Us Housing Market Shows No Sign Of Cooling

[Otis Key]

Financial Times

The hot US housing market showed little sign of cooling last month, as home sales hit a new record and house prices rose by 15 per cent compared with a year ago.

Existing home sales rose 2.7 per cent in the month to a seasonally-adjusted annualised rate of 7.3m units, breaking the previous record of 7.18m set in April, the National Association of Realtors reported.

The Fed has called on mortgage lenders to be more careful in selling interest only mortgages and other “more exotic” forms of adjustable rate mortgages that might encourage some people to overstretch themselves financially to afford inflated home prices, leading to problems later.

 

[Karl]

You gotta love em. Get everyone to buy before they realize they can't afford the added fees such as Property Tax, Insurance, Items needed in a home such as CURTAINS. Government gives OK to have some of these ridiculos loans then BLAME the lender when these loans go defunct.

 

[Restrain]

I think a more proper analysis is that the "hot" areas are still active. There's a lot of areas that are experiencing declining markets and oversupply of housing, especially manufactured homes in the Carolinas.

Remember, the people floating these numbers are the ones making the money on selling the properties.

Here's a true-life example. Large lake development area. 5 sales within the last year between $140,000 and $225,000. At the same time, there were 57 active listings of comparable properties, not including withdrawns and expireds.

Did an analysis of a typical suburban area. Found that listings were up, sales down and property values declining at about 5% per year.

No, such generalizations only serve to push the investors and the wanna-be investors.

Rates are climbing, interest-only loans will be coming due, and there's a diminishing number of potential buyers for these properties that the investors will want to sell. Just something to think about.