Which country has the fastest growth in home prices?
According to data gathered by money.co.uk, the country with the highest property price increase from 2010 to 2020 was Israel, where there was a staggering 346% rise in costs per square meter.
Switzerland and Germany come next, with increases of 166% and 162%, followed by the United States at 153%. Hungary, Slovakia, France, Portugal, Japan and the United Kingdom round out the rest of the top 10, all with average home price increases of at least 75%.
Real Estate: It’s Still a Lack of Supply, Not a Lack of Demand
One of the major questions real estate experts are asking today is whether prospective homebuyers still believe purchasing a home makes sense. Some claim rapidly rising home prices are impacting demand and, by extension, leading to the recent slowdown in sales activity.
However, demand isn’t the real issue. Instead, it’s the lack of supply (homes available for sale). An article from the Wall Street Journal shows this is true for new home construction: “Home builders have sold more homes than they can build. Now they are limiting their sales in an effort to catch up.”
The article quotes David Auld, CEO of D.R. Horton Inc. (the largest homebuilder by volume in the United States since 2002), explaining how they don’t have enough homes for the number of buyers coming into their models: “Through our history, to have somebody walk into our models and to tell them, ‘We don’t have a house for you to buy today’, is something that is foreign to us.”
Danielle Hale, Chief Economist for realtor.com, also explains that, in the existing home sale market, the slowdown in sales was a supply challenge, not a lack of demand. Responding to a recent uptick in listings coming to market, she notes:“. . . if these changing inventory dynamics continue, we could see a wave of real estate activity heading into the latter part of the year.”
Again, the buyers are there. We just need houses to sell to them. (more…)
Prediction: Lots of International Buyers Over the Next Year
NEW YORK – In June, when real estate agent Nitin Gupta took two clients to see a new housing development in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a sales representative for the builder told him all the units were gone.
The builder had planned to sell 100 homes to investors out of roughly 1,500 he was planning to build. Investors had come to the site the day before, the rep told Gupta, and another agent had pitched the homes to a group of buyers in China over Zoom.
“He said, ‘The people were saying, I want one, I want two, I want three. Boom, boom, boom,” Gupta recalls. “The agent sold about 50 to 60 homes and the builder had sold 130 homes the first day.”
While the global COVID-19 pandemic has squashed sales of U.S. homes to foreign buyers over the last year, local buyers should be prepared for a rebound in competition from other countries in the next 12 months, economists say.
Texas, Gupta’s state, ranked as the third-most-popular destination for foreign real estate buyers between April 2020 and March 2021, according to a recent report by the National Association of Realtors. Florida and California claim the top two spots, while Arizona, New Jersey and New York follow Texas. (more…)
7 Winning Tips for Buyers
The only one of these I don’t recommend is number 4 – waiving contingencies other than in certain circumstances.
18 Reasons to Work With a Realtor
Whether buying or selling you need a Realtor on your team, working for you, putting your interests first. Here are 18 reasons why:
Naples Area June Market Summary
This is the overall market summary for June published by NABOR:
Comment
While this picture conveys very clearly the strength of the market I do not find the detail particularly helpful as it combines all types of property – from single family to condo.
I will publish detailed reports by sector and by area this coming Saturday. Meanwhile, here are links to the preliminary reports I have already published for June: (more…)
SWFL boasts booming job market for college graduates
Across the country, nearly half of recent college graduates are stuck looking for work, and when they do find jobs, 69% expect lower salaries. But here in Southwest Florida, we are experiencing just the opposite of that trend: Here, there are too many jobs, and not enough people to fill them. (WINK News).
CareerSource of Southwest Florida says the graduates here have been doing well, and the company has been touching base with all universities in the area to make sure students are placed in positions. It says the pandemic may have impacted graduates more in other states with stricter lockdowns, and that’s why national numbers are showing recent graduates struggling to find employment. (more…)
The US is 3.8 Million Homes Short
The U.S. housing market needs nearly 4 million single-family homes to meet the nation’s demand, according to a new analysis from Freddie Mac. The 3.8 million shortfall marks a 52% increase in the housing shortage since 2018.
“This is what you get when you underbuild for 10 years,” says Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist. “We should have almost four million more housing units if we had kept up with demand the last few years.”
Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of REALTORS®, has been among real estate economists leading the calls over the last few years for greater inventory and more homebuilding to meet demand. “We need to build more homes,” Yun told NPR, adding that since the housing crisis more than a decade ago, homebuilders have been building too few homes.
