Home prices were up over 12 percent in the nation’s top 20 housing markets in July, according to a report this week from SP/Case-Shiller. While the price gains are moderating, the jumps make it increasingly difficult for first-time home buyers to get into the housing market.

(Read more: Forget easing prices, new homes are up, up, up)

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101065140

“There’s no need to inflate the value of the home because home prices are rising,” said CoreLogic’s chief economist Mark Fleming.

But new federal regulations forcing lenders to prove that borrowers can repay their loans has some borrowers shifting the focus of their fraud to their personal balance sheets. Lenders are now scouring financial records, unlike during the recent housing boom, in order to make sure they are complying with new rules, so fraudsters are following suit, jacking up the numbers.

(Read more: Forget easing prices, new homes are up, up, up)

That could be more dangerous to the banks, because jacking up a home price only hurts if the home price falls, but inflating income means the borrowers may not be able to pay the loan no matter what.

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101062232

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U.S. home prices jumped 10.9 percent in March compared with a year ago, the most since April 2006.

A growing number of buyers are bidding on a tight supply of homes, driving prices higher and helping the housing market recover. The Standard Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index released Tuesday also showed that all 20 cities measured by the report posted year-over-year gains for the third straight month. And prices rose in 15 cities in March from February. That’s up from only 11 in the previous month.

The monthly figures aren’t seasonally adjusted and may reflect the beginning of the spring buying season.

Prices rose in Phoenix by 22.5 percent over the past 12 months, the biggest gain among cities. It was followed by San Francisco (22.2 percent) and Las Vegas (20.6 percent). New York City had the smallest year-over-year increase at 2.6 percent, followed by Cleveland at 4.8 percent.

“Rising home prices may begin to alleviate a lack of housing inventory … by encouraging more homeowners to put their properties on the market,” said Maninder Sibia, an economist with Economic Advisory Service, in a note to clients.

“The housing market is clearly improving.” The index covers roughly half of U.S. homes. It measures prices compared with those in January 2000 and creates a three-month moving average. The March figures are the latest available.

The U.S. housing market is steadily recovering, buoyed by solid job gains and near-record low mortgage rates.

Sales of new homes rose in April to nearly a five-year high. And sales of previously occupied homes ticked up in April to the highest level in three and a half years. Despite the gains, a limited number of homeowners are putting their houses on the market. That’s helped lift home prices. And it’s made builders more willing to ramp up construction. Applications for building permits rose in April to the highest level in nearly five years.

The supply of available homes jumped in April, but was still 14 percent below its level a year earlier. Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow, a real estate data provider, said that the increase in the Case-Shiller index has been skewed higher by cities such as Phoenix and San Francisco.

Fewer homes are available in those areas because many homeowners still owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

That makes it difficult to sell. Still, even excluding those markets, home prices are rising steadily nationwide, Humphries said. The increases are “certainly confirmation that the housing market is experiencing a brisk recovery,” he added.

The housing recovery is creating more construction jobs and bolstering the economy in other ways. Higher home prices make homeowners feel wealthier and encourages them to spend more.

Rising prices also encourage more would-be buyers to purchase homes, before prices rise further.

They also enable more homeowners to sell homes, by reducing the number of people who owe more on their mortgages than the homes are worth. Prices have been increasing steadily since last summer.

Still, they are about 29 percent below the peak reached in July 2006. Banks have raised their credit standards since the housing bubble burst and are demanding larger down payments. That’s made it particularly hard for potential first-time buyers to get a mortgage.

Copyright Associated Press

Article source: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Bay-Area-Housing-Prices-Take-Big-Jump-209268641.html

(Read More: US Pending Home Sales Tick Upward in March)

“In terms of our mix, less is going to Arizona and California today,” said Justin Chang a principal at Colony. “Our mix is increasing on east coast, Georgia, Florida, we’re active in Texas. I think over time some of the early markets will become a smaller part of our overall portfolio.”

Some investors are also starting to look at new construction, as home builders start to ramp up production again. The key is to find new product that is cheaper than replacement costs, which still is not that easy. So far investment has mostly gone only as far as distressed new homes, but as prices rise, that may change.

“On home building, there’s a lot of chatter about that. We are in some conversations with builders,” explained Chang, who admits the economics have not been compelling yet. “Over time you’ll see more and more of these transactions, and we may do one as well.”

Another potential strategy going forward is a consolidation, as investors turn away from distressed properties and focus on so-called “Mom and Pop” landlords, who may buy just one or two properties. There are an estimated 14 million single family rental homes owned by this cohort.

