HAFA housing scorecard released
The government’s housing scorecard was released for January recently. You can check it out HERE.
Page 2 has some great graphs on it; what housing prices are doing nationwide, what the expectations are for housing prices in the future, and the number of houses available on the market.
It seems that most of the country is following a similar trend to what we are seeing here in Arizona.
The Monthly House Price Trends graph shows that prices have remained fairly stable since about October 2011. There has been seasonal increases and dipping, which is normal in a market where demand changes. However, overall the price of housing has stayed right around the $175k mark.
The Housing Price Futures Index confirms this stability. This graph was predicting a continued drop in prices in 2009. It is now predicting a slow, but stable increase in prices for the next few years.
The graph that concerns me the most however, is the Existing Homes Available for Sale. This graph clearly shows that while the amount of homes available for sale is dropping rapidly, there are still a *ton* of homes that are not on the market that need to be sold.
Now that the robo-signing scandal has settled, these homes may start to hit the market. The question is, will the banks dump the homes on, or release them gradually. Dumping houses onto the market can have disastrous results for our slowly improving economy. While slowly releasing the houses would keep market prices relatively stable.
Picture courtesy of krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
