Despite record foreclosure levels, the other indicators in the Houston real estate market remain resilient and generally strong. According to a March 25, 2010 article in the DS News, “Texas claimed the biggest increase in foreclosures during the month of February with a rise of 35.3 percent, according to new data published this week by ForeclosureListings.com…While their overall numbers were lower than the Sin City, in Phoenix, Arizona, foreclosures jumped 34.61 percent last month, and in Houston, Texas, they surged 37.80 percent.” The piece, composed by Carrie Bay, continued to state that “Today one in every 418 homes in the United States has been hit with a foreclosure filing, topping over 300,000 filings for the 12th straight month and brining the nationwide total to almost 1.4 million.”
The prices of Houston homes for sale has been holding steady, according to a March 19, 2010 article in the Houston Business Journal. The piece found that “For the past two years, economists have pointed out that Houston housing prices were immune to the worst of the real estate collapse. A report issued Friday by IHS Global Insight puts an exclamation point on that observation. Across the country, house prices in extremely overvalued U.S. metropolitan areas declined nearly 37 percent on average between 2005, the peak of the real estate bubble, and the end of 2009 when prices stabilized, according to IHS’s fourth quarter 2009 report.” According to James Diffley, director of IHS Global Insight’s Regional Services Group, “The high risk of a home price collapse that we reported in 2005 was borne out, and the subsequent price declines across metropolitan areas is very closely correlated with our valuation metric.”
A local trend for Houston real estate for sale was reflected in the larger Southern real estate market, according to a March 23, 2010 article in the New York Times. That piece, also published by the Associated Press, stated that “Last month, 113,000 homes were sold in the region, but the median sales price dipped 4 percent from a year ago to $139,600, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday.”