You'd be forgiven for thinking that pricey homes always have a lot of bedrooms. They so often do.

Take this seven-bedroom spread in Annapolis. Or this 12-bedroom, 19-bathroom mansion (who's using all these bathrooms?) in New Jersey. Or, heck, this 30-bedroom house near Orlando with an entrance designed to look like the opulent Palace of Versailles. Thirty bedrooms!

But one house selling in the Baltimore region last month in the $600,000 to $799,999 category has two bedrooms at most, according to the newest sales statistics from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems.

I don't know much about this place, except that it's in Anne Arundel County and so is probably well-above-average in price thanks to waterfront. To give you an idea of how unusual this is, there wasn't another one- or two-bedroom single-family house in the entire Baltimore region that sold for more than $400,000 last month.

Average price of a two-bed-or-less house in the Baltimore area last month: $148,000. Almost half sold for less than $100,000.

Continue reading "Few bedrooms, big price" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Real estate search site Trulia says the Baltimore region is seventh on the list of metro areas with the weakest demand among the online search crowd -- specifically, more renters and homeowners looking to move out than in.

For every search on Trulia by someone outside the region checking out places for sale or rent here, there are two (or more specifically 2.2) searches by people in our area looking somewhere else. The company, which ranked the 100 largest metro areas on search demand, says big regions tend to have more people looking to leave than to arrive.

Maryland overall has seen more going than coming in recent years, starting at the height of the housing boom and continuing in a bigger way afterward, according to the state Department of Planning's analysis of IRS migration data.

That doesn't mean the population dropped, though -- it grew. As a planning agency chart in an earlier analysis shows, births outnumber deaths and international migration is also adding to the mix, even as state-to-state migration subtracts.

Trulia says Baltimore-area residents searching online for apartments and homes outside the region are most frequently checking out these places:

1. The Washington area

2. The Bethesda-Rockville-Frederick mini-metro area (usually lumped in with the D.C. area, but not always)

3. The York-Hanover area in Pennsylvania

4. New York City and environs (an area that reaches New Jersey)

5. The Philadelphia area

But what about the people who live elsewhere and are checking us out? Trulia's list made me go "whaa?" -- here's why:

Continue reading "Where Baltimore-area residents would rather be" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

 
Above: The homes that sold in the Baltimore region in December, organized by how quickly -- or slowly -- they went from listed to under contract.

The breakdowns come from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence, which notes that yes, some homes really do come on the multiple-listing service as already sold -- hence the 34 properties in December in the "zero days" category.

But it's rare that someone had to have the house so badly that they snagged it from the owners before they were even thinking of selling. It more likely was for sale but not on the MLS -- a new home, say, or a for-sale-by-owner -- and an agent entered it into the system afterward.

So let's ignore the zeros. If you add up everything from one day to 30, that's almost 400 homes, close to a quarter of all (non-zero-day) sales that month. That's by far the most common period for a home to sell, comparing just 30-day stretches.

Continue reading "Fast home sales, slow home sales" »

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Categories: For sale, Housing stats
        

If you're a dissatisfied homeowner, chances are you're young.

That's the takeaway from real estate search site HomeGain's latest survey, which asked Americans whether they were happy with homeownership.

Least happy are homeowners in the 18-to-25 crowd. That's the only age group where more than half (55 percent) said they're not satisfied with homeownership. The share of satisfied homeowners goes up from there almost in lockstep with age. (Slightly more 26-to-35-year-olds are satisfied than 36-to-45-year-olds, though it rounds to two-thirds in each case.)

Those most likely to be satisfied are 55-plus, people who are also the most likely to have lived in their homes the longest and -- assuming they didn't pull a lot of equity out during the bubble years -- to owe little or nothing on a mortgage. So it makes sense, just as it's understandable that young homeowners who have seen nothing but depreciation aren't wild about the idea.

But here's something surprising:

Continue reading "Youngest homeowners least satisfied with homeownership" »

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Categories: Housing stats, Survey says ...
        

Home prices in the Baltimore area fell about 4 percent last year, which is either bad or good, depending on your perspective.

If you take the position that it's bad, chin up -- dozens of metro areas had bigger drops.

But even more regions had smaller losses or actual increases.

That's according to a new report prepared for the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Council for the New American City, which looked at a variety of vital signs -- including home prices -- in metro areas across the country.

Continue reading "How home prices in the Baltimore area stack up" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Real estate data firm Clear Capital puts the Baltimore region's price drop last year at 6.2 percent, a figure calculated from repeat sales of homes to try to capture the true gain or loss over time.

The average drop in home prices last year, by contrast, was about 4 percent in the region -- considering everything that sold in 2011 vs. everything that sold in 2010.

It's not unusual for price stats to differ, especially if they're measuring the market differently. That's one of the reasons it can be helpful to look at a variety. Triangulation, if you will.

Clear Capital says Baltimore's price loss in 2011 was 12th largest among big markets, with Atlanta No. 1 for its 18 percent decline.

At the other extreme of its 50-region ranking were metro areas that have seen big declines already and posted gains last year, including Dayton, Ohio (up more than 11 percent), Orlando (up almost 7 percent) and Miami (up 5.6 percent).

Continue reading "Clear Capital: Baltimore-area home prices dropped 6% in 2011" »

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Categories: Housing forecasts, Housing stats
        

Here's the early look at the 2011 housing market in the Baltimore area:

Carroll, as you can see, was the only jurisdiction to eke out a sales gain in 2011 compared with 2010. Howard managed basically flat prices (the numbers are rounded) but had one of the largest sales drops in the region.

More about 2011 in this story, which also includes the Moody's Analytics forecast for this year and next.

Continue reading "Baltimore-area housing market in 2011" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Here's what the people trying to sell homes in the Baltimore region were asking in the month of November the past few years, and how that compared with what buyers paid for the homes that actually changed hands:

Sources: Department of Numbers, Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' RealEstate Business Intelligence

It's interesting to see how different the median asking price and median selling price were in 2006 and how the gap has shrunk since then.

Incidentally, the asking price of the typical home for sale vs. the price of the typical home sold isn't the same as what a typical seller gets compared what he or she asked for. That is decidedly not closer together now than it was in 2006.

RBI tracks the average original list price of homes that ultimately sell. The discount was 5 percent in November 2006 and 11 percent this past November, RBI says. 

What gives? Two things, probably.

The asking prices on the graph above -- for homes actively for sale -- are a snapshot at the time rather than whatever those homes on the market were originally listed at.

And perhaps more importantly, would-be sellers and buyers nowadays have had years to get accustomed to the idea that it's a down market and set their expectations accordingly. In late 2006, that was still a new thought. Sales activity was dropping but prices weren't; they just weren't rising at the fast clip of a year or two earlier.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Just because you're paying your rent or mortgage every month on the dot doesn't mean you can really afford it. That's the idea of "house poor," people spending so much on housing costs that they're not spending on much of anything else -- or saving, for that matter.

Is this you?

The National Housing Conference and Center for Housing Policy just updated their "Paycheck to Paycheck" data this week to show the income you need to avoid spending too much on the typical home or rental in metro areas across the country.

Their calculations suggest that plenty of workers -- from bank tellers to security guards to school bus drivers -- had better double up with another working stiff, or they'll have a hard time of it. That's all right for a variety of families, but it's less all right for single folks and any couples dealing with a job loss.

In the Baltimore region, the two housing groups say, you need to earn almost $70,000 a year to buy the median-priced home and not spend more than 28 percent of your income on the mortgage, taxes and insurance (a common measure of affordability). This assumes a 10 percent down payment, bigger than FHA's minimum requirements.

You don't need to earn as much if you're renting, but it's still a good chunk of change.

Continue reading "House (or apartment) poor" »

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Categories: Affordable housing, Housing stats
        

What's the cheapest way to buy a home if your aim is as many bedrooms as possible? Aim for attached housing.

In October, townhouses and rowhouses in the Baltimore region sold for substantially less than single-family houses in comparable bedroom categories. In fact, the average three-bedroom townhome or rowhome sold for about $15,000 less than the average house with two bedrooms or fewer.

And the average house with four bedrooms or more sold for nearly twice the average townhome/rowhome with that many bedrooms -- $395,000 vs. $202,000.

Here's the price breakdown from low to high, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence:

Continue reading "What it costs to buy 2 bedrooms, 3, 4 and more" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Howard County -- the priciest housing market in the Baltimore region -- seems to have been buffeted the least by the popping bubble.

The typical home sold there in the middle of this year was 7 percent less expensive than the typical sale in 2007, when prices peaked, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems data. Harford, the next closest, saw double the drop.

Median sale prices fell 19 percent in Carroll, 22 percent in Anne Arundel, 26 percent in Baltimore County and about 40 percent in the city, where the picture is complicated by investors buying extremely cheap homes in need of total rehabs.

The number of sales in Howard County is also down less sharply than in most of the region, though the difference isn't so striking (with one exception) -- and the drop is pretty darn big everywhere. Since sales peaked in the region in 2005, Howard's numbers are down 43 percent, compared with 45 percent in Carroll, 49 percent in Anne Arundel, 51 percent in Baltimore County and just over 60 percent in the city. Harford's decline is smallest, at 41 percent.

I've been taking a meandering statistical tour of the jurisdictions this year, looking at figures for the month of June from 1998 onward. It reinforced that the bubble and bust both packed a harder wallop in Baltimore than in the suburbs, while the suburban counties themselves haven't felt the impact evenly.

The reputation of its school system and its location between Baltimore and Washington have worked to Howard County's advantage for years, so it's not a complete shock that it might fare relatively better in rough times. But goodness, prices are still double what they were in 2000. In June, at least, Howard's median sale price was up about half a percent over the year before, which in turn was up over the year before that.

Continue reading "In pricey Howard County, a less precipitous housing-market drop" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Housing stats
        

If you bought a home in the Baltimore region after 2003, chances are it's not adding anything to your net worth. It's much more likely subtracting.

Multiply that across the country, and you have one of the explanations for a recent Pew Research Center finding that while older Americans were doing much better financially in 2009 than their counterparts a generation ago, younger Americans were doing much worse. The older you are, the greater your chance of having bought a home well before the housing bubble started, as NPR noted when it reported on the Pew study.

The median net worth of households headed by someone at least 65 years old was about $170,000 in 2009, 42 percent more than seniors in 1984, Pew says. In under-35 households, median net worth was a slim $3,662, 68 percent less than what their same-age counterparts were worth in 1984.

"People generally accumulate wealth as they age, so it is not unusual to find large age-based gaps on this measure. However, the current gap is unprecedented," Pew notes. "In 1984, the age-based wealth gap had been 10:1. By 2009, it had ballooned to 47:1."

Though the rough job and housing markets have helped turn that gap into a chasm, they're not the only factors.

Continue reading "Housing bust worse for younger homeowners" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Curious where the 1 percent live? Turns out the Baltimore area has a fair amount -- or, at least, a fair amount of the top 3 percent of income earners, which is as close as a Brookings Institution fellow was able to get with available IRS data.

Howard Wial, director of Brookings' Metropolitan Economy Initiative, wrote in an Atlantic Cities piece that Baltimore is one of just 20 metro areas that have at least 1 percent of the country's households with $200,000-plus incomes. Top of the list, to no one's shock: New York.