The housing shortage mixed with strong buyer demand since the pandemic is prompting home prices to rise rapidly. The median existing-home price for all housing types in February was $313,000, up 15.8% compared to a year earlier, according to the National Association of REALTORS®.
Boom times ahead for Lee and Collier Counties
THOUGH THE PANDEMIC IS FAR from over in Florida, economic development directors and other economic experts in four counties forecast a boom: Each county will see at least $1 billion in development over the next two years and the creation of 2,000 jobs, according to this Florida Weekly article.
At Southwest Florida International Airport, things are looking up. Construction continues on a new $80 million Airport Traffic Control Tower. Meanwhile, the $280 million, 200,000-square-foot expansion of the airport terminal, a project that had been deferred for a year due to the impact of the pandemic, will be bid this month, said Ben Siegel, executive director for the Lee County Port Authority.
Passenger traffic may be down, but the airport is No. 1 among the top 50 airports in the country in recovery, he said. The airport has recovered about 60% of its pre-COVID traffic, more than any other airport in the nation. From the airport standpoint, “we are optimistic,” Mr. Siegel said.
In Lee County, $2 billion in economic development and 6,500 jobs are expected in the next two years, all in one booming development area, said John Talmage, Lee County Economic Development director. (more…)
Want to Sell Your Home as Quickly as Possible? Here’s How to Be Proactive About Making That Happen
Image by mynemesis2011 from Pixabay
If you’re anticipating putting your home on the market soon and want to sell it as quickly as possible, you’re probably thinking that the best way to accomplish this is to accept a major drop in price. Although it’s true that price points can affect how quickly a property sells, you don’t have to dip much, if anything, below market value to facilitate a fast sale as long as you live in an area with a moderately healthy real estate market. Following are five proactive ways you can help your upcoming home sale go quickly. (more…)
Naples market on fire in February
The February 2021 Market Report, released by the Naples Area Board of REALTORS® (NABOR®), which tracks home listings and sales within Collier County (excluding Marco Island), marks the last month of comparative activity before the pandemic shuttered the global economy in March 2020. That said, overall closed sales of existing homes in Naples for February increased 62 percent to 1,307 closed sales from 807 closed sales in February 2020.
Buyers are scooping up the available inventory of homes in all geographic locations within Naples almost as fast as they come onto the market. Inventory fell 68.8 percent in February to 2,224 homes from 7,127 homes in February 2020. (more…)
“Party on, dude” says the Federal Reserve
Former Federal Reserve Chair William McChesney Martin, Jr famously said: “The Federal Reserve…is in the position of the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up.”
This week, current Fed Chair Jerome Powell in effect said “party on, dude.” As the New York Times commented: “The official view of the central bank’s leaders now is that it has been an overly stingy host, taking away the punch bowl so quickly that parties were dreary, disappointing affairs.
The job now is to persuade the world that it really will leave the punch bowl out long enough, and spiked adequately — that it will be a party worth attending. They insist punch bowl removal will be based on actual realized inebriation of the guests, not on forecasts of potential future problematic levels of drunkenness.”
Chairman Powell’s comments
“We will continue to provide the economy the support that it needs for as long as it takes.” (more…)
Goodbye sub 3% mortgages
It was only last July that the 30-year Fixed Rate Mortgage (FRM) dropped below 3% for the first time and this week it moved back above 3% again, following the direction of the 10-year Treasury Note (10T).
Where have all the sellers gone?
As I read this New York Times article: Where have all the houses gone? my mind went to Yogi Berra’s line of “it’s deja vu all over again” as I checked my files and discovered that this will be my 5th article with this title – and the first was written in 2013.
Let’s look at the what and the why.
First, the what. This chart shows that inventory has plummeted across the country:
The why (more…)
It’s 80 degrees in Florida…
In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote:
“In the past year the owners of great businesses found how much can be done remotely.
They hadn’t known that!
They hadn’t had to find out.
They don’t have to pay that killer rent for office space anymore.
People think it will all snap back when the pandemic is fully over but no, a human habit broke; a new way of operating has begun. People will come back to office life to some degree, maybe a significant one; not everything can be done remotely; people want to gather, make friends, instill a sense of mission; but it will never be what it was.
The Partnership for New York City reports 300,000 residents of high-income neighborhoods have filed change-of-address forms with the U.S. Postal Service. You know where they are going: to lower-tax and no-income-tax states.
A recent report suggested that 850 people per day will move to Florida for the next 5 years as they seek “the weather, lifestyle and tax benefits” offered by Florida. (more…)