Calculate your site FeedRank Today
FeedRank, a newly developed algorithm for ranking RSS feeds only on RSSMicro
Click here to learn more
 4/10 Good --- blogs.tampabay.com http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/tampabaycom/blogs/realestate
| (Un)Real Estate offers a peek at the housing market usually reserved for insiders. ... |
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 --- 73 days ago http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/tampabaycom/blogs/realestate/~3/288729853
| This article from last week makes some good points about a pending housing recovery. Of course, it uses a broad national brush and isn't specific to Florida: The dire headlines coming fast and furious in the financial and popular press suggest that the housing crisis is intensifying. Yet it is very likely that April 2008 will mark the bottom of the U.S. housing market. Yes, the housing market is bottoming right now. How can this be? For starters, a bottom does not mean that prices are about to return to the heady days of 2005. That probably won't happen for another 15 years. It just means that the trend is no longer getting worse, which is the critical factor. Most people forget that the current housing bust is nearly three years old. Home sales peaked in July 2005. New home sales are down a staggering 63% from peak levels of 1.4 million. Housing starts have fallen more than 50% and, adjusted for population growth, are back to the trough levels of 1982. Furthermore, residential construction is close to 15-year lows at 3.8% of GDP; by the fourth quarter of this year, it will probably hit the lowest level ever. So what's going to stop the housing decline? Very simply, the same thing that caused the bust: affordability. The boom made housing unaffordable for many American families, especially first-time home buyers. During the 1990s and early 2000s, it took 19% of average monthly income to service a conforming mortgage on the average ... |
|
|
Recent Posts
|
|
|
Facebook Del.icio.us Digg StumbleUpon Reddit Google
Anytime
