St Louis Mortgage and Real Estate News –
St Louis Mortgage Refinancing and Customer Financing News: Buyer’s Market?
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Falling home prices should give aspiring homeowners the upper hand this spring, but in a growing number of locations, it doesn’t feel like a buyer’s market. Blame the nearly five-year slide of home prices. Those declines, which accelerated over the past two quarters, have left many sellers unable or unwilling to lower their prices. Meanwhile, buyers remain gun shy about agreeing to any purchase without getting a deep discount.
That dynamic has fueled buyers’ appetites for bank-owned foreclosures. Those homes often hit the market at bargain prices, but they are being snapped up by investors who are paying in cash. The Wall Street Journal’s quarterly survey of housing-market conditions in 28 major metro areas shows inventories of unsold homes remain high but fell during the first quarter.
Listings were down by nearly 25 percent from one year ago in Miami and Orlando, and by 12 percent in Phoenix and Portland, Ore., according to figures compiled by John Burns Real Estate Consulting. Other markets, including New York’s Long Island and Charlotte, N.C., still face imbalances.
At the current sales pace, it would take more than 16 months to sell all homes listed for sale in each market. A balanced market typically has a six-month supply. Meanwhile, home values fell in every metro area for the second straight quarter, according to data from Zillow Inc.
Prices were down by more than 5 percent in Chicago and Detroit, the largest quarterly drops, to levels not seen in more than a decade. Values have fallen so far that many sellers with equity aren’t willing to drop their prices. Those without equity can’t cut the prices unless the bank agrees to take a loss in what is known as a short sale.
Such sales can take months to complete and fall through at the last minute, deterring some buyers. Still, short sales hit a new high, accounting for 9 percent of all transactions in January, according to CoreLogic Inc.
“Frankly, until we start building some equity, the market is just going to sit here and do pretty much nothing for the next few years,” says Christopher Thornberg, a housing economist at Beacon Economics in Los Angeles. Homes that don’t need much repair work and that are located in choice neighborhoods near transit hubs or with good schools are in demand.
While foreclosures are in demand, mortgage companies’ processing problems have sharply curtailed the flow of bank-owned properties onto the market in states such as Florida, New Jersey and New York, where courts must process foreclosures.
To be sure, some of the challenges facing the housing market are easing as the economy adds jobs, boosting demand and easing mortgage delinquencies. Depressed prices coupled with low interest rates have made housing more affordable than at any time since 1975, according to Zillow.
But the legacy of the housing market’s collapse has left two big structural problems. First, the huge erosion in homeowners’ equity has deprived housing markets of the all-important “trade up” buyer. Even those with equity often aren’t willing to sell at current market prices, exacerbating what housing analyst Ivy Zelman calls the “stuck factor.”
Second, foreclosures are still weighing on housing markets. While mortgage delinquencies are down from their 2009 peak, an all-time high of 2.2 million loans were in foreclosure at the end of March, according to LPS Applied Analytics. Economists say the “shadow inventory” of another 4 million potential foreclosures will keep a lid on prices for years.
Even in markets with rising demand and falling inventory, prices won’t go up because “there’s too much on the horizon, so nobody’s in a hurry,” says Ron Leis, a broker in Sacramento, Calif. Tighter credit standards have also left markets with fewer buyers at a time when more would help.
Contributions By Wall Street Journal
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