Posted on July 22, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

Texas Property Markets Continue to Outpace Nation

Texas property markets will continue to outpace the nation, but things are likely to cool a bit through next year.

“The Texas housing markets are going to be spotty,” said Dr. James Gaines, a research economist with Texas A&M University’s Real Estate Center.

The Dallas Morning News states, some residential markets “will be doing very well and some will be doing poorly,” Dr. Gaines said to a corporate real estate group meeting in Addison on Thursday.

Also Online
Check out our interactive map.
Area home sales fall 15% Home sales statewide declined more than 14 percent through May compared with the same period of 2007, Dr. Gaines told a meeting of CoreNet Global’s Southwest chapter.

With the tougher lending standards and a pullout by home investors, the drop-off in sales in Texas could have been much steeper.

“Sales volumes should have fallen somewhere around 40 percent, but they haven’t fallen that far,” Dr. Gaines said. “It’s a testament to the strength of our economy and the fundamentals in Texas.

“Generally our housing prices are sustaining and holding up.”

Statewide home prices are up about 1.4 percent this year.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, median home sales prices fell by 2 percent in the first half of 2008.

“From a total market perspective, this is not too bad - it’s not the end of the world,” Dr. Gaines said.

But the recovery of Texas’ housing markets may take awhile – particularly on the construction side.

“Residential projects are almost dead in the water now,” he said. “It’s very difficult to find lenders willing fund them.”

The housing markets in Dallas-Fort Worth and the rest of Texas will benefit from huge population increases, he said.

“The D-FW Metroplex is bigger than the state of Arizona in population,” Dr. Gaines said. “It’s bigger than 30 other states.”

Likewise, job growth in the area is close to the highest in the country.

So far, that’s kept the commercial real estate market in North Texas and other markets strong.

“Rents and occupancy rates in Texas commercial properties will probably stay high for the rest of this year,” Dr. Gaines said. “But we are seeing early signs that market will settle down a little bit.”

Developers have been adding millions of square feet of new construction in Texas.

“Demand so far is keeping pace but we are not sure that is going to keep up.”

Tags:
Posted on July 21, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

Home Foreclosures up 18%

Home foreclosure postings in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are up 18 percent in the latest filings.

The Dallas Morning News reported, Almost 4,600 homes are scheduled for foreclosure next month, according Addison-based Foreclosure Listing Service.

That compares with 3,870 postings for August 2007.

Also Online
Interactive map: 2007 Dallas-Fort Worth foreclosures by ZIP code

Interactive foreclosure primer
Despite the big increase since last year, total foreclosure filings for the D-FW area are below the recent peak in February, when more than 5,300 postings were recorded.

The largest volume of postings for August was recorded in Dallas County, with 2,072 filings. That's an increase of 18 percent from a year ago.

Denton and Collin counties had the biggest percentage gain in foreclosure postings – up about 40 percent from a year ago.

With August postings, the total so far for 2008 in the four-county area is almost 34,000.

"For the first eight monthly foreclosure auctions of 2008, foreclosure posting activity has climbed 21 percent compared to the 27,911 notices filed by this time last year," Foreclosure Listing Service president George Roddy said.

"Foreclosure postings filed on D-FW homes during the first eight months of the year reached another new record-level high," Mr. Roddy said.

And don't look for a slowdown in foreclosures any time soon, said James Gaines of Texas A&M University's Real Estate Center.

"Foreclosures are going to stay high probably through next year and into early 2010," Dr. Gaines said.

The number of home loan defaults will begin to subside only after thousands of subprime loans are refinanced or go into foreclosure, he said.

"It's going to take us a little while to work through those," Dr. Gaines said. "They won't come down completely until we start seeing a bottoming of home prices, and prices start picking back up."

Tags:
Posted on July 18, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

Home Foreclosures in Dallas - Fort Worth Area Up

Home foreclosure postings in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are up 18 percent in the latest filings.

The Dallas Morning News reports, almost 4,600 homes are scheduled for foreclosure next month, according Addison-based Foreclosure Listing Service.

That compares with 3,870 postings for August 2007.

Also Online
Interactive map: 2007 Dallas-Fort Worth foreclosures by ZIP code

Interactive foreclosure primer
Despite the big increase since last year, total foreclosure filings for the D-FW area are below the recent peak in February, when more than 5,300 postings were recorded.

The largest volume of postings for August was recorded in Dallas County, with 2,072 filings. That's an increase of 18 percent from a year ago.

Denton and Collin counties had the biggest percentage gain in foreclosure postings – up about 40 percent from a year ago.

