the mall or a second car. The equity extracted through these mortgages, known as cash-out refinancings, rose from $26 billion in 2000 to $321 billion in 2006. Home-equity loans, which do not require a new mortgage, also fueled the frenzy. Economists figured that every dollar increase in housing wealth produced an extra 3¢ to 5¢ in spending.

Home prices are rising again, but the wealth effect “is much smaller,” says Amir Sufi, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Sufi reckons that each dollar gain in housing wealth today may yield as little as 1¢ in extra spending. U.S. Department of Commerce data show that consumer spending has grown at a 2.1 percent annual rate since the recession’s end, down from a 3.2 percent average for the 20 years before the slump.

Consumers now see their homes less as a piggy bank to be tapped and more as a nest egg to be secured. More homeowners are paying down the principal and shortening the maturities of mortgages. Cash-in refinancings, in which borrowers invest more of their own money in the house, outnumbered cash-outs by more than 2 to 1 in the fourth quarter, according to Freddie Mac (FMCC).

As Home Prices Rise, Consumer ‘Wealth Effect’ May Be Smaller | Mt Kisco Real Estate | Bedford NY Real Estate | Robert Paul Talks Life in Bedford NY.

Facebook Showing Off New Look for News Feed | Mt Kisco Realtor

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via blog.hubspot.com

Auction.com launches research division | Mt Kisco Real Estate

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Online real estate marketplace, Auction.com, is expanding its brand by launching Auction.com Research, a new division providing continuous data and analysis throughout various real estate sectors.
Auction.com Research will gather experienced economists and industry researchers, who have built solid track records of accurate research and forecasts, to create a broad range of information.
“We all benefit from a healthy real estate marketplace,” said Monte Koch, Auction.com co-CEO. “Making Auction.com Research’s findings publicly accessible will facilitate smart growth and sound business practices that support ongoing market recovery.”
Led by Peter Muoio, founder of the research and consulting firm Maximus Advisors, the division will release regular reports and forecasts related to single- and multi-family housing, retail, office, hospitality and industrial real estate.
The first report released by Auction.com Research, a single-family market report, can be found here.

via housingwire.com