Top of the Tweets: Land Grab, Global Prices and Signs
Green shoots showing a potential recovery continue to sprout. One of the most tweeted real estate stories was the surge in sales of single family new homes. March saw the largest monthly percentage increase in 47 years. Last year, reports of high end sales were few and far between on Twitter. This week, I saw many blurbs about improving luxury sales in locales all over the country, including Boston and Fort Worth.
Land rush? It may be hard to envision now, but experts are predicting a shortage of housing in the not-too-distant future. In the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a number of reports of builders once again on the prowl for land, looking even in the hardest hit areas. Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal developments blog http://is.gd/bFdwZ
Prices over the globe are on the upswing. The Economist magazine’s latest survey of global house prices shows prices in half of the 20 countries they monitor are higher than they were 12 months ago. In the remaining 10 with the exception of Ireland, the pace of decline has slowed. In America, two of the three measures they follow show prices are still below a year ago. The exception is the Case Shiller Index of 10 big cities, which is the same as a year earlier. Singapore has seen one of the fastest turnarounds, going from one of the most depressed markets in the third quarter of 2009 to “being the second frothiest,” according to the report, in the first three months of 2010. At the top of the list with the largest percentage price growth is Hong Kong, followed by Singapore, and then Australia, China and Britain.
Real data vs. seasonally adjusted: A majority of groups reporting sales data including the National Association of Realtors use seasonally adjusted data. “Seasonally adjusted” means the number crunchers take the data for whatever they are measuring and adjust the number for changes related to the time of the year. Theoretically, this makes it easier to identify underlying changes in the economy. Real estate analyst @jonathanmiller questions the accuracy of this reporting. The folks who put together the Case Schiller Home Price Index seem to be of a similar mind — they recently dropped seasonably adjusted data in favor of real data, which they contend offers more reliable numbers.
A sign of the times, they are a changing: A tweet from @bizjournalism says it all: “Happy days are here again. Sandwich board job hunter finds work after two year search.”
Boise Idaho had a great first quarter for new construction. New Construction for Boise is driven by In-Migration, mainly people from California. Currently, production builders are buying lots in bulk at below cost but we are probably at the end of that though there are no A rated subdivision lots available currently so as demand stays constant supply is dwindling. Probably in next six month prices will begin to rise and rapidly.