With August postings, the total so far for 2008 in the four-county area is almost 34,000.

"For the first eight monthly foreclosure auctions of 2008, foreclosure posting activity has climbed 21 percent compared to the 27,911 notices filed by this time last year," Foreclosure Listing Service president George Roddy said.

"Foreclosure postings filed on D-FW homes during the first eight months of the year reached another new record-level high," Mr. Roddy said.

And don't look for a slowdown in foreclosures any time soon, said James Gaines of Texas A&M University's Real Estate Center.

"Foreclosures are going to stay high probably through next year and into early 2010," Dr. Gaines said.

The number of home loan defaults will begin to subside only after thousands of subprime loans are refinanced or go into foreclosure, he said.

"It's going to take us a little while to work through those," Dr. Gaines said. "They won't come down completely until we start seeing a bottoming of home prices, and prices start picking back up."

Tags:
Posted on July 17, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

Construction of SIngle Family Homes Fall

Construction of single-family homes fell in June to the slowest pace in 17 years although a change in New York laws helped give a big boost to apartment building.

The Houston Chronicle reported,The Commerce Department reported today that construction of single-family homes dropped by 5.3 percent in June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 647,000 units, the weakest performance since January 1991, another period when the housing industry was going through a severe downturn.

However, construction of multifamily units surged by 42.5 percent last month, thanks to a change in New York City building codes that spurred a wave of apartment construction in that area. Taken together, single and apartment construction rose by 9.1 percent to an annual rate of 1.066 million units.

But the total increase was viewed as an aberration that did not give a true picture of the continued weak state for the housing industry because it was skewed by the huge jump in apartment building in New York.

Private economists are predicting that housing will continue to be under strains for the rest of the year. The troubles in housing, combined with related turmoil in the financial sector attributed to billions of dollars of losses on mortgage loans, are dragging down the total economy, raising risks of a recession.

Separately, the Labor Department reported that the number of newly laid-off people signing up for jobless benefits rose by 18,000 last week to 366,000, the highest level since late June. The increase was below the number that economists had been expecting.

The report on housing construction showed that applications for building permits, considered a good sign of future activity, rose by 11.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.091 million units. However, this increase was also skewed by a big rise in the volatile apartment sector. Permits for multifamily construction soared by 39.4 percent while permits for single-family homes fell by 3.5 percent.

Analysts said they expect that builders will continue to slash construction as they struggle with an extremely difficult environment. The National Association of Home Builders said Wednesday that its survey of builder sentiment fell to a record low of 16 in July, down from 18 in June,

That decline reflected all the problems facing the housing industry at the moment from a weak economy that is pushing down employment and consumer sentiment to surging mortgage foreclosures which are dumping more homes on an already glutted market.

Tags:
Posted on July 8, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

June Sales Down 20 %

Hot summer weather isn't heating up the North Texas home market.

The Dallas Morning News reports, June sales were down 20 percent from a year ago. And for the first six months of 2008, the number of pre-owned houses sold in the area is off 15 percent from the same period last year.

The good news: Prices are holding up relatively well.

North Texas real estate agents sold 7,371 pre-owned homes last month, the North Texas Real Estate Information System and Texas A&M University's Real Estate Center reported Monday.

It's the lowest sales total for June since 2003.

The falloff is "maybe a tad higher than we expected," said Dr. James Gaines of A&M's Real Estate Center.

"We've seen the high-end market decline significantly with the high cost of financing for jumbo mortgages" over $417,000.

Indeed, some of the biggest local home sales declines this year have been for properties priced over $700,000, Realtor statistics show.

In June, the median price of homes sold in North Texas was $158,580 – unchanged from a year ago.

Through the first six months of this year, median prices are down 2 percent from the first half of 2007.

That compares with a more than 6 percent dip in nationwide pre-owned home prices, according to the latest statistics.

But any decline in local prices could be a problem, Dr. Gaines said.

"Some will see the small price decline and decide to postpone any buying decision to see if prices go down further," he said.

And decreasing prices in the local home market "will not bode well for getting out of the foreclosure problems – in fact, it'll add to the problem," Dr. Gaines said.

While it's taking longer this summer to sell a home here – 77 days in June – the number of houses for sale continues to decline.

Last month there were 45,125 pre-owned single-family homes on the market in North Texas. That's down 10 percent from June 2007.

Currently there is just under a seven-month supply of homes for sale in the area.

Tags:
Posted on July 2, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

Dalas - Fort Worth Shows Stable Home Values

The latest home price risk forecast shows that Dallas-Fort Worth is overall the safest place in the country for stable home values.

