The next Florida housing market....

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I give you Houston, too bad the bubble already popped here 4 month ago.

http://austin.bizjournals.com/austin...ml?jst=b_ln_hl

Ranked by total building permits issued in 2006, Austin, with a total of 26,900 permits, just missed the top 10. The Houston area ranked first on the list with 71,257 permits, followed by Atlanta with 68,240 and Phoenix with 43,657.

I live in Houston, so I follow it quite closely. We even have a great site to track the real estate market:

http://har.com/mls/dispPressRelease.cfm (look for the table)

Apparently no one is paying attention to the fact that YOY sales growth started to decrease last summer, and went negative earlier this year. At the same time we are seeing a YOY double digit percent rise in inventory. All I've been hearing is our local economy is "too strong" for a housing slump, and prices haven't appreciated as much as other areas, therefore the bubble won't come here.

WRONG!

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Re: The next Florida housing market....

Houston had been hailed as one of the few markets in the country that had weathered the real estate downturn seen in most of the rest of the country—until September.

http://har.com/mls/dispPressRelease....NTH=10&YEAR=07

16.7% decline in YOY sales (largest decline in more than a decade).
11.3% decline in YOY pending sales.

They forgot to mention inventories are now at an all time high.

[FRED]

Re: The next Florida housing market....

http://har.com/mls/dispPressRelease....NTH=10&YEAR=07

16.7% decline in YOY sales (largest decline in more than a decade).
11.3% decline in YOY pending sales.

They forgot to mention inventories are now at an all time high.

Interview with Blanche Evans of Realty Times - May 18, 2006

Janszen: Makes sense that you'd want to invest in real estate where the local government is investing in infrastructure. Are there any places where the investment in infrastructure has been made but real estate prices remain depressed for various reasons?

Evans: At the risk of sounding self-serving, I would seriously look at the major cities of Texas – Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Galveston and El Paso. Texas has been under the national average of housing appreciation for over 15 years. That’s a long time to be undervalued.

Dallas, for example, is one of the largest cities in the U.S., yet its homes are among the lowest in costs in the Southwest. The reason is sprawl (no mountains, so seashore) but that’s coming back to bite the area. To get away from Dallas' dysfunctional city government, poorly performing schools, and high crime, wage earners moved to nearby suburbs. Now, the commutes are outrageous and home appreciations have been fairly modest to stagnant, even if you can live like royalty 60 miles from your employer. So the fed-up factor is coming into play. People are finding the grass isn't greener in suburbia, and they're returning to the inner city. Dallas has about 28 high-rise housing projects either under construction or planned. The entertainment area adjoining downtown has a public improvement district when enables it to operate like a little fiefdom Uptown has extra police, flower beds, and other things that aren’t in the city budget. It's exploding with growth. We still have dysfunctional city government, but now they're handing out subsidies, so they look like geniuses.

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Re: The next Florida housing market....

http://har.com/mls/dispPressRelease....NTH=12&YEAR=07

“The drop in property sales, while disappointing, is not unusual at this time of year and is far from the loud thud being heard in markets outside Texas,” said Rob Cook, HAR Chairman and broker/owner of Robert D. Cook Properties. “We’re encouraged by the ongoing increase in average and median home prices, which demonstrates that Houston’s real estate market has staying power through the subprime debacle and continues to offer a sound investment opportunity as we head into 2008.”

Texas Real Estate Pollyanna of the year award goes to... Rob Cook!

Highlights:
Sales y/y -10.2%
Pending sales y/y -5.7%

It amazes me that we staved off the bust for 2 years before we showed weakness, and now we've had consecutively negative months. Yet they pretend to have no idea what is coming...

BTW, did everyone see this gem?: http://www.costar.com/News/Article.a...9D4A04C9D98935