“If you think about all of the major institutions maybe owning 70,000 total homes compared to the market size of 14 million homes, the long term potential is enormous. Institutions are literally a fly on an elephant,” said Aaron Edelheit, CEO of The American Home, an Atlanta-based company that owns and manages about 2,500 homes. “We may look back and realize that the REO [real estate owned] to rental space was only the foundation for an exponentially larger industry with institutions owning hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of homes.”

(Read More: Next Boom? ‘Spec’ Homes Are Back)

There are 7.2 million more renters today than there were in 2004, and just 400,000 more homeowners, according to the U.S. Census.

Despite the recovery in home sales, the homeownership rate continues to fall, from an all-time high of 69.2 percent to 65 percent in the first quarter of 2013. As home prices rise and the employment picture improves, more people will come back to home ownership, and some of the new rental homes will inevitably be sold, but certainly not all of them.

“If you buy homes in areas with below-median income, I think the mortgage market is going to have harder time providing credit to these people, and it’s going to take longer for that to recover,” said Bloemker. “We think that these homes are more likely to be long term rentals, and those are likely to end up in the hands of institutional investors.”

—By CNBC’s Diana Olick; Follow her on Twitter @Diana_Olick or on Facebook at facebook.com/DianaOlickCNBC
—CNBC’s Stephanie Dhue contributed to this story

Questions? Comments? RealtyCheck@cnbc.com

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100700113

“Market prices have to go higher to provide incentives for more new houses to be built,” said Aaron Edelheit, CEO of Atlanta-based The American Home, a company that invests in distressed properties and turns them into rentals. “I believe we are on the cusp of a massive housing shortage in many parts of the country due to the historic lack of residential investment in the last five years. This summer, I expect the housing market to be ‘blue flame’ hot.”

(Read More: What Tops Home Buyers’ Wish List Now)

Prices today are rising fast because supplies of homes for sale are so low. Both new and existing homes are running near four month supplies.

For new homes, builders just aren’t able to start fast enough, due to labor and land restraints.

For existing homes, there are fewer distressed properties for sale, a segment that has driven the market into recovery, and organic homeowners are either unwilling to list their homes for fear of selling at the bottom, or unable to list because they are still underwater on their mortgages.

(Read More: Foreclosures Fall Due to New Laws)

“Taking new and existing homes together, the relationship between the months’ supply of unsold homes and house prices points to an acceleration in the pace of house prices gains in the year ahead,” said Paul Diggle of Capital Economics.

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100496564

Many economists have their predictions for how the real estate market will perform in 2013, but one thing that is certain and that will likely play a large role is that there are a lot less available homes for sale.

We’ve already seen how this has affected the Bay Area, from hundreds of hopeful buyers lining up for a lotto to buy a new construction model home to prospective buyers creating designer love letters to sellers, telling their life story and how much they want to buy their home.

Real estate site Redfin pulled some stats, showing San Francisco and San Jose starting off the first two weeks of the year with nearly 50% less homes on the market compared to same time last year. Inventory is down all over the country, but it’s particularly worse in the Bay Area.

What’s the reason behind the low inventory?

The Wall Street Journal writes a good article on this, pointing to six reasons:

1. Many homeowners are underwater, and thus can’t sell.
2. Homeowners with equity in their home don’t have enough of it to “trade up” to buy a bigger and more expensive home.
3. Everyone wants to buy at the bottom, but few want to sell when they feel their home will be worth more next year.
4. Investors – from mom and pop and corporate investors have come out and become landlords, taking property that normally would be on the market into the rental realm.
5. With the foreclosure fiasco, banks have been slower at foreclosing homes.
6. There’s been a lot less construction of new homes by home builders.

Unless inventory starts picking up, this will make for a very interesting year for Bay Area real estate.

Article source: http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2013/01/23/2013-real-estate-kicks-off-with-inventory-crisis/

Disclosure: I am long KBH. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. (More…)

The real estate market, like any other market, is a numbers game. Demand versus Supply. If one is greater than the other, it tips the balance and creates a turn in the market. Did we turn? Let’s look at the numbers.

Demand can be tracked simply by population growth. Using 2010 US census numbers, we can track back 50 years of population growth and get an average compound growth of 1.4% growth per year. Factors such as birthrate and immigration make this demand stable and consistent through the last 50 years.

