Helpful Real Estate Blog

Studying the state of some local markets in the USA I came to the conclusion that while American real-estate market as a whole experiences a slowdown, every local market has its particular features and tendencies.
 

Thus despite on the overall cooling of the housing market the residential real-estate market in San Antonio is getting a boost from middle-class Mexican buyers. Mexicans tend to purchase homes between $100,000 and $150,000. The average price for a house in the city increased 9% to $131,900 in the first quarter of 2006 from $121,200 the year before. In accordance with some of local real-estate agents the number of Mexican clients doubled from the last years.
 

Slowing of the real-estate market and demand decline don’t apply to Austin also, where price gain and ready sales are still observed.
 

Other trends are taking place in the Southern California - the area which was characterized with bidding wars and word-of-mouth sales recently. Today’s local market in the state is featured with increased period of time which is required for selling a home. While it took 25 days to sell a residential property in April 2005 in Los Angeles County, this year homeowners need 34 days to sell their homes. In Orange County homeowners have been selling their homes for 39 days in comparison with 26 days last year, and in the combined San Bernardino and Riverside counties region – 39 days compared with 27. Parts of the Westside and Malibu especially excelled displaying the median time of selling a property amount to 85 days. To attract buyers homeowners are forced to cut prices sometimes by $200,000 and more. But despite on slackening of the market and decline of buyers’ demand California still remains one of the priciest areas with the median home price of $485,000, that is 9% up from April 2005’s median price.
 

Thus at the Southern California’s housing market prices are continuing to grow, but the duration of finding a buyer is also growing. And as one of the local real-estate agents in San Jacinto in Riverside County Hugo Florez said, “It’s not last year’s market anymore.”

Southwest Florida’s housing market is also loosing its former attractiveness. Growing home inventory forces builders to offer different incentives (such as free trips, cars and upgrades) to attract potential home-buyers in such cities as North Port and Orlando.
 

Oregonian’s property market is characterized with high prices and scarcity of buildable land. This is featured mainly to the Portland area. Scarcity of land impels builders to construct thin houses measuring 25-square-feet wide on smaller plots. Such houses constructed in high-density neighborhoods have little or no backyards. Due to the luck of land developers build also three-story houses squeezing 10 to 15 homes on an acre, versus four to six per acre of 10 years ago. The price of land in the Portland area today is $500,000 an acre.

In accordance with the PMI Mortgage Insurance Co. six American markets saw price appreciation of more than 20% over the year (Phoenix saw appreciation of 31.1%; Orlando, Fla., saw appreciation of 27.7%; Fort Lauderdale, Fla., saw appreciation of 25.7% and Miami saw appreciation of 24.7%). Four higher-risk markets saw appreciation drop to a single figures over the year (San Diego experienced 7.7% appreciation; Boston experienced 5.7% appreciation; Providence, R.I., experienced 9.5% appreciation, and Cambridge, Mass., experienced 5.2% appreciation).  

During the first quarter of 2006 more than half of the largest metropolitan areas (from 50) saw decrease of home affordability while 19 markets experienced slight increase of affordability due to slower price growth (five of the markets were in Texas and six were in the Midwest).

In this article I reviewed only a few markets but it was enough for me to arrive to some conclusions. Surveying changes that are taking place at the existing real-estate markets I make sure more and more that general market tendencies featured to the whole American market don’t spread to all the local markets. Every local market is excelled by its own particularities and trends. Meanwhile I must notice that overall tendencies capture the majority of markets.
 

Among the most common features of almost all today’s markets I’d like to note:
1) Slowdown tendencies;
2) Slackening of price gain;
3) Growing home inventory;
4) Decline of buyers’ demand;
5) Increased period of time required for selling a home.
 

But as I’ve already mentioned above there are some exceptions which were partly described.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Real estate market. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.