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Most big cities across US show signs of housing market cool-down: report
In Miami, LA and Chicago home prices are slowing; in NY they rose sharply
South Florida’s once booming housing market appears to be cooling down along with a majority of other metro areas in the United States, as median annual home prices slowed in the second quarter.
The Miami metro area’s annual median home prices rose 6.4 percent to $266,000 from April to June, compared to an 8.7 percent gain from January to March, according to a new report by Attom Data Solutions. Chicago and Los Angeles also reported a slowdown in annual home prices amid rising mortgage rates. Other large cities that did as well included two in Texas: Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.
New York City, however, countered the trend, as median annual home prices accelerated in the second quarter, compared to the first. , Boston and Detroit also saw sharper gains.
The report comes on the heels of government data released Wednesday, which indicated a broader slowdown in the housing market. New home sales reached an eight-month low, according to the data, dropping 5.3 percent from May.
According to Attom, median home price rose at the slowest rate across the U.S. in two years.
Also, homeowners who sold their properties in the second quarter had owned for an average of more than eight years, the longest since Attom began tracking in the first quarter of 2000.
In South Florida, home prices have increased 160 percent since the bottom of the market in early 2011, when the annual median home price was $102,500. Prices have increased in part due to tight housing supply and a shortage of available land to develop there. Large developers are increasingly purchasing plots of land outside the urban core to build new communities.
But some developers and economists have expressed concern that home prices across the country are too high compared to median incomes, making home buying unaffordable for potential buyers.
The recently released government data did show some good news. The number of unfinished homes sold nationwide was at its highest in four months, indicating a healthy future demand, according to experts.