Meanwhile, a report from Brown University's US2010 Project finds that the poor and well-to-do are increasingly isolated in their own neighborhoods, and those islands of poverty and wealth are growing as the number of middle-class neighborhoods is shrinking.

Just over 30 percent of families in large and medium-sized metro areas lived in neighborhoods at either income extreme in 2007, up from 15 percent in 1970, according to the report. (The Baltimore region was at nearly 30 percent in 2007, but the report doesn't give its '70 statistic.)

"These trends are consequential because people are affected by the character of the local areas in which they live," write the report's authors, from Stanford University. "The increasing concentration of income and wealth (and therefore of resources such as schools, parks, and public services) in a small number of neighborhoods results in greater disadvantages for the remaining neighborhoods where low- and middle-income families live."

Thoughts?

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Many Baltimore communities have lots of homes jostling for would-be buyers' attention, but only one has more than 500.

The 21224 ZIP code had 513, to be exact, on the market in October, according to Realtor.com. The real estate search site's October housing summary shows nearly six dozen ZIPs with at least 100 homes for sale in the Baltimore region, just over two dozen with at least 200 and almost a dozen with at least 300.

The 21224 ZIP is pretty expansive, stretching from the Canton waterfront to several blocks north of Patterson Park, and -- west to east -- from the park to the city line. Many rowhomes are tucked within, so it's always going to be a candidate for Most Homes for Sale.

What's changing nowadays: The number of listings is plummeting. 21224's offerings are down more than 30 percent from a year earlier, when about 750 homes were for sale. Most of the Baltimore region's ZIPs are down too -- for a nearly 20 percent drop on average, same as the national trend.

Why? Robo-signing might be part of the answer. There's probably also some amount of "thanks but no thanks" among homeowners who don't like today's sale prices.

What are you seeing out there, and what do you think is driving these inventory drops?

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: For sale, Housing stats
        

FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all dropped their loan limits in a variety of metro areas across the country as of Oct. 1. Result? Buyers (and would-be refinancers) in the Baltimore region can't borrow more than $494,500 from them. Everything above that amount is in "jumbo" territory with higher rates and -- in some cases -- much higher down payment requirements.

The Baltimore region had temporarily been bumped up to $560,000 in 2008 in reaction to the mortgage meltdown.

The downward push seems to have had an immediate effect on sales between $500,000 to $600,000, which dropped more than 20 percent vs. a year earlier. (Sales between $400,000 and $500,000, meanwhile, rose during the same period.)

Read more about it in today's story about October home sales.

And while you're at it, you might want to check out this piece about a mortgage fraud/Ponzi scheme conviction and this story about fallout from the ground rent ruling.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Housing stats, Mortgages
        

Maryland's pickup in home sales compared with last year is among the smallest in the country.

That's according to new figures from the National Association of Realtors, which said the number of homes sold in Maryland over the summer was up 10 percent from a year earlier, lower than all but six other states.

No. 1 and No. 2 for smallest sales increases? Virginia and D.C., respectively. Gotta wonder if federal budget problems -- and the resulting pullbacks by government contractors -- have something to do with that.

Continue reading "Md. home sale activity among the slowest nationwide" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

How much do you think home prices rise in a typical year? Four out of every 10 prospective home buyers surveyed by real estate search site Zillow say "seven percent," which -- Zillow says -- is way out of sync with reality despite all the dour news about housing the last several years.

Housing bubbles and busts aside, home prices usually increase two to five percent a year, Zillow says. The company points to Yale economist Robert J. Shiller's index of housing prices from 1890 onward, which adjusts for inflation and shows a lot of up-and-down movement.

"It's troubling that we're still in the midst of one of the worst housing recessions in history, and yet prospective buyers continue to have such high expectations for home value appreciation," Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow, said in a statement. He added: "Over-estimation of the appreciation potential will lead many to buy real estate when the time in which they plan to live in the house may make renting a better strategy."

Continue reading "Over-optimistic homebuyers" »

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Categories: Housing stats, Survey says ...
        

You might think a simple question like "how much have home values dropped" would get you a simple answer. Sorry, no.

Reports out within the last few days have very different figures for the loss in home-sale prices in the Baltimore region -- the city and nearby suburban counties.

Real estate data firm CoreLogic puts the drop at 1.7 percent in September, compared with a year earlier. Clear Capital, another data firm, calculates a loss of 6.4 percent for a slightly longer period that includes that month -- July through October, compared with a year earlier.

Both firms track repeat sales of homes over time to try to capture the real change in value, but CoreLogic is looking at single-family homes while Clear Capital says it also includes condos.

Zillow, meanwhile, says its "Zestimates" of homes' value -- not just recently sold homes -- suggests a 4.1 percent price drop in the Baltimore area in September compared with a year earlier.

And Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, which runs the local multiple-listing service, says the average price of all homes sold in the Baltimore area in September fell less than 1 percent from a year earlier. (October numbers are due out on Thursday.)

Continue reading "How much are home prices down? Pick your number" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Housing stats
        

If you're curious how the median home sale price in the Baltimore region compares with the median household income these days (and how that compares with the past decade or so), have I got some charts for you. First, the one above, which really drives home how out-of-whack prices got as the housing bubble inflated.

First, a warning about a data limitation: I don't have household income stats past 2009 for the region, so I repeated the approximately $67,000 figure for 2010 and '11. (High unemployment tends to stifle income growth, so that's probably not far off. The estimates from the Maryland Department of Planning show median household income inching up by $400 in 2009.)

So: The median sale price more than doubled between 1999 and 2006, while the median household income rose 26 percent. It's not quite so far apart now -- prices are up 80 percent since 1999 and incomes are up 35 percent.

But what about the effect of today's low-low mortgage rates? How have monthly payments changed, and how does that compare with incomes?

Yeah, I've got those charts, too. Also one showing prices as a multiple of income.

The bottom line is that home prices appear a lot more affordable if you factor in mortgage rates, which were nearly 8 percent 12 years ago and last month were around 4 percent.

Check out these visuals:

Continue reading "How Baltimore-area income stacks up with home prices" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Hey, would-be homebuyers -- if it feels like there's less to choose from these days, it's not your imagination.

The number of homes on the market in the Baltimore region last month is still high compared with the pace of sales, enough supply to last about eight-and-a-half months. But listings are down 16 percent from a year earlier, according to statistics from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems.

And perhaps more significantly for buyers, new listings were down 23 percent to the lowest level for the month of September since MRIS began tracking the area in 1998.

Just over 3,200 homes were newly on the market in September, compared with almost 4,200 last September, 6,000 in September 2005 -- right before the overheated market began to show signs of slowdown -- and about 3,500 in September 1999, the previous low.

Buyers frequently complain that a not insignificant number of homes on the market aren't really on the market because the asking prices aren't anywhere close to realistic. So here's a question for lookers and lookyloos: Does it feel as much like a buyer's market as the low sales figures and dropping prices suggest? Are you happy with your options?

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: For sale, Housing stats
        

In half the home sales in Baltimore last month, the buyer paid cash -- or the equivalent to it from the seller's point of view.

Cash and cash-like deals are much more common in the city, where investors are buying foreclosures and can't easily get bank financing, than in the counties around Baltimore. Still, nearly 15 percent of the suburbs' sales -- about one in seven -- fell into that category in September.

That's according to statistics from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence.

So what's the deal with "cash-like"? 

Continue reading "Cash deals for half the homes sold in Baltimore last month" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Ross Mackesey, sales manager of Long & Foster Real Estate's Greenspring office, writes a monthly commentary on the local housing market, and the newest one -- about September -- is packed full of interesting tidbits. Here's an observation or two for each part of the region:

Anne Arundel County. He notes that the number of sales was up, the time to sell them was down and the average price rose ever so slightly. "Everything looks better than it did a year ago," he wrote.

Baltimore. Foreclosures accounted for at least a quarter of sales in 15 of the city's ZIP codes, he says. (That's about half of the ZIPs.) "Foreclosures at this level dictate value to the extent that market rate transactions must compete with foreclosure pricing," Mackesey wrote. "This makes these zip code areas a high risk for investors who have been buying foreclosures, rehabbing them and then selling them at the high end of the arms-length transactions. They can no longer get an appraisal to support a palatable annualized return on their investment. ... There are still some neighborhoods where the investor rehabber/flipper can make their economic model work, but the number is rapidly diminishing. However, buy to rent still works well."

Baltimore County. Foreclosure sale activity here is "a West and East side serious issue and barely (seldom) seen in the central corridor," Mackesey says. "There were 73 bank owned properties settled in September, only one of which was between Towson and the Maryland line."

Continue reading "Housing-market intel for Baltimore and 'burbs" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

For a little while, Harford County's housing market had a double shot of federal stimulus -- the first-time homebuyer tax credit plus New Jersey workers relocating to the region thanks to BRAC. (The base realignment and closure process sent thousands from Fort Monmouth to Aberdeen Proving Ground.)

But the credit expired last year and all the government workers were in place by September. As you can see, the uptick didn't last:

Sales fell 13 percent in June compared with a year earlier, after increasing 15 percent in June 2009 and 13 percent in June 2010.

Why June? Because this is part of an occasional (OK, irregular) blog series looking at Baltimore-area jurisdictions during that month. I'm looking at statistics for June back to 1998, when Metropolitan Regional Information Systems began tracking the region.

See Anne Arundel here, Baltimore City here, Baltimore County here and Carroll County here. 

What's significant about Harford: Even though the number of home sales is far off the housing-bubble peak, more homes changed hands in June of this year than in June 1998, when MRIS began keeping records. Regionwide, sales were down 18 percent.

The price situation in Harford is pretty interesting, too:

Continue reading "Harford County's housing market" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Twenty-five percent of homes that sold in the Baltimore region over the summer changed hands for less than their owners paid for them, up from 21 percent a year earlier, real estate search site Zillow says.

The share of homes selling at a loss is down from the spring, however, when it peaked at nearly 28 percent. (Zillow shows the percentage of losses generally spiking in the first half of the year, dipping in the summer and then heading back upward.)

The situation is worse nationally, with just over a third of homes -- 34 percent -- selling for a loss.

The calculation excludes foreclosures. Zillow crunched transactions from June through August, putting the most weight on sales in the most recent of the three months.

Oh, and it looked at the new sales price vs. the previous price, so that doesn't include homes that were a net loss for the owners after taking into account transaction expenses (like transfer taxes and real estate commissions) or money spent on renovations.

So what's the breakdown at a more local level? It varies a lot, as you might expect, though most places are seeing losses rise.

Continue reading "One in four homes in Baltimore region selling for a loss" »

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Categories: Housing stats, The foreclosure mess, Underwater
        

Photo of Butler Road near Falls Road by Tenney Mason of Patuxent Publishing

Here's an eye-popping stat to start your day: A Baltimore County property sold for $9.5 million in August, by far the region's most expensive sale of the month.

It's not an all-time record -- author Tom Clancy spent $12.6 million in 2009 on a huge Ritz-Carlton Residences penthouse that was originally three separate units. (Clancy went on to purchase three more condos at the Ritz to round it out to six.)

But $9.5 million is still really unusual for the region.

The property, on Butler Road where Reisterstown and Sparks Glencoe meet, is more than 100 acres with a four-bedroom, seven-bathroom house. The listing says 144 acres; the property records suggest 108. A few more details here, including an aerial view. (The photo above is in the general area.)

