Just a blip?
After a year and a half of slowly declining numbers of homes listed for sale in America, January’s numbers reported by ZipRealty show an increase in listings by 2.9% or 15,000 total homes.
The rise in the number of listings in the 27 major US metropolitan markets totals 567,265 homes for sale, and with 18.9 million homes vacant, which isn’t quite the hair that will break the camel’s back but doesn’t look like an upswing in the immediate future can be forecasted.
Stabilization in the housing market will come when many of the moving pieces fall into place but it might be some time before that happens. Year over year, most markets had rises in inventory numbers, but perhaps FHA’s announcement this week that they would relax anti-flipping rules, the U.S. Treasury has vowed to improve the Home Affordable Modification Program and the end of 2009 ending with December seeing an increase in number of home sale contracts that were signed, there is hope yet for recovery.
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Consumerism, Geo-mapping columnist
Marketing columnist
The inventory will continue to increase as will the number of sales throughout the Spring. The effect of which will be the interest rates will rise on news that the housing marketing is improving! Then, after the tax credits go away and rates go up, those sellers who weren’t fortunate enough to sell during the Spring will get to share their misery with the Shadow Inventory that will start leaking into the market…Yikes, what a gloomy Gus I am!
Inventory always increases in the Spring in our market as sellers get their hopes up that that the market will be flush with buyers when the Spring market arrives. Rumor has it that there is an impending tsunami of foreclosures in 2010, however, so perhaps the increased inventory can also be accounted for to some degree by that. It stands to reason that with banks not increasing their lending, the tax credits expiring soon, and interest rates rising (due to the Feds stopping their program of buying mortgage-backed securities in early March), that should cause demand to taper off a bit. If inventories continue to increase due to dramatically increased numbers of foreclosures while demand decreases more than normal (due to a more strenuous lending atmosphere, high unemployment, and lack of affordability), we could be in for a very bumpy 2010 indeed.
As the spring is in the air, seasons of home buying and selling will rise and the monthly home sale inventory will continue to increase in the market. Plus, the ongoing extended and expanded tax credit will somehow help in the rocketing up in the number of home sale this year. This one great article widens our horizon towards developing real estate business. Keep it up!