Tag Archives: Home Prices

Sales of Miami and surrounding area homes increased sharply in June, according to MDA DataQuick. During the month, 9,296 new and resale houses and condos closed escrow in the Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward counties, up 18.3 percent from May and more than 20 percent higher than a year ago.

The nation's REO stock fell 0.6 percent in May to 524,000 properties, according to Barclays Capital. In addition, the research firm estimates that housing's shadow inventory - which Barclays defines as the supply of homes nearing REO status - declined by 2.3 percent to 4.02 million properties. A separate study released by Clear Capital supports the assumption that indeed, there are fewer REOs influencing the market. The company says the percentage of bank-owned homes sold as compared to all properties sold dropped 22.7 percent during the May-July period.

Home sales in the Lone Star State are on the rise. According to the latest Texas Quarterly Housing Report released Monday by the Texas Association of Realtors, a total of 66,079 existing single-family homes were sold during the second quarter of this year, soaring 14 percent from the same quarter last year. This marked the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year increases.

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is expected to have a grave--and costly--impact on coastal area real estate. According to a recent report by CoreLogic, the impact of the spill on home values in coastal communities already affected by the spill is expected to range from $648 million over one year to as much as $3 billion over five years. And in the event that the unlikely, worst-case scenario occurs and the spill reaches around the Florida Keys and up the Atlantic coast of Florida, the additional losses could reach up to $28 billion over five years, CoreLogic said.

Real estate data provider Altos Research is taking a very bearish outlook on the housing market. The company says that ominous shadow inventory of distressed properties hanging over the industry will lock home prices into a downward trajectory for the remainder of this year, with property values starting out 2011 even lower than they were in 2009. Add to that the fact that the pool of viable buyers out there is shrinking, and you've got an equation that Altos says is a sign of real market weakness.

Despite recent increases in a number of the industry's home price measurements, and even an uptick in the company's own index of residential property prices, Fiserv Inc. says the gains will be short-lived. The information technology firm is forecasting home prices to fall by another 4.9 percent over the next 12 months, as unemployment remains high, mortgage rates rise, and markets such as Florida, Arizona, and Nevada add even more distressed properties to their inventories.

The residential real estate market in Massachusetts seems to be on the mend. According to a recent report by the Warren Group, a provider of real estate data in New England, the Bay State saw year-over-year increases in both sales and prices of single-family homes and condos in June and in the second quarter.

Home prices in the United States rose in May on both a month-over-month and year-over-year basis, Standard & Poor's reported Tuesday. The S&P/Case Shiller 20-city home price composite increased 1.2 percent between April and May and 4.6 compared to a year ago. The gains posted in the latest installment of the closely watched index were much larger than the market expected, but analysts warn that the plus-signs are only making a temporary showing, reflecting a strong spring selling season and the residual effects of the homebuyer tax credit.

A new study developed by TransUnion finds that consumers with multiple account relationships with the same lender outperform consumers who maintain only one relationship with that lender, with the biggest improvements in delinquencies seen among mortgages. The study found that borrowers whose only credit relationship with their lender was for their mortgage had a 30-day or worse delinquency rate of 4.8 percent. However, this delinquency level dropped to 4 percent if the borrower had two relationships with the lender, and that rate fell even further with each additional relationship.

A recent study published by the New York Federal Reserve says that lax lending standards were not the air that inflated the market’s latest housing bubble and propelled the nation into an economic tailspin.