The buyer was Michael Lund Petersen, presumably the same Michael Lund Petersen who bought a condo for $2.7 million in 2008 ... at the Ritz. Small world.

I called jewelry company Pandora yesterday to see if this is also the same Michael Lund Petersen identified in past years as the company's president -- and one of the selling shareholders when Pandora went public last year -- but did not hear back. Pandora is best known for its high-end charm bracelets.

All told, 20 properties in the Baltimore region -- the city and its five surrounding counties -- sold for at least $1 million in August. 

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Housing stats, Priciest home of the month
        

Here's the quick take on the Baltimore region's housing market in September: Compared with a year ago, average prices fell a little less than 1 percent, the number of homes sold increased a little more than 1 percent and the supply of new properties hitting the market tumbled.

The 23 percent drop in new listings was the second-largest decline since Metropolitan Regional Information Systems began tracking the area in the late 1990s. Colleague Liz Kay has more in this story, including one agent's suspicion that the market was not the only factor pushing down the number of homes newly listed in September.

On another note, columnist Jay Hancock writes here about the "misery index" -- unemployment rate plus inflation -- and how some are coming up with new ways to take into account the other economic miseries out there. Like a rough housing market. (Which is obviously more miserable for sellers than buyers.)

If you're looking for Baltimore data on one of those miseries -- foreclosure -- then you'll want to check out the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance's statistics page, which has just been revamped. The data, compiled for the Baltimore Homeownership Preservation Coalition, include maps, charts and the actual addresses where foreclosure proceedings have been started. You can also see how many of those cases end up as ratified foreclosure sales (not all do). (BNIA offers updates about its data, foreclosure and otherwise, on its Facebook page.)

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Falling home prices might be the norm, but they're not dropping everywhere.

New figures from real estate data firm CoreLogic are a reminder of that fact, showing price gains in 13 states in August compared with a year earlier.

Maryland isn't one of them, mind you. Most of these states aren't ones that made headlines during the housing bubble years. Kansas, up 1 percent. North Dakota and Wyoming, up about 3.5 percent. West Virginia, up an eyebrow-raising 8.6 percent.

At the other extreme were Nevada and Arizona, states that did make headlines during the housing bubble and all the years since. Prices in each state declined more than 10 percent.

Maryland was in the middle, with home prices declining 2.1 percent.

When I crunched home-sale numbers to see trends at a local level during the first half of the year, some ZIP codes showed price gains -- on average, at least. Here are the bigger communities that fell into that category:

Continue reading "Where home prices are rising" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Housing stats
        

A big jump in the number of empty homes for sale and rent helped push up the number of vacant housing in Maryland over the last decade by 35 percent, new Census figures show.

More than 222,000 homes were vacant during the count in April 2010, an increase of nearly 58,000 properties.

The nationwide increase in vacancy was even bigger than Maryland's -- 44 percent. Nevada's number of unoccupied units more than doubled, which underscores just how hard that state has been pummeled by the housing bust.

In addition to an increase in vacant homes for sale and for rent, Maryland saw growth in vacant vacation homes and a category that includes foreclosures not yet on the market. Here's the breakdown:

Continue reading "35% increase in vacant housing in Md. in last decade" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Housing stats, Vacancies
        

Four years ago, a housing affordability index that stacks metro areas against their own histories showed the Baltimore area at its most unaffordable point on record.

Two years ago, it had worked its way down from the ranks of "significant affordability concern" to good ol' "affordability concern."

Now the index, put together by John Burns Real Estate Consulting, pegs the Baltimore region at just about its historical norm -- measured over a stretch of time starting in the early 1980s. It's slightly on the "underpriced" side now, making it an area of "less affordability concern," the California company says.

But the Baltimore area's price drops have been so muted compared with some regions that it's one of the least underpriced areas, compared with their own histories. Of the 183 areas John Burns tracks, 171 are more underpriced than Baltimore. More on that in a moment.

The index -- which melds prices, incomes, mortgage rates and down payments -- isn't meant to predict what home values will do at any given time, so you probably shouldn't hold your breath for a quick return to rising prices. (A separate Johns Burns analysis suggests a very large "shadow inventory" of distressed properties not yet on the market, for instance.)

But the company believes its index is a useful measure of where you can expect prices (compared with incomes and rates) will be long-term.

"Typically, things fall in line with their historical norms," said Erik Franks, a senior research analyst at John Burns. "That's basically true of any commodity."

Here's how the index works -- and how Baltimore compares with other regions:

Continue reading "Firm: Baltimore-area prices close to historical norm" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Thousands of homes are on the market in the Baltimore region. But as the commercials say, wait -- there’s more.

Tens of thousands of Baltimore-area homeowners are behind on their mortgage payments. At least some of their homes will end up on the market too, either as short sales or repossessed foreclosures.

California-based John Burns Real Estate Consulting, which does market research for homebuilders and banks, estimates this "shadow inventory" in the Baltimore region at 50,000 homes as of June. That’s how many properties the company believes will eventually become distress sales but aren’t yet listed.

"That equates to 14 months of supply based on the average resale sales volume for the area over the last 10 years," Wayne Yamano, a vice president at John Burns, said in an email. "The U.S. average is about 9 months of shadow inventory in comparison."

The sales volume was much larger for most of the past 10 years than it’s been in the last few. At the pace of June sales, it would take 21 months -- almost two years -- to find buyers for 50,000 homes.

Continue reading "Firm: Baltimore-area 'shadow inventory' at 50,000 homes" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (17)
Categories: Distress sales, Housing stats, The foreclosure mess
        

Pegging the start of the housing bust depends on how you're defining it. Home sales began falling in late 2005. Prices took longer to follow suit, peaking in 2007 in most of the Baltimore area.

But for Carroll County, the price impact came a year early.

I'm crunching numbers for the month of June to compare and contrast the counties over the years -- see Anne Arundel here, Baltimore City here and Baltimore County here -- and Carroll County is an interesting case. Even though average prices began falling sooner in that county, they remain higher compared with the late 1990s than some of the other jurisdictions in the region.

Both the average and median sale price in Carroll was about 90 percent higher in June than it was in June 1998. Compare that with Baltimore County's roughly 65 percent increase. (In Baltimore City, where foreclosures and investor activity are both high, the increase in median prices vs. 1998 is the lowest in the region -- 40 percent. But the city's average price increase tops Baltimore County's, which just goes to show that "average" and "typical" aren't always the same thing.)

Carroll County home sales, meanwhile, are down 45 percent since the 2005 peak -- pretty typical for the region -- and remain near recorded lows:

Here's a chart showing the change in prices:

Continue reading "Carroll County's housing market" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Baltimore County home sales are way down from where they were at the height of the housing bubble, like the rest of the region. Unlike the rest of the region, the county's home sales are also way lower now than they were as far back as 1998.

For a (very) occasional blog-post series, I've been crunching numbers at a county level for the month of June to compare and contrast over the years. See Anne Arundel here and Baltimore City here. Today it's Baltimore County's turn.

The number of Baltimore County homes sold this June was down 30 percent from June 1998, when Metropolitan Regional Information Systems began tracking the region. That's the biggest drop in the metro area.

Pricey Howard County was close, with a 28 percent drop, but no other jurisdiction saw anywhere near that big of a decline. (One actually saw a gain in sales, but you'll have to wait until it's that county's turn to find out which ... or check the numbers yourself.)

Here's what Baltimore County's home sales looks like over the years:

And here's the change in average and median prices:

Continue reading "Baltimore County's housing market" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Housing stats
        

You can try to get at housing-market popularity a lot of ways. By one measure, the Baltimore region's most popular ZIP code is Pasadena, 21122.

The Anne Arundel County community is the one that got the most home searches last month on Realtor.com, according to the company that runs the site, Move Inc. No. 2: 21042, the western ZIP code in Ellicott City.

Here's the rest of the top five:

No. 3: 21784, Sykesville (a ZIP code shared by Carroll and Howard counties)

No. 4: 21043, Ellicott City's eastern ZIP code (Howard County)

No. 5: 21146, Severna Park (Anne Arundel County -- near Pasadena)

Does that match up with your sense of what's popular?

Another way to gauge buyer interest is the average length of time the homes in a community have been up for sale, though that's not foolproof (see this blog post for one reason why). Among ZIP codes with at least 20 homes for sale, here are the ones where Realtor.com shows the lowest number of average days on market:

Continue reading "Most popular Baltimore-area ZIP codes among homebuyers" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Here's August in a nutshell for the Baltimore-area housing market: Home sales up, prices down.

In a slightly larger nutshell, sales rose 6 percent in the Baltimore region vs. a year ago, while the average price slipped 5 percent.

The number of sales remains very low compared with the norm since the late 1990s, when Metropolitan Regional Information Systems began tracking the market. The number of homes listed for sale is dropping, though, so the time it would take to sell everything at the current pace is just under eight months -- close to what it was in August 2009, when the federal first-time home buyer tax credit was giving activity a bit of a boost.

Six months is generally thought of as a balancing point between demand and supply.

Continue reading "August home sales in the Baltimore area" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Home prices were about 9 percent lower in the Baltimore region in June than they were a year earlier, one of the largest declines among large markets, according to real estate data firm FNC.

The company says its latest analysis of 30 metro areas shows Baltimore with the sixth-largest loss in prices year-over-year, behind Orlando (down about 16 percent), Las Vegas and Atlanta (both down about 13 percent) and Sacramento and Tampa (both down about 11 percent).

Most regions saw price drops compared with a year ago, mind you. FNC said it found increases in only two large markets: Detroit -- yes, really -- and Boston, both of which posted gains of about 4 percent.

It's interesting to see how different the various measures of price changes have been lately -- all down, but not by the same amount. Here are some other recent figures, for comparison's sake:

Continue reading "Report: Baltimore region had one of the biggest drops in home prices in the last year" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Single-family home prices in the Baltimore region were 3.8 percent lower in July than they had been a year earlier, the smallest decline since last summer, real estate data firm CoreLogic says.

The year-over-year loss in prices ranged from a little over 4 percent to a little over 6 percent from August 2010 through June of this year, according to CoreLogic. And even those are less dramatic than the price drops in 2009 -- in July 2009, for example, single-family values fell 9 percent. (The company analyzes both detached and attached single-family homes.)

Nationally, CoreLogic said, single-family home prices declined 5.2 percent over the year. That's down a bit compared with the past several months. Subtract out short sales and foreclosures, and U.S. home prices were a lot closer to steady, down about half a percent.

Non-distress sales in the Baltimore area also showed a smaller drop, but it wasn't as big of a difference -- down 2.8 percent rather than the overall 3.8 percent decline.

So: trend or temporary?

Continue reading "CoreLogic: Baltimore-area price drops are the smallest in a year" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Photo by Sun photographer Jed Kirschbaum

Want a home for less than $10,000? You wouldn't be alone: About 275 of the properties changing hands in Baltimore during the first half of the year fell in that price range.

That's one out of every 10 home sales in the city.

That's more than the number of under-$10,000 Baltimore homes that sold in 2009 and 2010 combined.

That's a bigger group than the number of homes selling for $750,000-plus in the entire metro area.

And that's just one of the tidbits in the mid-year 2011 housing-market story, the every-six-months exercise in number-crunching and mapping that I hope you'll find interesting.

