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Posts Tagged ‘housing’
This morning, Chris Versace, the Thematic Investor, will be on America’s Morning News to talk the economy, budget deficits, Bush tax cuts, housing, unemployment, investing and whatever else hosts John McCaslin and Amy Holmes want to talk about.
As even the most passive investor would recognize, the housing market has been a volatile one over the past several months. This volatility has increased to the downside with the expiration of the first-time homebuyer credit at the end of April. Since that expiration, new home sales dropped to a record low in May, mortgage applications have declined and housing prices remain weak over concerns over the strength of the economic recovery. And yet, there appear to be pockets of strength - as some have stated in the past, there is always a bull market out there; the trick is to find it.
To make some sense of this, I spoke with Steve Kann, the Washington D.C. District director for ZipRealty Inc., a California-based full service residential real estate brokerage firm.
Q: Steve, what is the current tone of the housing market as ZipRealty sees it following the expiration of the housing tax credit?
A: There was a quite a mad rush to put deals under contract before the tax credit expired, and we are seeing a bit of “wait and see” in the market right now - seeing if prices soften at all. However, Zip’s Home Hunter Report, released in April, revealed that several markets throughout the country are seeing multiple offers and above-list price contracts for the first time in several quarters. There are still plenty of active buyers out there (more than 235,000 active on ZipRealty.com alone since the tax credit went away).
Q: Is the housing market adapting to “the new normal” after so many years of growth?
If the generally accepted notion that the domestic economy is one fueled by the consumer, then I suspect more than a few cages were rattled this past week. What I am referring to is the rash of retail sales data out over the past several days, which reinforced the view that consumers continue to stretch their budgets amid high unemployment and a weak job market.
Late last week, we learned U.S. consumer spending in April fell for the first time since September as modest wage growth was used to rebuild savings. That weakness continued into May per MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse, a unit of MasterCard Inc. that tracks spending by credit card, debit card, cash and check.
More specifically, SpendingPulse found that specialty-apparel sales fell 3.7% in May from a year earlier while furniture sales fell 9.6% and electronics and appliances slipped 0.7%. The combination of these two data streams would suggest that consumer spending has been and will continue to be choppy at best near term…
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