The Dallas Morning News, also states the latest report by mortgage insurance company PMI Group ranked the D-FW area dead last among the 50 cities it rates for possible declines in home prices.

That means PMI is betting there is less than a 1 percent chance that average home prices here will be lower two years from now.

PMI's summer 2008 risk ranking for D-FW is similar to the insurance company's previous studies.

As in other PMI reports, the U.S. cities with the biggest run-up in home prices in recent years are at the greatest risk for losses.

During the last year, some markets have seen a significant increase in the number of existing single-family homes for sale, PMI chief economist David Berson said in the report.

"Given the magnitude of the inventory overhang, we expect national home price declines to continue into at least 2009," Mr. Berson said.

In North Texas, however, the number of pre-owned homes listed for sale has declined during the last year.

Although PMI Group's report about D-FW home prices should be encouraging, Mr. Berson said that doesn't mean there won't be short-term declines in values.

"It is also an average for a metropolitan area, so individual neighborhoods and houses could behave differently," he said, perhaps considerably so.

Tags:
Posted on July 2, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

Dalas - Fort Worth Shows Stable Home Values

The latest home price risk forecast shows that Dallas-Fort Worth is overall the safest place in the country for stable home values.

The Dallas Morning News, also states the latest report by mortgage insurance company PMI Group ranked the D-FW area dead last among the 50 cities it rates for possible declines in home prices.

That means PMI is betting there is less than a 1 percent chance that average home prices here will be lower two years from now.

PMI's summer 2008 risk ranking for D-FW is similar to the insurance company's previous studies.

As in other PMI reports, the U.S. cities with the biggest run-up in home prices in recent years are at the greatest risk for losses.

During the last year, some markets have seen a significant increase in the number of existing single-family homes for sale, PMI chief economist David Berson said in the report.

"Given the magnitude of the inventory overhang, we expect national home price declines to continue into at least 2009," Mr. Berson said.

In North Texas, however, the number of pre-owned homes listed for sale has declined during the last year.

Although PMI Group's report about D-FW home prices should be encouraging, Mr. Berson said that doesn't mean there won't be short-term declines in values.

"It is also an average for a metropolitan area, so individual neighborhoods and houses could behave differently," he said, perhaps considerably so.

Tags:
Posted on July 1, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

Wachovia Corp. Stops Mortgage Payment Option

Beleaguered consumer bank Wachovia Corp. will quit offering a mortgage payment option that allows borrowers to pay less each month than the bank charges in interest.

The Dallas Morning News also state that the choice to pay less was one of the options of Wachovia's controversial Pick-A-Payment mortgages, which offer customers four different payment options each month.

Wachovia told The Associated Press on Monday that it will no longer offer the less-than-full interest payment option on all new home loans.

Critics have said such paying less than the amount of interest charged can lead to negative amortization, in which the borrower owes more than the value of their home, increasing the chance of foreclosure.

Tags:
Posted on June 30, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

Foreclosures Rise

Jacksonville is heading into the third year of the real estate slump and the number of home foreclosures continues to rise. The San Antonio News also reports ,so many homes are being auctioned off at the Duval County Courthouse that in July, the foreclosure auctions will be put online to move them through faster.

"I don't see any bright skies on the horizon," said University of North Florida real estate professor Sid Rosenberg.

Evelyn Mew, the Jacksonville grandmother pictured at right, was able to save her home after falling behind on her mortgage payments. Thousands of others have not been so fortunate. Local agencies, such as Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, are quickly trying to gear up to help, but the caseload is heavier each month.

Meanwhile, a cottage industry has developed.

Tags:
Posted on June 27, 2008 by Stephanie LaCoste

KB Home Reports Second - Quarter Loss

KB Home, one of the nation's largest homebuilders, reported a larger second-quarter loss Friday, as weak sales and falling home prices led to a 55% drop in revenue. The San Antonio News also reported that the company also booked charges to lower the value of unsold homes, joint venture deals and land option contracts.

The Los Angeles-based company reported a loss of $255.9 million, or $3.30 per share, for the three months ended May 31. A year ago, it lost $148.7 million, or $1.93 per share.

The latest results included a $176.5 million charge to cut the value of its unsold homes and to abandon some land option contracts.

Revenue plunged to $639.1 million from $1.41 billion in the year-ago period. The decline was driven by lower housing and land sale revenues, the builder said.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial were expecting KB to post a loss of 94 cents per share on revenue of $691.3 million. The earnings estimates typically exclude one-time items.

Tags: