Blog entries tagged Market Dynamics

Why Houston is Leading the Recovery

Nick Will — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:33:41 +0100

This chart tells the story of what I'm seeing through other economic indicators being released now and in recent weeks. This is a chart of the past 10 years of Producer Price Indices, the general economic cost index for companies that produce things. If a steel cookware company wants to sell more cookware, it cares a lot for example about the cost of steel. Same for a fast food compRead More...

FHA Delinquencies Drop in February

Nick Will — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:15:10 +0100

From The Washington Post, FHA delinquencies dropped significantly in February after several months of increasing. Definitely good news. Now we need more investors to get back in this market, the good signs keep coming.

The default and claims rate is now the lowest it has been since August, when the rate was 4.8 percent. The number of troubled loans fell from about 166,000 to roughly 162,000.

Brian Chappelle, a banking consultant and former FHA official, attributes thRead More...

Buffett: Housing Problems Are Largely Behind Us

Nick Will — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:03:13 +0100

Jonathan Stempel of Reuters wrote yesterday that Berkshire Hathaway's "oracle" Warren Buffett sees the housing crisis as mostly behind us, as do we at our firm. Writes Stempel:

[Buffett] said "residential housing problems should largely be behind us" within about a year as supply falls into line with demand, though "prices will remain far below 'bubble' levels."

This is the same observation we're hearing from non-celebrity analysts and industry colleagues on the ground. Read More...

New Home Sales Stats: Some Truth to Power

Nick Will — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:41:56 +0100

Okay so new home sales numbers weren't reported to be up last week. So? First of all, the housing market is local in nature. If all politics is local as Tip O'Neill said, then real estate and housing is darn near skin-tight.

Here's what Deutsche Bank said in the linked article above: "Overall, we think today's weak number supports our contention that based on waning government stimulus the housing recovery could end up being W-shaped..." What blather.

&nbsRead More...

Austin: Construction Contracts Down 50%

Nick Will — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:05:44 +0100

Austin is an odd bird in the Texas aviary of real estate, both commercial and residential. The Austin Business Journal is reporting that commercial and residential contracts combined are down almost 50% through August of this year over last year, which itself was not a stellar year.

That blowing sound you hear could be the air coming out of the Austin real estate market. I'm a bull when it comes to Houston area real estate, a serious bull, but with Austin... not so much. AusRead More...

Buyers Gaining Interest: Web Stats

Nick Will — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:58:01 +0100

The website alexa.com tracks various statistics regarding web traffic across the Internet worldwide. Its methods are sometimes questioned - full disclosure - they use a large sample of people who download their "toolbar" is how I understand they get their sample. Nonetheless it's a commonly referenced source for Internet traffic statistics.

So today I pulled the recent traffic for HAR.com, the Houston Association of Realtors's public version of the Multiple Listing Service fRead More...

Sell Well Now.

Nick Will — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:29:28 +0100

We've recently completed a review of year-over-year sales figures in our general market area, and the results confirm a dynamic we've noted for several months now: inventory is low, which is supporting values of quality properties.

Year over year, each quarter (and month) is showing a steep decline in activity - not necessarily value, as is the case in other cities and states. In Houston and particularly surrounding areas, we see that in our market, there are fewer sales beiRead More...