Houston real estate market
May 12th
- Image by escapevelocity via Flickr
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.”
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San Francisco real estate update 2009
Nov 24th
- Image via Wikipedia
San Francisco real estate has seen lackluster interest and fluctuating prices for a few years to the erratic economic conditions caused by the global recession affecting real estate markers not only in the United States but around the world. Steven Brown of the San Francisco Business Times wrote on November 11, 2009, that “more than a quarter of homes listed for sale in San Francisco have had their asking prices cut in the last year, with a whopping $66.1 million in total price reductions for the city.”
Additionally, according to Trulia, Inc., a real estate market analysis company, “28 percent of listed homes in San Francisco have had their prices cut in the last year. That puts San Francisco at No. 27 on a list of the top 50 U.S. cities ranked by percentage of homes that have been discounted.” The report also announced that “luxury homes costing $2 million or more have been the hardest hit across the country but are responsible for a quarter of the total of $28.1 billion in home price cuts.” These staggering figures spell financial hardship for many previous owners or mortgage holders who have had difficulty with their properties in one of the most expensive cities to live in.
Owners of San Francisco homes for sale are not happy at all with the latest figures released by realtor associations and RealtyTrac. As reported on November 18, 2009, via Yahoo!’s real estate portal, there were almost 2,000 homes for sale on the market at a median price of $839,000, a decrease in over six percent compared to the previous month. Foreclosed houses didn’t suffer as badly. Based on about 1,700 property foreclosures, there was only a 3.3 percent decrease in price, dropping the median to a tad over $524,000.
There is some relief, though. For buyers interested in real estate in San Francisco and who would like to help rebuild the local real estate market, the Mayor’s Office of Housing has created a down-payment assistance program to help facilitate homeownership for people with low and moderate incomes. The San Francisco Chronicle announced on November 13, 2009, that the program would be expanded to help stimulate sales in the city.
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