Tag Archives: Home Prices

The valuation firm Clear Capital released the results of its home price forecasting models Thursday. The company expects residential property values at the national level to begin to show slight increases over the next three months, ending the year with a growth rate of 1.2 percent. Clear Capital's diagrams depict the valley shape with current prices at the bottom and a subtle upward trend from March through December of 2012. Markets in the southern part of the country are expected to perform the strongest.

When excluding distressed sales, such as short sales and REO transactions, prices actually increased on a month-over-month basis in February, according to the February 2012 Home Price Index released by CoreLogic Wednesday. Though, when including distressed sales, prices decreased compared to the month before. Month-over-month home prices increased by 0.7 percent in February when not factoring in distressed sales and decreased 0.8 percent compared to the year before.

Despite the fact that key market indicators released in recent weeks have shown declines in home sales, anecdotal reports from real estate agents in the field suggest better days are ahead for the industry, according to commentary released Monday by the economic team at Wells Fargo Securities. Most agents are reporting ""significant gains in buyer interest and sales,"" and as a result, Wells' economists have nudged their forecast for home sales slightly higher. They are expecting sales of existing homes to top out at 4.50 million in 2012 and rise to 4.65 million in 2013.

Home prices in many areas are already rebounding from the bottom of the market, according to the March HomeValueForecast.com update from Pro Teck Valuation Services. This month, the company explores the turnover rate, which is the number of non-distressed sales divided by the total housing stock in a particular market. Pro Teck says this calculation is one of the most powerful and, yet, simplest leading indicators of the future direction of home prices, with the turnover rate hitting bottom six to 18 months before the bottom in home prices.

Tuesday's S&P/Case-Shiller release on home prices was labeled ""disappointing"" by a number of analysts and market participants as both the 10- and 20-city composites and eight cities set new cycle lows. With the Case-Shiller numbers failing to fit the mold of improving market conditions, several commentary notes from analysts dismissed the latest results as ""old news,"" with a two-month lag time and home price assessments based on three-month averages. S&P's index committee chairman took to the web to defend the Case-Shiller report against naysayers.

States and metro areas known for being risky when it comes to mortgage fraud seem to be repeat offenders, according to the 2011 Annual Mortgage Fraud Risk report released by Interthinx. The top six states with the highest levels of mortgage fraud risk in 2010 maintained their spots as the riskiest states into 2011, a trend also seen when looking at data for fraud in Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). Nevada, Arizona, Florida, California, Colorado, and Michigan were the six riskiest states for 2011 and 2010.

The Urban Land Institute released its Real Estate Consensus Forecast Wednesday morning, and overall, the 38 real estate economists and analysts surveyed project broad improvements for the economy. With signs of improvement in the housing sector already emerging, participants expect to see housing starts nearly double by 2014, and project home prices will begin to rise in 2013. The average home price, which has declined somewhere between 1.8 percent and 4.1 percent over each of the past three years, according to FHFA data, is expected to stabilize in 2012, followed by a 2 percent increase in 2013, and a 3.5 percent increase in 2014.

Standard & Poor's reported Tuesday that it's closely watched Case-Shiller index declined in January for the fifth straight month. But according to John Burns Real Estate Consulting (JBREC), that's stale news and doesn't reflect what's actually happening in the market right now. In fact, the independent research company says home prices are rising. JBREC conducted its own analysis of home prices in 97 markets and found that over the January-to-March period prices are up in 90 of them, with an average increase of 1.1 percent.

After a forecast from Moody's Analytics hinted that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is at risk of requiring a taxpayer bailout, the FHA released a myths and facts sheet and categorized speculation about a bailout as myth. ""Sweeping changes enacted by FHA since 2009, including an important series of recent steps such as the enforcement actions that resulted in over $900 million in compensation to FHA from settlement agreements with major banks, and further increases to FHA's insurance premiums, it is unlikely that FHA would require additional resources from the U.S. Treasury in FY 2012,"" the FHA stated.

The Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes fell for the fifth straight month in January, with the 10- and 20-city composites each dropping 0.8 percent from December, Standard & Poor's, which compiles the indices, reported Tuesday morning. The 10-city index slid to its lowest level since May 2003 and the 20-city index dropped to its lowest level since December 2002. Home prices fell in 16 of 19 major cities during the month of January.