(click to enlarge)

Secondly, let’s look at Supply. New supply comes onto the market in terms of new homes built each year. The best way to track this is through housings starts. Let’s track back 50 years of housing starts to see our levels of new supply to the market.

(click to enlarge)

From the graph, the average cyclical real estate market is plotted through 10 year cycles. It’s rather clear that the 10 year cycles have been pretty predictable the last 50 years up to 1997. Instead of the cyclical downturn we should had expected in 1997, we accelerate upward mainly due to the dot-com bubble. This continued to after 2001 when the dot-com bubble popped, and was followed upward with historically low interest rates from the Federal Reserve. It’s no wonder why we had a dramatic downturn in 2006, followed by historically low starts the next 5 years to clear the supply. Excluding the bubble period, if you break down these 10 year averages from the last 60 years, the average new housing starts are close to 14M per decade. There are decades where the homebuilders either overbuilt or under-built, but the demand over time remains consistent to level out this supply. More dramatically though, in the last 4 years, the total cumulative housing starts combined to a number barely over 2.2M homes. To reach the historic 14M decade average, there will need to be 2M housing starts per year or a sum of 11.8M starts in the next 6 years.

If we are able to meet 2M homes per year, the homebuilders would need a dramatic spike in housing starts the next 6 years.

(click to enlarge)

From the latest housing report this month, the homebuilders are currently on pace to reach only 894k (revised, Oct 2012) (seasonally adjusted) new starts this year. It is no wonder why new homebuilders are in “catch-up” mode buying any large developed parcel of land to meet the supply shortage. Furthermore, to support this data, inventory in many local markets are experiencing 50 year historic lows. So in principle, the increased demand due to consistent population growth, combined with decreased supply shortage from the last 4 years, will equal price appreciation in the next 6 years. Do you think we hit a bottom now?

Who are the best homebuilders that are position to take advantage of this shortage?

Any homebuilders that survive the downtown of the last 5 years are all in a great position to take advantage of the next 5 years. More specifically, homebuilders with the largest and key coastal land position will benefit the most. I like KB Home (KBH) as my top pick due to its heavy land position in California. They own more than 60% of their total land holdinsg in California, with the majority of the remainder in other hot markets like Texas. Fundamentally, their balance sheet and cash position is solid with moving a large part of their short-term bond holdings ($585M) well out to 2020 and beyond. In addition, they have a meaningful deferred tax asset of $883M that could be used to potentially offset $2.2B future taxable income. All of this combined will just provide them with a significantly large cash position to fill the shortage the next 5 years in housing.

Additional disclosure: John Chiem is a realtor in the SF Bay Area real estate market.

Article source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1081501-why-housing-will-surge-in-the-next-5-years

Last week the CEO’s of 18 home building companies, who collectively build 30 percent of the nation’s new homes, sent a letter to President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner urging them to avoid the fiscal cliff, even if it means raising taxes on the builders:

“We support a comprehensive agreement in Washington to avoid the fiscal cliff that includes revenue increases (including tax rate adjustments) together with meaningful entitlement reforms. We believe that a properly balanced agreement will breed confidence in the political system and the U.S. economy, will enable the housing market to continue its recovery, and, in turn, will promote broader economic growth.”

The letter was signed by the CEOs of publicly traded builders including Beazer Homes, Hovananian Enterprises, KBHome, Lennar, MDC, and Meritage.

(Read More: Best US Housing Markets for Buyers and Sellers)

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100324311

These latest numbers fly in the face of rising home builder optimism and a huge run on the stocks of the public builders. Some analysts, however, have been warning that this recovery is fragile at best, given other factors in the economy, specifically lackluster job growth and poor consumer sentiment.

“Builder stocks have continued to outperform the market as demand has remained strong into summer; also, earnings and the next few macro data points should be positive,” wrote analysts at Deutsche Bank earlier this week. “However, we think downside tail risk is mounting for 2H12. It shouldn’t take more than muddle-through economic growth for housing recovery to continue, but the risks are that even that doesn’t happen or it happens unevenly against tenuous investor optimism.”

Several home builders reported big jumps in new orders this spring, but those orders did not translate into pricing power for the market. Prices of new homes fell 3.2 percent in June after several months of gains.

Single family housing starts rose 4.7 percent in June from the previous month to a four year high, but they are still running at about one third the historical average volume. Inventories of new homes for sale rose to 144,000, representing a 4.9 month supply, but that is still historically very low.

Questions?  Comments?  And follow me on Twitter @Diana_Olick