Margaret Kelly, RE/MAX chief executive officer

Confidence in the U.S. housing industry has returned, and as The Real Deal previously reported, bottoming prices and record affordability are bringing buyers back to the market. Now brokers are feeling the positive effects. Four out of five brokers say that they believe the housing market has stabilized and 70 percent say that prices are on their way back up, according to a national survey of 1,022 RE/Max agents cited by Property Wire.

“For active real estate agents, this market is definitely heating up. They are witnessing a recovery across the country fuelled by home buyers and sellers taking advantage of a significant market opportunity,” Margaret Kelly, RE/MAX chief executive officer, said. [more]

Shaun Donovan, HUD secretary

The U.S. government’s settlement against five big banks was supposed to benefit distressed homeowners, but many states cannot resist diverting the funds to make-up for budget shortfalls, the New York Times reported. When the government reached the estimated $25 billion settlement with banks over mortgage and foreclosure abuses, $2.5 billion was earmarked for states to prevent foreclosures, investigate fraud and alleviate general housing market woes. Now, 15 states have announced that they will be budgeting the money for items other than housing — although 27 states have agreed to use their entire distribution as intended. [more]

The housing market might have hit its valley

Economists increasingly believe the U.S. housing market has finally reached its valley after a series of housing market day points were released this week, Bloomberg News reported. New-home sales exceeded expectations and price declines slowed, according to reports released yesterday, which both offered glimpses of hope for the market. The news organization also expects this week’s pending home-sales index to reach two-year highs. More importantly, according to some analysts, consumer confidence remained at a high level in April, and consumers are reporting that jobs are easier to find. [more]

Price-to-Rent ratio (source: Calculated Risk)

Calculated Risk has pegged this March as the bottom of the market  for U.S. home prices.

The blog isolated home prices from another data set that’s commonly used to determine market strength, new home sales and housing starts, and predicted that both the Case-Shiller Index and the CoreLogic index would valley in March. [more]

Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group and several other notable investors have turned bullish on the U.S. housing market, the Wall Street Journal reported, buying up shares of home building companies, like Pulte Group, Beazer Homes and Hovnanian Enterprises. Those stocks are up 30 percent since the end of the third quarter, according to Dow Jones, far outpacing the 10.5 percent increase recorded by the Standard & Poor’s 500.

In a recent report, Goldman said it expects home prices to decline 3 percent next year, before gaining 30 percent — not taking inflation into account — through 2022 [more]

Sen. Chuck Schumer is one of two senators introducing a bipartisan bill aimed at improving the housing market by offering an incentive to foreign buyers, the Wall Street Journal reported. He and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah want to offer residence visas to any foreigner that spends at least $500,000 on residential real estate in the United States. The measure compliments existing rules that offer visas to foreign investors that create jobs in America.

“This is a way to create more demand without costing the federal government a nickel,” Schumer said. [more]

Prudential Douglas Elliman CEO Dottie Herman appeared on Fox Business this week (see video above) to talk about the consistently fluctuating housing market. Reports such as the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index give a view of the national as a whole, she said, but don’t reflect activity in unique markets such as New York. “You have to really look at your local market to determine what’s going on… Interest rates are the lowest they’ve been… the banks just really have to start lending,” she said. While national home prices are continuing to exhibit seasonal strength, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices’ data through July, Herman said she expects the housing slump to continue for another year at least.
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Paul Ballew, chief economist of Nationwide Mutual Insurance, accompanied attorney Adam Leitman Bailey on CNBC yesterday to diagnose the state of the housing recovery. Each of their statements proved grimmer than the last. Bailey started by noting the three markets, the well-performing luxury market, the muddling lower market that could be damaged by the conforming loan limit and the foreclosure market, which he said may not be sorted through for another five years. Comments

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Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan responded to a recent report by Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies today on CNBC. The report shows that one in every four U.S. households is paying more than half their income on rent and middle-income Americans are struggling just as badly and those in a low-income bracket. Rents are rising, vacancies are falling and buyers simply can’t get credit, the report revealed.

Asked about helping the rental housing market and pushing homeownership, Donovan says, in the video above, that HUD didn’t have the luxury of prioritizing one over the other. “We’ve had the biggest increase in worst-case rental housing needs over a two-year period, 2007 to 2009,” he said, “in the history of looking at those numbers.”
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Residential brokers are bullish on the second-quarter housing market in New York City, according to a survey by the Real Estate Board of New York released today. Of the 394 residential brokers REBNY said it polled through April 8, 72 percent said they expect the market to improve in the second quarter. And brokers reported having the sales numbers to back that up. Five percent more brokers said they have closings scheduled in the next three months compared with last year. Among the survey’s other findings, 7 percent of brokers reported sales that closed above the sellers’ asking price, up from 4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. TRD [more]