Tag Archives: Home Sales

When figuring in distressed sales (short sales and REO transactions), home prices jumped by 5.6 percent year-over-year in February, according to CoreLogic's February 2015 Home Price Index released on Tuesday.

The NAR’s latest look at existing-home sales shows that while sales nationally were 3.2 percent higher this January than last, single-family transactions were down almost 5 percent to 4.82 million. This is the lowest since last April’s 4.75 million.

Housing in Texas heated up in the final quarter of 2014, capping off the second-best year for the market in the state's history, according to data released by a local Realtor group.

December home sales topped the previous month by a double-digit percentage, defying the usual slowdown brought on by seasonal influences, according to a survey of metros nationwide.

The share of all-cash home sales continued its streak of annual declines in October but remained elevated compared to pre-crisis levels, according to data released Wednesday. In a post on the company's blog site, CoreLogic estimated that cash transactions accounted for 35.5 percent of total home sales in October 2014, down from 38.7 percent the year prior.

While lower prices are bound to keep Americans happy at the gas pump, they could potentially be a problem for housing in oil-dependent states, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. If the current decline impacts the local labor market (as the Dallas Fed indicated Wednesday in its own Beige Book), it could be a weight on their housing health in the next few years.

Improvements in economic fundamentals, notably employment growth among millennials, will fuel significant increases in home sales and housing starts and a modest rise in home prices in 2015, according to CoreLogic's 2015 Housing Outlook released earlier this week. Sam Khater, deputy chief economist for CoreLogic, predicted an increase of 9 percent in home sales and a 14 percent spike in housing starts for the coming year in the report.

Freddie Mac predicted that 2015 will see the highest level of home sales in the U.S. since 2007 in its December 2014 U.S. Economic and Housing Market Outlook released on Tuesday.

In her outlook, IHS economist Stephanie Karol focuses on two major trends that have shaped the housing market in 2014: low household formation and diverging trends for new versus existing-homes.

The year 2015 is gearing up to be a stronger, more expensive housing market powered for the first time by new millennial buyers, according to the Realtor.com 2015 Housing Forecast.