Category Archives: Real Estate

US housing market looks headed for its worst slowdown in years

The U.S. housing market — particularly in cutthroat areas like Seattle, Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas — appears to be headed for the broadest slowdown in years. Buyers are getting squeezed by rising mortgage rates and by prices climbing about twice as fast as incomes, and there’s only so far they can stretch.

“This could be the very beginning of a turning point,” said Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who is famed for warning of the dot-com and housing bubbles, in an interview. He stressed that he isn’t ready to make that call yet.

Existing-home sales dropped in June for a third straight month. Purchases of new homes are at their slowest pace in eight months. Inventory, which plunged for years, has begun to grow again as buyers move to the sidelines, sapping the fuel for surging home values. Prices for existing homes climbed 6.4 percent in May, the smallest year-over-year gain since early 2017, and have gained the least over three months since 2012, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Read more at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/american-housing-market-is-showing-signs-of-running-out-of-steam

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San Diego median home price hits $575k

San Diego County’s median home price hit another record in June, reaching $575,000, while sales hit their lowest point in years, real estate tracker CoreLogic reported Tuesday.

The previous record was $570,000 in May. Home prices have been steadily breaking records all year, with prices increasing 5.5 percent in a year as of June.

A lack of homes for sale has reduced sales significantly, while pushing prices up. There were 3,927 home sales in June, down 9.4 percent from the same time last year. That’s the lowest in four years for June in San Diego County.

“Affordability and inventory constraints are likely the main culprits in last month’s sales,” wrote CoreLogic data analyst Andrew LePage, “which applied to all six of the region’s counties and across most of the major price categories.”

San Diego County’s resale home market, the most significant part of the puzzle because it has the majority of sales, hit a new peak while sales dipped. The median for a single-family home reached an all-time record of $630,000, a 5.8 percent increase in a year.

read more at: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/real-estate/sd-fi-corelogic-home-20180724-story.html

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Relief in Sight for Homebuyers in High Priced West Coast Cities

It’s been tough being a homebuyer on the West Coast. Prices have been surging for years as house hunters fight for the few available listings. Now the tide could be shifting.

As sellers come off the sidelines to lock in gains, they’re starting to boost inventory. New data by brokerage Redfin Corp. shows that supply in several U.S. markets is rising in the places that need it the most, like Seattle; Portland, Oregon; and San Jose, California.

relief

The rise in inventory in these West Coast housing markets has slowed the torrid price increases in the region and, in turn, in the U.S. as a whole, where prices grew at their slowest pace since December 2016. The cooling includes the pace of sales as well. While sales increased in June in many of the nation’s biggest markets, including Chicago (9.8 percent), Washington (5.7 percent) and Houston (2.4 percent), declines out west were so sharp they dragged the national figure down to a drop of 3.3 percent.

The pain isn’t over. The inventory shortage is still very real in many West Coast markets — some have only a few months of supply. And if the skyrocketing trajectory of prices has eased, the increases still consistently outstrip wage growth. The median home in San Jose sold for $1.23 million in June.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/this-bizarre-sunscreen-booth-is-driving-cocktail-sales-at-hotel-pools

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