Here's the linkage (and a few details about that photo above):

Continue reading "Homes for less than $10k and other craziness (housing market, mid-2011 edition)" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Trulia, comparing the cost of buying in Baltimore with the cost of renting, says buying is cheaper. The costs are more in favor of buying vs. renting here than they are in most large cities, according to Trulia's figures: We're No. 10.

Trulia is using asking prices and rents from its site -- it has both sides of the housing coin -- and runs them through a calculation we've talked about before: Divide the asking price by a year's worth of rent.

If your number is 15 or lower, buying is better, in Trulia's book. If it's above 15, advantage renting -- especially the higher that number gets.

Baltimore's figure is 11. Lowest of all is Las Vegas, at 6. At the other end is New York with a whopping 36, which Trulia (in what seems like an understatement) dubs "much more affordable to rent."

Patrick Killelea outlines a different rule of thumb on his housing-bubble-and-bust site Patrick.net.

Continue reading "Buy or rent? Trulia says buying is cheaper here (but not everywhere)" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Categories: Housing stats, Renting
        

The typical home for sale in the Baltimore region in July had been sitting on the market for 98 days -- a little over three months.

So says Realtor.com, which released a market-trends report with statistics on homes for sale. Many of the stats we see are for places that have already sold, so it's a change of pace to get a snapshot of the so-called market inventory.

The region's median time-on-market is almost exactly the same as the nation's, which is one day shorter at 97. Several metro areas are at or above 150 days -- five months. Two -- Oakland, Calif. and Denver -- are under 50. (Denver's typical home has been on the market about a month.)

Aggregated days-on-market figures hide a lot of variations, of course. Homes are always coming on, brand-spanking new, their time on market measured in minutes. Others have been languishing for months. Occasionally years.

And the figures don't necessarily reflect how long the wait has been for sellers, since some pull their homes off the market and put them back on later so they can be brand-spanking new all over again from a multiple-listing standpoint.

Continue reading "Days on market for the typical Baltimore-area home for sale: 98 " »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

There's no perfect best-of list, especially if you're ranking communities. Go to any neighborhood and chances are the people who live there don't all agree about whether it's a nice place or not, let alone the people who don't live there.

So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Money's most recent ranking for best small towns has drawn "you gotta be kidding" comments from readers who don't agree with the three Maryland communities the magazine included on its list.

"I wouldn't ask my worst enemy to move there," Geoff wrote of Montgomery Village.

JD commented, "This makes me laugh - I lived in Crofton for 7 years and HATED every minute of it!"

"As for Eldersberg, except for some defense facilities nearby that are cutting back, nothing is close for commuting," wrote didactic1.

Some readers had good things to say about the communities, naturally. Some suggested other places for an ideal best-of list.

But all this got me wondering: Setting aside the fact that no list would be met with universal approval, what would make a pretty darn good list? What statistics would you look at? How would you try to account for hard-to-measure qualities that make a place livable?

When I picked the hidden-gem neighborhoods in 2009, I didn't try to make it a top-10 list. They weren't a best-of, just examples of nice places where average prices were under $250,000 and name recognition wasn't (as far as I could tell) especially high.

I understand the appeal of ranking, though. After all -- thousands of you stopped by to look at yesterday's post about someone else's ranking. Imagine how many hits Money is getting.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Housing stats
        

The Fiserv Case-Shiller index shows home prices in the Baltimore area going an unexpected direction in the first quarter of this year: Up.

The Baltimore metro area saw a price gain of 1.2 percent compared with a year earlier, the index says, and though that's a very small gain I called the company just to make sure it wasn't a typo. Other measures I've seen for the region all show losses.

It's not a typo. But Fiserv doesn't see it as the beginning of a trend. It's predicting that prices in the region will be 4.6 percent lower in the first quarter of next year than they were in first-quarter 2011.

David Stiff, Fiserv’s chief economist, attributes the Baltimore area's small increase -- at a time when the index shows home prices falling just over 5 percent nationwide -- to an unemployment rate that's not as bad as the United States'. It's averaged 7.5 percent in the region this year, compared with 9 percent for the U.S.

The Fiserv Case-Shiller index compares repeat sales of the same homes over time as a way to avoid the problem of changing mix -- homes selling now that aren't comparable to the homes selling a year ago. Taking the average or median price of everything that sells can leave you comparing apples and oranges, so you can see why Fiserv's numbers don't necessarily track with multiple listing service data. (In March, the MLS showed average sale prices in the metro area dropping 7 percent; the median fell 11 percent.)

But Clear Capital, another real estate information firm, has a repeat-sales index that shows home prices in the metro area falling, too. I asked Stiff what could explain the difference.

Continue reading "Home prices ... up?" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Baltimore-area home sales rose in July compared with a year earlier, while home prices continued to sag.

It's the first time in five months that sales increased, but that's not surprising. The comparison point — July 2010 — is when settlements slumped as the effect of the federal first-time homebuyer tax credit waned. (Most buyers trying to get the incentive of up to $8,000 closed by June 30 last year, which if you recall had been the deadline until Congress extended it at the last minute through the rest of that summer.)

More heartening for would-be home sellers than the 12 percent increase in July home sales: The number of new contracts in the Baltimore region has now risen for eight of the last nine months, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, which runs the multiple-listing service used to buy and sell homes in the area. (MRIS's stats arm has more statistics here.)

Buyers and sellers signed 24 percent more contracts in July than they did a year earlier — deals that will turn into sales within a few months if all goes smoothly. The approximately 2,400 new contracts represent the largest number signed in the month of July since 2007, before the full effects of the credit crunch and financial crisis set in.

This possible sales stabilization did not translate into price support, however. The average sale price in the Baltimore metro area slid 5 percent to just under $279,000.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Housing stats
        

A snapshot of the region's housing market in July is due out at 10 a.m. from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence. Check back for the rundown later this morning.

While you're waiting, here are some other numbers to chew on:

The typical asking price for a Baltimore-area home on the market so far in August was just under $230,000, according to the Department of Numbers, a website that tracks various statistics around the country. It's the first month since January that the asking price has dropped rather than risen.

The typical asking price, after decreasing from $219,000 in December to about $213,000 in January, increased steadily afterward to $231,000 in July. (This is for the metro area as a whole, not just the city.)

The peak? May 2006 -- $350,000.

I mentioned in June that the upward rise in asking prices was unusual compared with the past few years. We did tend to see an uptick in the spring and summer, but not to this extent.

Continue reading "Typical asking price in August: just under $230,000" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Next up in our tour of the region: Baltimore. The city's level of home sales is below what it was 13 years ago, after soaring during the bubble years and plummeting during the bust at rates that outpaced the suburbs.

Here's the change in the number of homes sold during the month of June, according to data from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' RealEstate Business Intelligence arm:

And here's the change in price, also more dramatic on the up and downswing than the 'burbs:

Continue reading "Baltimore City's housing market" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Housing stats
        

I usually look at the region as a whole, but I know you're probably more interested in what's happening to a somewhat smaller housing market. Your neighborhood, say. Or at the very least, your county or city.

Over the next week or two, I'll share graphs that show the change in sales and prices in each of the six jurisdictions that make up the Baltimore area. First up: Anne Arundel County.

Here's a look at how the number of homes sold has changed in Anne Arundel since 1998 for the month of June, with data pulled from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' RealEstate Business Intelligence arm:

And here's the same snapshot for average and median sale prices:

Continue reading "Anne Arundel's housing market, by the year" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

In Maryland and across the country, local and state agencies shape the homebuilding process through regulations -- rules about where and how companies can build. The idea is to avoid problems.

But the National Association of Home Builders says regulations add a substantial cost, accounting for 25 percent of the price of a new single-family home.

The trade group's study, conducted by HousingEconomics.com, relied on survey responses from homebuilders, including firms with experience acquiring land and developing lots.

As you might imagine it would, the report suggests government officials think twice before adding more regulations in an environment where "builders are already reporting new homes appraising at less than the cost required to produce them."

The cost of regulation and regulatory-related delays tends to be somewhat higher in the Northeast, the study says.

Maryland -- at the cusp of the Northeast and South -- has a variety of rules that vary from county to county. Some are of the building-code sort. Some are queues designed to control the pace of development so it doesn't get ahead of new schools. And some require upfront fees to pay for the impact of more people on the roads and students in classrooms.

Maryland's "impact fees" are among the highest in the nation, according to a separate survey by impact-fee consulting firm Duncan Associates.

Continue reading "Homebuilders: Regulation accounts for 25% of a new home's price" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Several (somewhat related) trends to chew over:

A recent study by the Research Institute for Housing America, a nonprofit arm of the Mortgage Bankers Association, says we can probably expect "further notable declines in homeownership rates in the United States." The rate jumped during the housing bubble -- pumped up by lax lending terms -- and has slid backward since.

Though it's possible that decline is over, the study's authors write, they think a drop of as much as 1 to 2 percentage points over the next few years is more likely.

It's possible the homeownership rate would be different -- lower or higher -- if not for the "pent up" phenomenon of would-be buyers and would-be sellers stuck in place. A recent Wonk poll that asked readers if they're feeling pent up drew a lot of "yes" votes -- nearly two-thirds of those who took the poll.

Most popular choice among the pent-up crowd: "I would sell and then buy if market conditions were different," picked by 28 percent of poll-takers.

Continue reading "Homeownership, investors and the "pent up" phenomenon" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Dropping home prices give buyers an opportunity to spend less on a house. But a growing share of the buying pool is opting to just get more house.

Forty percent of Baltimore-area buyers closing on a house or townhouse in June purchased a place with four bedrooms or more, up from 36 percent at the height of the sales frenzy six years earlier.

Three bedrooms are still the most popular choice, with a 50 percent market share in June. But that's down from 53 percent in June 2005.

And two bedrooms or less? Ten percent of purchases, down from 12 percent.

The numbers come from Metropolitan Regional Information System's stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence. (RBI tracks condos as a separate group but doesn't break them out by number of bedrooms, so I don't know if they're showing the same trend.)

The sales slump in houses and townhouses in the metro area follows the same bedroom trend. Sales of two-bedroom-or-less places dropped by 58 percent in the past six years, sales of three-bedroom digs declined by 53 percent and sales of four bedrooms or more fell by 45 percent.

So how much are people spending? Below are the average sale prices for detached homes and attached ones (rowhouses, townhouses, duplexes) in the Baltimore region -- the city plus the five suburban counties around it -- by number of bedrooms. The two-bed category is two bedrooms or less, and the four-bed is four bedrooms or more:

Continue reading "As prices drop, more buyers opt for more bedrooms" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Here's the good news/bad news for the Baltimore region's housing market in June (with emoticons!):

:-D  The month was the biggest June in four years for the number of new contracts signed

:-(  But it's still way smaller than during the other Junes in the aughts

:-( or :-D (depending on your perspective)  Average prices were down 7 percent vs. a year earlier

:-(  And the number of home sales that closed in June -- as opposed to contracts signed, which will likely settle in July or August -- hit its lowest level in at least 13 years

:-D On the upside for sellers, competition was waning, with 7 percent fewer homes on the market than a year earlier

:-( But there's a lot of homes that could end up on the market later, courtesy foreclosure

Here's the full story, emoticon-less.

If you like to splash about in raw data, and who doesn't, you can find it at RealEstate Business Intelligence, the stats arm of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems.

One of the themes of this extended housing bust is "pent up" -- as in demand and supply. People who want to buy but are holding off because of volatility (or tighter mortgage rules or job uncertainty or any number of issues). Homeowners who want to sell but are hoping things will improve if they wait.

Continue reading "Good news, bad news for Baltimore-area housing market" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

The price that sellers are asking for homes in the Baltimore metro area has been on the rise the last few months, but so have the number of homes for sale -- two measures that can't head in the same direction for long.

New figures from Altos Research, a California-based real estate market research firm, show a 12 percent increase in single-family homes for sale in the Baltimore region over the past three months. Asking prices rose 4 percent over the same period.

Altos, which noted in an email to me that prices and inventory "usually have an inverse relationship," said Baltimore's increase in the number of houses for sale was the largest among 21 mid-sized metro areas. The average increase across the group was about 2 percent.

The average asking-price increase was about 3 percent, Altos said.

The company predicts the housing market is entering a "catfish recovery" (we're way past the point of using letters to describe the market's past-and-future trajectory).

Continue reading "Inventory -- and asking prices -- on the rise" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Lots of factors influence how well or poorly a local housing market will do, but The Wall Street Journal's David Crook argues that you can boil them down to three essentials. And no, it's not location, location, location.

First, jobs. Second, the price of homes vs. the cost to rent. Third, foreclosures.

Makes sense. If the local economy isn't growing, you won't have a growing number of people able to buy. If it's a lot more costly to buy than rent, tenants aren't going to be rushing to purchase -- not in these post-boom days, anyway. And a flood of bank-owned properties on the market makes it harder for regular homeowners to sell.

He offers a "yes, but" to his second rule-of-thumb: "Beware the outliers. Extremely low price-to-rent multiples can be warning flags for seriously depressed markets that are glutted with unsold properties."

Do you think these three factors are the most important measures for a housing market, or do you have others you prefer?

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Predicting how long a home will take to sell is no certain business. But here's one statistic sellers and buyers alike might like to know:

At the pace of May sales, it would take eight months to find buyers for all the Maryland homes still on the market.

A year earlier, when the federal home buyer tax credit was boosting activity, that pipeline was just over six-and-a-half months long. (Six months or so is usually considered a balanced market, where sellers and buyers have more or less equal power.)

This stat can tell you only so much, of course. There's no guarantee that sales will continue at the same pace or that the number of listings will remain more or less even as some homes come on the market and others go off. How quickly banks repossess homes and put them on the market as new foreclosures is one of the big question marks, what with the slowdown that came in the wake of robo-signing revelations.

But that months-of-supply figure is one bit of market intel you'll want to have if you're looking or selling. Here's the breakdown by county in the Baltimore region for the month of May, and a way to get it down to the ZIP code:

Continue reading "An eight-month pipeline of homes waiting to sell (so far)" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Want to live in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country? You won't have to move far. (You might even be there now.)

Coldwell Banker Real Estate's new ranking of just over 2,300 markets in the country by average price puts Annapolis at No. 2,240, meaning it's among the 100 priciest areas -- No. 1 is cheapest. Annapolis is the priciest sizable market in Maryland by Coldwell Banker's measurement, outpacing the Washington suburbs of Rockville and Silver Spring.

The list doesn't include everything you might consider its own market, such as tony Potomac and Bethesda. And the calculation for Baltimore appears to include at least part of Baltimore County, upping its average price to $265,000 rather than the $135,000 measured by the local multiple-listing service.

But hey, everyone loves a ranking. Go on, have a look:

Continue reading "Cheapest, most expensive communities in Md." »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

We'll get a snapshot of May home sales and prices today when Metropolitan Regional Information Systems releases its monthly statistics for the Baltimore metro area.

MRIS, which runs the region's multiple-listing service used to buy and sell homes, puts its figures on the website of its stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence. You should be able to see the report here when it's released, likely later this morning.

Check back here for an update.

UPDATE:

The number of May home sales dropped 20 percent from a year ago, when homebuyers were hurrying to close deals in order to qualify for the now-gone federal tax credit. Home prices also fell, down about 4.5 percent on average.

April 2010 was the deadline to get under contract for the tax credit, which meant a big uptick that month and a big drop-off the next, so unsurprisingly, new pending deals this May blew last May's out of the water. The increase: 54 percent.

What's probably more interesting than the May vs. May contract figures is the year-to-date. New contracts signed in the first five months of this year outnumber signings in the corresponding months last year by 10 percent, MRIS says.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Home prices in the Baltimore metro area are down nearly 9 percent compared with a year ago, according to new figures from real estate data firm Clear Capital.

The company, which tracked prices in the four months ending in May, uses a repeat-sale index that tries to get at the true change in home value without the skewing that can come when comparing all homes sold in one period vs. all those that sold in another.

Clear Capital says the metro area saw the same nearly 9 percent drop when comparing February-May with the previous three months, one of the largest declines among big regions. Five other metro areas saw larger drops, including No. 1 Detroit, down 13 percent.

The federally powered Washington region was one of the few to see a gain over the quarter and also over the year.

Alex Villacorta, director of research and analytics for Clear Capital, thinks it's pretty clear why the Baltimore area is on the company's "lowest performing major markets" list.

Continue reading "Report: Baltimore-area home prices down nearly 9%" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

The much-discussed "double dip" in home prices is upon us, per Standard & Poor's definition: Its Case-Shiller measures that track 10 and 20 cities are now both below their previous lows in 2009.

The Baltimore area isn't part of either index. But we already knew it was into double-dip territory earlier this year, having retrenched after a minor price boost from the first-time homebuyer tax credit in '09 and '10.

In a statement, S&P Indices' David M. Blitzer said the price increases seen in a variety of places during that period was "largely" about the tax credit.

"Excluding the results of that policy, there has been no recovery or even stabilization in home prices during or after the recent recession," he said. "Further, while last year saw signs of an economic recovery, the most recent data do not point to renewed gains."

The Washington area posted a modest gain in March vs. February, according to the S&P data, but that was unusual. Consider Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit and Las Vegas -- in all those markets, values have been falling so fast and long that "average home prices are now below their January 2000 levels," S&P says.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Just over a quarter of the Baltimore-area homes that changed hands in April got under contract in 30 days or less -- about 540 in all. That's a lot more than the number of sales that took at least a year (115, or 6 percent).

Here's what the stats don't say but I'd like to know: How many of the homes that haven't sold yet have languished for upwards of a year? Or have bounced on and off the market as their owners test the waters with no success?

I frequently hear from real estate agents that the first few weeks are critical for a seller. Price the home competitively right off the bat, put it on the market in good condition, make sure you have tons of photos online, etc., and your odds of buyer interest are pretty good -- or at least as good as you can make it given that demand for your neighborhood is mostly outside your control. But what about the homes whose sellers (and/or agents) don't get it right from the get-go and have to adjust course a month or three later?

One way of reading the sales statistics is that it gets progressively harder to sell:

Continue reading "Home sales in 30 days or less vs. a year-plus" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Just as the number of newly inked pending deals for home sales in the Baltimore metro area slumped in April, so did the number of homes newly listed for sale.

Both dropped just over 20 percent compared with a year ago, when both buyers and sellers were trying to take advantage of the federal tax credit -- buyers so they could get $8,000 from Uncle Sam and sellers so they could, you know, sell. 

Metrostudy, which does market research for homebuilders, noted that new listings are down across the Baltimore-Washington region.

"There are two ways to correct an oversupplied market," Kenneth Wenhold, Mid-Atlantic regional director for Metrostudy, wrote in a market analysis. "The first is to increase demand to sell the supply faster. The second is to reduce the supply itself, and we are effectively doing exactly that by adding fewer units to the market. This should go a very long way to reducing inventories in Maryland and stabilizing the market in 2011, even in Baltimore."

(By "Baltimore," he means the suburban Baltimore area, which is what builders tend to focus on.)

Continue reading "Demand may be down, but so is supply (for now)" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Above: The month of April in the Baltimore metro area, measured by home sales and newly signed contracts.

Sales last month were the second-lowest on record, while contracts were third-lowest (the recessionary years of 2008 and 2009 were worse). Year-over-year drop in the number of sales, which compares now vs. the homebuyer-tax-credit days of April 2010: 17 percent.

The average home sale price in the metro area was about $255,000, down nearly 4 percent.

You can find data by jurisdiction at Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence.

A truly perfect way to compare home prices so as to avoid skewing doesn't seem to exist -- every measure has its downsides. But I like to see repeat-sale indexes that compare the same homes over time. Here's how Clear Capital's repeat-sale index looks for the Baltimore metro area (the city plus the surrounding suburbs) in the last five years:

Continue reading "April home sales drop 17 percent in Baltimore area" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Housing stats
        

If homes keep selling at the current pace, how long would it take to clear everything currently listed for sale?

Here's the answer for the Baltimore region in March, the most recent statistics from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, keeper of the multiple-listing service:

Anne Arundel County: 8.4 months

Baltimore City: 9.8 months

Baltimore County: 8.5 months

Carroll County: 12.4 months (longest in the region)

Harford County: 7.8 months

Howard County: 6 months (shortest in the region)

Metro area overall: 8.7 months

To put that into perspective, the rule of thumb is generally that six months reflects a balance between demand (buyers) and supply (sellers).

Continue reading "Supply vs. demand in the Baltimore-area housing market" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Rents in Baltimore (and many other places) are climbing, while typical home prices -- thanks to foreclosure sales -- are way down.

Here are just two of the implications:

--Affordability problems for renters. Twenty-seven percent of renter householders in the Baltimore region were spending more than half their pre-tax income on housing and utilities in 2009, up from 19 percent in 2000, according to a new report by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. And rents have only increased since.

That's a "severe" cost burden, but plenty of others are feeling pinched. Nationwide, just half of renter households were spending less than 30 percent of their income on housing and utilities in 2009, the center said.

"In the last decade, rental housing affordability problems went through the roof," co-author Eric S. Belsky of the joint center said in a statement. "And these affordability problems are marching up the income scale. In real terms, it means more people have less money to spend on household necessities such as food, health care, and savings."

--New grist for the buy vs. rent debate. HotPads.com, a real estate site that shows both rental and for-sale listings, says rents in Baltimore have jumped nearly 5 percent in the last year while asking prices for city homes on the market have slumped nearly 30 percent. That's lowered the "rent ratio" -- its buy vs. rent calculation -- to the point that buying is "more favorable" than renting, the company says. The median home price is 7.8 times higher than a year's worth of rent in Baltimore, down from 10.7 a year ago, HotPads says.

Continue reading "Baltimore rents up, home prices down" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)
Categories: First-time home buyers, Housing stats, Renting
        

Market intel for home buyers and sellers alike: See how quickly homeowners in various ZIP codes reduce their asking prices and by how much.

The new data, from real estate search site Trulia, maps price reductions across the country -- as well as the likelihood of a second drop in asking prices.

Two examples:

In 21244, Windsor Mill in Baltimore County, the first reduction is 10 percent and comes in an average of 49 days. Probability of a second reduction: 44 percent. In the much pricier Monkton, 21111, the average reduction is 9 percent and takes a lot longer in coming -- 152 days. Sellers are also less likely to drop their list price again.

While we're on the subject of interesting links, here are two more -- both on property taxes: 

Continue reading "Asking-price reductions on homes, by ZIP code" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Housing events, Housing stats
        

That roller coaster pictured above is the last year of the housing market in the Baltimore metro area, at a glance.

In blue -- the figure with the huge swoops and swoons -- is the year-over-year change in the number of homes sold, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm. In red is the year-over-year change in the average home sale price.

The federal first-time homebuyer tax credit is what drove the number of home sales up, and then down, last year. Buyers rushed to beat the deadline (contract signed by April, closing by June -- later pushed back to September). And at least some of them were people who would otherwise have bought later in the year.

Sales began to rise again in December, but new numbers for March show we're back in declining territory year-over-year. Probably not a tremendous shock, since we're now (and for the next few months will be) comparing against the height of the 2010 tax-credit boost. The April 2010 bump was particularly large, nearly 40 percent.

Even when the tax credit was in effect, however, market activity wasn't back to normal for the region. About 1,960 homes changed hands in the metro area in March 2010. That's 100 more than this March and 330 more than March 2009, but it's less than all the previous Marches in the last decade.

In March 2000, when fewer people lived in the area, more than 2,370 homes changed hands.

Here's the news story about March home sales, complete with an anecdote about a Baltimore County home seller who found people were more interested in his house when he offered to throw in a '93 Taurus (with low mileage) as a freebie.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: First-time buyer tax credit, Housing stats, Repeat buyer tax credit
        

If you're trying to sell a home, you might want to move it to Montgomery County.

Economists generally say supply and demand is in balance if it would take six months for all the homes currently for sale to find buyers at the current pace. More months and buyers have the edge. Less, advantage sellers.

Montgomery stood at about 5.5 months in February, lowest in the state. Do the months' supply calculation for pending deals -- this is normally a busy time of year for contract-signing -- and it drops to just over three.

Call it the Washington effect. Maryland counties with the lowest inventory compared with sales and contracts are all Washington suburbs, either officially (like Frederick and Prince George's) or unofficially (like Howard and Anne Arundel, which send as many commuters south as north).

Counties at the other end of the spectrum are largely on the Eastern Shore. Garrett, in far Western Maryland, had the highest months' supply no matter how you cut it -- sales (more than 70 months) or contracts (just over 40 months).

Here's a chart showing pending deals, inventory and how they compare for February: 

Continue reading "Housing market in balance in some counties, way off in others" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Housing stats
        

When I did a Q&A with real estate agent Pat Hiban at the beginning of 2009, he said foreclosure resales were about to hit in a big way, prices would continue to head downward and the higher end of the market had been "severely beaten up."

Now he returns as a guest blogger -- the first of what I hope will be many -- to talk about a new market shift he's seeing.

Hiban (pictured above) has been in the business for more than 20 years and runs the Pat Hiban Real Estate Group with Keller Williams Crossroads Realty. He's a billion-dollar agent who focuses primarily on Central Maryland and as far south as Washington, and he has a book coming out later in the year.

Take it away, Pat:

-------------

Very recently, the market has taken a major turn upward with regards to activity. I have one property on Nursery Lane in Gaithersburg with 23 offers on it -- multiple offers escalating the list price significantly. This is a single-family home listed at $630,000.

I currently have 51 properties pending whereas I am used to about 30. As I write this, we are negotiating 12 offers on 12 different properties and on an average day we may only be negotiating two or three.

The housing statistics for the state of Maryland show pending units are up 34 percent compared with February 2010. Because the number of active listings has only decreased by a mere 7 percent, this tells me that it's not an inventory shortage that has created a frisky market but a large increase in buyers.

Why have so many buyers come out of the woodwork?

Four very technical factors exist today that didn't even a year ago:

Continue reading "Pat Hiban: Surge in part of Md. housing market as buyers, investors leap" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (29)
Categories: Expert guest post, Guest post, Housing market experiences, Housing stats
        

Here's a housing market that had a seemingly rip-roaring February: Kent County's average sale price soared 317 percent.

If I thought sellers in that Eastern Shore county were actually getting more than four times the amount that comparable homes sold for a year ago at a time when prices overall are falling, I'd be rushing out there to write a story. But here's a clue that it's apples-to-pizza -- well, besides the ginormous $96,000-to-$400,000 jump: Nine homes changed hands in the 20,000-person county last month. (A year ago? Eight.)

It's not just about the skewing that can come with averages. The median price jumped 158 percent. The thing is, people have the unhelpful habit of buying the homes they want rather than exactly the sorts of homes that sold a year ago, so price comparisons can get hairy.

Take Kent County in November, for instance: prices dropped 60 percent.

While we're having fun with statistics, there's always Somerset County, another small jurisdiction on the Eastern Shore. The number of home sales there rose 125 percent in February vs. a year earlier -- from four to nine.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Housing humor, Housing stats
        

The housing market continued two trends in February: the number of home sales rose while prices dropped.

Sales increased 7 percent compared with a year earlier, less strongly than in January but still heading in the right direction (if we're ever going to see inventory get back to a normal level, anyway).

Average prices fell 5 percent to just under $250,000 -- about $12,000 below the average price six years earlier.

Here's the county-by-county breakdown, which ranges quite a bit.

The other economic report out Thursday was Maryland job numbers, and that was a doozy. The U.S. Department of Labor, which benchmarks state figures every March, revised 2010 numbers so sharply that the 25,000-job gain the state appeared to have in the 12 months ending in December turned -- poof! -- into about 4,500 jobs. Quite a depressing magic trick.

Here's the story about both that report and home sales, the latter of which gets second billing.

You can find the housing-market figures from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems on the website of its stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence.

A few more stats:

New pending deals, contracts that were signed in February and will later turn into sales if all goes smoothly, rose 25 percent from a year earlier. That's the same increase reported in January.

New listings rose, too -- 8 percent. There were nearly 16,000 homes on the market in total in February.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Housing stats
        

While we wait for February home sale statistics, here's something to whet your appetite: the official 2010 tally for the Baltimore metro area from the keeper of the multiple-listing service. (Earlier figures were preliminary.)

Overall, the number of home sales dropped about 3 percent in the region -- the city and surrounding suburbs -- last year vs. 2009, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence.

Prices dropped not quite 1 percent on average, to $274,000. (The decline in median price, for those who prefer that measure, was 2 percent -- with half the homes selling for less than $235,000 and half selling for more.)

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Where can you afford to purchase a home if your limit is $250,000 or less? Many more places than a few years ago.

The average sale price was between $50,000 and $250,000 in 40 ZIP codes in the Baltimore metro area last year, spread around every jurisdiction in the region except pricey Howard County. (A few more were under $50,000, but that seems like the point below which sales are much more likely to be homes in bad repair picked up by real estate investors, rather than by first-time buyers.)

They account for almost one-third of ZIP codes in the metro area that had at least a handful of home sales last year. Many more had some sales in that price range -- just not enough to put the average there.

Neighborhoods are a more useful categorization in the city than ZIPs, and just over 120 in Baltimore had average prices between $50,000 and $250,000 last year. That's close to two-thirds of the neighborhoods with at least a handful of sales.

Here's the list of ZIPs and city neighborhoods:

Continue reading ""Starter home" neighborhoods" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Categories: First-time home buyers, Housing stats
        

Land is a critical part of homebuilding. Those homes have to sit somewhere, right? But while house prices have fallen significantly -- about 19 percent in the Baltimore metro area since peaking, according to Moody's Analytics -- the cost of the ground, not so much.

"Land and lot prices have not declined substantially in most of the Baltimore metropolitan area," said Kenneth Wenhold, Mid-Atlantic regional director for Metrostudy, which does market research for homebuilders. "Perhaps to a degree in the exurban areas (Cecil County, Washington County, Eastern Shore), but for the most part, prices are surprisingly close to where they were at the peak."

Why? In an email interview, Wenhold blamed it on "very tight" lot supplies, "to the point of seeing bidding wars between builders who need to refill their pipelines." The Baltimore region is "among the tightest markets" for available lots, similar to places such as San Francisco and southern coastal California, he said.

"The result is that builders are constructing smaller, less feature-rich homes on very expensive lots, skewing the lot-to-home [cost] ratio to over 40 percent in some cases, as compared to 28 percent to 30 percent during the peak (2003-2005)," he said. "Builders are only able to do this as they have cut overhead to the bone, are spending fewer dollars in sticks, bricks and labor (since it is a smaller house), and accepting much thinner margins."

Typical lot prices in the region range a lot:

Continue reading "Land prices haven't followed home prices off the cliff" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Housing stats, New developments
        

How many homes are people buying, and how much did they pay?

The go-to source for that information has long been the National Association of Realtors. But real estate data firm CoreLogic says the trade group's tally of the number of homes sold is too high by a substantial amount:

Historically, the CoreLogic existing sales data have covered about 85% to 90% of all NAR’s existing home sales data. However, in 2006 NAR’s sales data became elevated relative to the CoreLogic, MBA [Mortgage Bankers Association], HMDA [Home Mortgage Disclosure Act] and Census sales related data, and that trend has continued and become more pronounced through 2010. There are several reasons for the divergence, including benchmarking drift, more sales going through MLS systems due to consolidation and a lower share of for sale by owners (FSBO) home sales. Net, NAR’s existing home sales data are overstated by about 15% to 20%.

A CoreLogic economist told The Wall Street Journal that he sees it as the difficulty of adjusting data accurately in times of big changes -- the National Association of Realtors' statistics are built on a sample -- rather than a "gaming-the-numbers issue."

But some were quick to see ill intent from a group whose members benefit if people think it's a good time to buy. "Where are the subpoenas and Congressional hearings?" asked trader Karl Denninger on the Seeking Alpha blog, suggesting that people overpaid for homes as a result of relying on faulty sale data.

The National Association of Realtors is re-examining its numbers, The Wall Street Journal said. (Reuters reported afterward that the NAR was calling any overcounting "relatively minor.")

So what about the local figures? 

They're reported by the company that runs the area's multiple-listing service, Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (specifically, its stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence). If there's any intentional adjusting going -- starting with a sample and extrapolating upward or trying to account for unlisted sales -- it would be news to me. So that seems to be a more solid starting point, at least. But the recent back-and-forth that came when MRIS's stats arm redesigned its statistics database wasn't exactly confidence-inspiring.

One useful comparison is the multiple-list sales vs. all recorded arms-length home sales. The multiple list should account for most but not all the arms-length sales, because not all homes are listed before they're sold. The state Department of Assessments and Taxation, as it happens, just shipped me data on all arms-length sales recorded in 2010.

Baltimore metro area home sales last year as originally reported by MRIS: just under 21,500.

Baltimore metro area home sales last year as recorded with the state: just over 23,900.

Does that mean everything's hunky dory? I'd need prior years to see if the difference is typical, and since I'm on vacation this week I don't have access to most of my files. But at least the multiple-list figure is less than the state's figure.

Statewide, that's not the case.

MRIS covers most of Maryland, with the rest handled by the Coastal Association of Realtors. Together, they show just under 50,900 homes sold last year, according to the tally by the Maryland Association of Realtors.

The state, meanwhile, has records of 47,817 arms-length home sales -- about 3,000 less than were supposedly sold on the multiple list.

Hmm.

Thoughts?

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Bottom line on the Baltimore metro area's housing market last year: There is no bottom line. It really depends which part of it you're talking about.

Read about the variety in Sunday's story, assuming you haven't already.

Check out the maps showing the change in average price and sales in the region's ZIP codes. (There are two maps of city neighborhoods, too, but darned if I can find them online. I'll update with links if they're out there.)

Play with the searchable database of ZIP codes to see specifics. (Thanks to Patrick Maynard for handling the programming on that feature!)

Click here for an Excel chart with the city neighborhood data on one worksheet and the ZIP code data on another.

Have fun with photo galleries of the most expensive places and other housing-market extremes, put together by biz editor Liz Hacken.

Thoughts, suggestions? Comment away.

How did 2010 treat your neighborhood?

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Check out the paper this weekend: If everything goes according to plan, you'll see the the story we do every six months that looks at housing-market trends down to the ZIP code and city neighborhood -- the one with lots of color-coded maps showing what's up and down. ("The story with all the maps," in fact, is how I always explain it in the newsroom.)

Online, you'll find a database with the numbers behind the maps, aimed at readers who want specifics rather than ranges.

Links to come, once they're live.

And then I'm taking some time off. I've spent so much time squinting at numbers that I've had a continual headache the last two weeks. (Time for a new prescription, maybe ...)

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Foreclosures and short sales -- but particularly foreclosures -- were a sizable chunk of the Baltimore region's housing market last year. Nevada we're not, but distress sales increased across our metro area.

Here's the breakdown for 2010, with numbers pulled by Joseph T. "Jody" Landers III of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' multiple-listing service:

The number of Maryland mortgages in default moved downward last year after several years of rapid escalation, as colleague Lorraine Mirabella reports.

How have you been affected by foreclosures and short sales -- if at all?

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Distress sales, Housing stats, The foreclosure mess
        

Almost 2,000 homes in the Baltimore metro area went under contract last month, deals that will turn into sales down the road if all goes smoothly. That figure, which includes contracts with contingencies, jumped more than 40 percent from a year earlier, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems.

Just to put that in perspective: The region saw the most newly signed contracts for a January since 2007, but it's still well below the '07 figure of about 2,400 -- not the mention the 2,600-plus signed in go-go January 2005.

MRIS's stats arm, RealEstate Business Intelligence, now shows how many contracts were signed in a particular month as well as how many deals are pending in total. That's interesting because it helps tell the story of dragged-out sales, the ones that take far longer than the traditional 45 to 60 days to get to the settlement table.

Consider:

Continue reading "Baltimore-area homes under contract on the rise " »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Think it's impossible to sell a home quickly these days?

Last month, 100 homes in the Baltimore metro area were on the market and back off -- with a contract -- in one to 10 days. So it can be done. (About 130 more sold in 11 to 20 days, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, keeper of the local multiple-listing service.)

All told, about 350 homes -- a quarter of the properties sold in January -- were on the market for one to 30 days.

But there are plenty of homes that sit and sit, too. Just among those selling last month, about 150 were listed for at least six months before going under contract. Two were on the market for -- wait for it -- at least two years.  

Here's the range:

Continue reading "Home sales, super quick and very slow" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Housing stats
        

January home sale figures came out yesterday morning, but it wasn't until well into the afternoon that I knew what the numbers actually were.

The first set I saw said 25 percent more homes sold compared with a year earlier in the Baltimore metro area. But wait -- elsewhere on the website run by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems' stats arm was an area profile that pegged the increase at 23 percent. So I called for clarification and was eventually shipped over a third set of numbers showing a 15 percent increase.

And the percentage change on that one was calculated wrong.

Oh, my aching head.

The final answer, according to MRIS's RealEstate Business Intelligence, was a 17 percent increase. (Average prices fell 5 percent.)

RealEstate Business Intelligence said it was opening-day glitches after a massive switchover from an old sales-statistics database to a new one, which is slicing the multiple-listing-service numbers in ways we couldn't get at before. Interested in how many homes were snapped up in 10 days or less? Now you can find that out.

"We recalculated everything this month for the past 13 years," said Margaret O'Sullivan, vice president of operations at RBI. "Before, it wasn’t queryable. It was like a big spreadsheet. ... In order to be more dynamic going forward, we had to go through these pains."

Continue reading "How much, exactly, were home sales up in January?" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Housing stats
        

While you're waiting for January home sale stats to appear today, here are two very different stories to read that both have something to say about the housing market:

First, Crofton-based Beltway Title and Abstract Inc. has had its licensed suspended by the state after auditors discovered that more than $1 million in escrowed funds intended for real estate transaction costs had been misappropriated, the Maryland Insurance Administration said Wednesday. The money, pulled out over a period of seven months, was spent on business expenses, the state said.

Here's the insurance administration's license-suspension order.

Second, the new Census 2010 numbers show population growth -- and decline -- across the state. According to the count, Baltimore has 30,000 fewer residents than it did a decade ago. As one colleague pointed out, that works out to a loss of eight people per day. ("I hope people aren't leaving because of me - I have so many arms to embrace you!" quipped @manwomanstatue, the self-proclaimed "most hated public art in Charm City.")

The city has successfully challenged census estimates before: The 2003 figures were revised upward by nearly 15,000, for instance. But the decennial census is a count rather than an annual estimate.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said in a statement that the 30,000-person loss was the city's smallest since the decade of the 1950s. (Baltimore's population peaked in 1950 at about 950,000 before dropping by nearly 11,000 by 1960.)

Still, the newest loss figure is striking for a decade that brought an inflow of housing-bubble newcomers and ended at a time when moving -- if you had to sell your home first -- was no easy proposition. (Still isn't, but it's a new decade now.)

Thoughts?

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Closing costs, Housing stats, Moving
        

If you bought a home in the Baltimore metro area three years ago and put down less than 20 percent, you're probably underwater on your loan.

That's the takeaway from a new housing analysis by Fiserv, which says home prices in the region dropped 17 percent between summer 2007 and summer 2010.

Fiserv, provider of the data that fuels the Case-Shiller index, expects a decrease of not quite 2 percent in the metro area -- that is, Baltimore and its surrounding suburbs -- over the 12 months ending this summer. Prices in Washington, by contrast, "have already stabilized," the firm says. (It produces its forecasts with Moody's Analytics.)

Here's another forecast to add to your score card if you're keeping track at home: Fiserv and Moody's are predicting that three-quarters of metro areas will see prices stop falling by the end of this year, with all leveling out by the end of next year.

But don't count on significant price gains anytime soon, the firm says: 

Continue reading "Report: Baltimore-area home prices down 17% since mid-2007" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)
Categories: Housing forecasts, Housing stats
        

Baltimore's new release of government data at OpenBaltimore lets you see how much the owners of each property are paying without having to look it up one at a time at the city's property-tax lookup site.

It's a huge file, the sort requiring a database manager such as Access to analyze, but you can page through the display on the site itself and do some sorting there as well. Top amount: $4.3 million -- that's for an office tower. Lowest: thousands of $0s for religious, nonprofit and government properties.

Also at OpenBaltimore: parking fines, 311 calls and a lot more.

Find something intriguing? Please share.

I'm not trying to make this a property-tax week, by the way. I'll have some completely non-tax-related topics for you soon.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)
Categories: Housing stats, Property taxes
        

Source: Maryland Department of Planning

Sales of all types of homes have really plummeted in the state since the peak days, as you can see from this new Maryland Department of Planning chart. The number of single-family homes didn't just drop well below its 2002 level, for instance, but also below the 2002 level for townhouses -- which had accounted for about half as many sales as detached homes that year.

Here's how the decline by housing type breaks down:

Continue reading "The housing-bust hit to houses, townhouses, condos" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Housing stats
        

If, while waiting for your turn in the shower, you occasionally ponder whether most Americans have more bathrooms than you do, HSH Associates has just the infographic for you. The financial publisher pulled statistics from the American Housing Survey to create the typical house. Drumroll, please:

Related Resources: Mortgage Rates and Mortgage Calculator at HSH.com

How does that match up with your living arrangements?

Here are some Baltimore-specific statistics for owners and renters alike, drawn from the separate American Community Survey:

Continue reading "Is your home typical?" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Housing stats
        

You never know for sure if the first upturn in home sales after a stretch of decreases is a blip or a trend until you can look back with 20-20 hindsight, but a homebuilding market research firm is ready to call December the start of a new era.

"The fact that sales are positive on a year over year basis, and that contracts continue to trend higher in many submarkets, indicates that the 'Tax Credit Hangover' is done," writes Kenneth Wenhold, Mid-Atlantic regional director for Metrostudy -- referring, of course, to the federal homebuyer tax credit that phased out last summer.

And here's something you don't see every month: The Baltimore suburbs saw a bigger turnaround than the Washington metro area. (The Baltimore area was worsening from a seller's perspective in the fall, so we have farther to go.) Sales rose eight percent in the local suburbs Metrostudy focuses on -- Anne Arundel County, Baltimore County, Cecil County, Harford County and Howard County -- while, for instance, falling 3 percent in Northern Virginia and 12 percent in D.C.

Here are a few more of Wenhold's Baltimore-area market musings:

Continue reading "Metrostudy: 'Tax credit hangover' is over" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Source: Metropolitan Regional Information Systems

Above: The craziest decade for the housing market, at a glance.

Preliminary numbers from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems show buyers in the Baltimore metro area -- the city and surrounding counties -- closing deals on about 21,500 homes last year, down 3 percent from the year before.

That's about the same number of homes that sold in 2008.

MRIS releases official year-end figures in February, often higher as a result of last-minute additions by real estate agents, so I'm using preliminary numbers only to allow for fairer comparisons. It'll be interesting, once we have the full results, to see if the effect of the federal home buyer tax credit was a wash. (Preliminary figures show a sales gain of 3 percent in 2009, counterbalanced by the 3 percent drop last year.)

Check out colleague Lorraine Mirabella's story about the newest market trends, including the sales increase in December after five months of losses. (I, alas, am home sick.)

Do you think the increase in December means the number of home sales is stabilizing? (In case you're wondering, December 2009 sales weren't nearly as high as November 2009, originally the deadline for the home buyer tax credit, but they did post a 10 percent gain over the previous December.)

One other nugget of information to chew on: The number of pending deals, which will turn into sales if all goes as planned, rose 10 percent last month vs. a year earlier.

Prices are another matter. The average fell about 7 percent in December.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Baltimore homes for sale with at least one price reduction now make up 40 percent of the market, according to real estate site Trulia.

That's higher than all but three of the country's large cities -- Minneapolis (44 percent), Mesa, Ariz. (43 percent) and Phoeniz, Ariz. (42 percent). Nationally, 27 percent of homes for sale have had at least one price drop.

Average reduction in Baltimore, according to Trulia: 12 percent, or more than $23,000.

Trulia focuses on cities rather than suburbs, but there are plenty of homes in the counties around Baltimore that are listed for less than they once were, too. (You can find pages and pages of "reduced!" listings in Annapolis, Columbia, Owings Mills and other communities.)

HousingTracker.net, a separate site that looks at what people are asking for their homes, says the typical listing price so far this month is $222,000 in the Baltimore metro area as a whole. It was $325,000 in December 2006 -- a more than $100,000 change in four years. (Unfortunately, HousingTracker.net doesn't go back much farther than that.)

While we're on the subject of home prices:

Continue reading "Prices reduced on 40% of Baltimore homes for sale " »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: For sale, Housing stats
        

High-income Baltimore neighborhoods might have retained more of their housing-bubble gains than moderate- and low-income communities, a new analysis by Johns Hopkins graduate students suggests.

The public-policy students, who wanted to understand how the drama-filled last decade affected 14 varied city neighborhoods, found that home prices in 2009 were far above their 2000 levels in most places -- but as a group, the high-income spots held up the best.

The hardest-hit neighborhoods weren't low income. Frankford and Belair-Edison -- both moderate-income areas in Northeast Baltimore -- saw values fall so much during the bust that they ended the decade with prices slightly below their 2000 levels, after accounting for inflation. (I know we don't normally think of home prices in an inflation-adjusted way, but the students wanted to try to get at the real change in value.)

Rising foreclosures seem to be a key reason for the big price drops in those two neighborhoods.

Read on to see how median home sale prices changed in the analyzed neighborhoods. And tell me if you're surprised by the community that retained most of its boom-time price levels. (Hint: It's an exception to the high-income-neighborhood trend.)

Continue reading "How Baltimore neighborhoods fared in the 2000s" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Home sales in the Baltimore metro area continued to plummet in November, but the number of newly signed contracts rose for the first time in months — a hopeful sign.

About 1,530 homes changed hands in November, according to figures released Friday by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, the Rockville company that runs the area’s multiple-listing service. That was a 32 percent drop from a year earlier, when buyers were rushing to beat a deadline for a federal tax credit for first-time purchasers.

The $8,000 credit was ultimately extended so buyers could sign contracts as late as April 30. Contract-signing swooned afterward — until November broke the streak. Buyers and sellers agreed to 100 more contracts last month than they did a year earlier, a 6 percent increase.

That means sales could stop falling soon. Contracts often turn into settled deals in a month or two.

The average sale price in November was essentially unchanged from a year earlier, at just over $260,000, Metropolitan Regional Information Systems said.

Sales numbers are solid, but prices should be taken with a grain of salt. Averages can be skewed up or down if the homes that sell one month aren’t comparable to those sold the previous year.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Housing stats
        

We'll find out how many people bought homes in November -- and for how much -- later this morning. In the meantime, chew on these figures from October:

--35 percent of the homes sold in the Baltimore metro area were financed with FHA-insured loans

--32 percent were financed with conventional loans

--21 percent were bought with cash, though real estate investors tell me that category includes the deals they struck with money loaned to them by other local investors

--7 percent were financed with VA-insured loans

--3 percent were assumptions, where the buyer took on the seller's loan

--The rest were financed in other ways, including just over half a dozen in which the buyer's "lender" was the seller

The numbers come from the stats arm of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, which runs the area's multiple-listing service.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Housing stats
        

It might be a statistical quirk, but the average price for small single-family houses in the Baltimore metro area -- two bedrooms or less -- jumped more than 20 percent in October.

This October: about $227,000. Last October: about $187,000.

Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, which runs the region's multiple-listing service, tracks the change in average price by a variety of home types, and everything else is down year-over-year. But there seems to be a trend of single-family house prices holding up better -- at least on average -- than everything else.

Consider townhouses and rowhouses: 

Continue reading "Home prices up for smaller single-family homes?" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Housing stats
        

About 120 homes sold for at least $1 million in the Baltimore metro area during the first half of this year. Most expensive: $3.9 million in Baltimore County. (The house pictured above, part of the Sun's "top properties" photo gallery, sold for $1.37 million in Edgewater this spring.)

How does that compare with earlier days, I wondered? So I checked. One of the nice things about swimming in numbers -- being able to satisfy your curiosity.

Pricey sales are actually up quite a bit from the first half of 2009, when 83 homes sold in that high-end category, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems data.

But they're down a lot compared with the first half of 2005 -- which probably won't surprise you all, since that was the height of the bubble. More than 230 homes sold for at least $1 million during those six months, nearly twice as many as in the first half of this year. And the top of the top was pricier, too: $5.2 million for digs in Anne Arundel.

That doesn't mean there's nothing really pricey up for sale at the moment in Maryland. There's this "lodge," for instance.

And lots of people are hoping their homes will end up in the $1 million sales club -- 610 as of October in the Baltimore metro area. Of those, 10 have asking prices of $5 million or more.

The $1 million-plus crowd is just one price category, so these stats don't fully answer reader Chappy10's question about how sales have changed in the various ranges in the last several years. But it was the quickest and easiest: a lot less to tally than other prices. I do plan to do a full analysis when time allows, Chappy10.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Housing stats
        

So an Eastern Shore home -- and its thousands of acres -- is on the market for $30 million. But what's the most someone has ever paid for a house in Maryland?

Answer: $15 million. At least, that's the most paid for a home changing hands on the multiple-listing service, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems.

The 11,500-square foot house, built in 1986 on a little over 4 acres, is located in Potomac, a Montgomery County community usually preceded by the adjective "tony." The current owner bought it in August 2005, just about the peak of the market as measured by sales pace.

Here's the aerial view -- you can get to the street view from there.

Continue reading "Priciest home sale in Md.: $15 million" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Nearly 40 percent of Baltimore homes listed for sale have had at least one price reduction, compared with 27 percent nationally, according to real estate site Trulia.

Baltimore's figure is a record high for the city -- at least for the last 18 months, which is when Trulia started tracking asking-price movements. Fourteen other cities broke their previous records as well. Check out the map above, which Trulia put together. (The message that went with the asterisk didn't copy over, but it's just a heads-up that the records go back a year and a half.)

Baltimore ranks fourth among the 15 cities with record highs. Minneapolis is No. 1 with price reductions on 46 percent of listings.

Continue reading "Price reductions hit (recent) record in Baltimore" »

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Categories: For sale, Housing stats
        

If you enjoy soaking in raw data about the local housing market, you'll want to update your website bookmarks.

Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, which runs the area's multiple-listing service, has moved its publicly available home-sale statistics to a different site as part of its new RealEstate Business Intelligence arm. Most of the monthly data you could find on the old site (number of sales, prices, pending deals) has been moved over, with the rest slated to come later, the RBI folks say. There's new stuff there, too.

RBI calculates the month-over-month change for you as well as the usual year-over-year, for instance. It also put together charts that show at a glance the change in the last several years by home sales, pending deals, average and median price, etc. And there's a list of the biggest movers (up and down) in the Baltimore-Washington area by price, sales and the like.

If you prefer videos, you'll find some here.

The firm is set to roll out more options this week as it promotes a new "premium product" for customers -- agents, brokers, appraisers -- that is designed to make slicing the data simpler. (What's the trend for four-bedroom Colonials in Baltimore County, for instance.)

If you're not in that target audience, the revamped site will still mean more to look at than you had access to before, said Jonathan Hill, president of RBI. There's a heat map for the region that you can adjust to show days on market, new listings and other useful statistics, plus you'll get a ranking of every jurisdiction covered by MRIS.

Continue reading "A new look for local housing statistics" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Here's a snapshot of how the housing market in the Baltimore metro area looked in October:

--Home sales dropped 30 percent vs. a year earlier, when buyers were rushing to get the first-time home buyer tax credit

--The number of homes changing hands totaled less than 1,600, the smallest amount in the month of October for at least 12 years (that's how far back the records go)

--Average prices fell just over 1 percent, to about $272,000 (though remember to take this calculation with a grain of salt)

--"Ouch" stat of the day: It would take four-and-a-half years to sell all the $1 million-plus homes on the market at the current pace of deal-making. (Home sales in this price range dropped, unlike in September.)

The new figures, released by an arm of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, show the drop in sales ranging by county. The biggest decline was 39 percent in Baltimore County. The smallest was 19 percent in Howard County, closely followed by Harford County's 22 percent drop.

Every time I write about home prices in the Baltimore metro area, someone inevitably looks at the average price and thinks that's for the city. So just to be clear: Metro area. Metro area. Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Carroll County, Harford County and Howard County. (The federal definition includes Queen Anne's County as well, but most local number-crunchers leave that Eastern Shore jurisdiction out.)

You can see the average price by county (and Baltimore City) right here.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Housing stats
        

The slump in home prices was less severe in the Baltimore metro area over the past four months than it was in most large regions, according to a new analysis that compares recent housing-market performance with the spring period.

Prices fell less than 1 percent in the metro area, ranking the metro area sixth, says real estate data firm Clear Capital. One other metro area had a smaller drop -- San Jose, Calif. -- while four posted price increases.

That's a turnaround from earlier in the year, when the Baltimore area showed up on Clear Capital's "lowest performing" list. The region apparently didn't feel the upward pull of the first-time home buyer tax credit as much as some markets, places in hangover mode now that the federal incentive is gone:

Clear Capital's "lowest performing" list is peppered with "lower-priced markets that reacted positively to the tax credits of the last eighteen months, and are now giving back the short term gains, and then some," the firm says.

The number of home sales slumped in our metro area post-credit, however. In May, the month after the deadline to sign contracts, new pending deals declined more than 30 percent compared with a year earlier and even more sharply vs. April, according to separate figures from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems.

Clear Capital's figures do show prices in the Baltimore metro area down 4.7 percent year-over-year, despite the smallish quarterly drop. That's out of sync with most of the regions on the "highest performing" list -- two-thirds are up vs. a year ago.

Here are those top 15 markets, as measured by quarter-over-quarter change:

Continue reading "Small declines in Baltimore-area home prices" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Q: Did any price ranges see home-sale gains in September, despite the overall drop?

A: Why, yes. So glad you asked.

You probably won't be shocked to hear that sales in the under-$100,000 category increased, compared with a year ago, since that's the most affordable to buyers and is also the niche most attractive to investors. But guess what also rose? Sales of $1-million-plus homes.

I analyzed sales data from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems for Baltimore and the surrounding suburbs, and here's what the stats showed: 

Continue reading "The price ranges with rising home sales (surprise!)" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Here's how home prices in the Baltimore metro area have changed over the decade, according to a new housing-market index. If it looks like the roller coaster is more up than down, FNC Inc. -- a mortgage technology firm that put the index together -- says you're not seeing things.

Prices in the Baltimore region appreciated more since 2003 than other large metro areas, according to FNC. Using a combination of sale prices, appraisals and property records, it calculates a 7 percent annual increase in our area. U.S. home values rose a little more than half a percent annually over the same period, FNC says.

Continue reading "Over the longer term, a big Baltimore-area increase in home prices" »

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Categories: Housing stats
        

Maryland's drop in home prices was 19th highest nationwide in August, a new CoreLogic report suggests.

The real estate information firm says the state's year-over-year drop was 2.9 percent, including the effect of distress sales such as foreclosures. (Without those sales, prices were essentially unchanged from Aug. 2009, the company said.)

Biggest slider -- Idaho, down 14 percent.

Eleven states, though, posted price increases, according to CoreLogic's calculations. Topping the list was Maine, up 5.8 percent. That's with distress sales. Without them, the state's home prices actually dropped, CoreLogic says, down nearly 1 percent. (It doesn't wade into the possible reasons for that brain-teaser.)

Bottom line, from CoreLogic's perspective, is that price decreases are bleeding into more communities:

"Price declines are geographically expanding as 78 out of the largest 100 metropolitan areas are experiencing declines, up from 58 just one month ago," Mark Fleming, its chief economist, said in a statement.

The Baltimore metro area is on the list: Prices dropped 4.5 percent. (Counting only the non-distress sales, price fell about 2.6 percent.)

CoreLogic crunches its stats using repeat sales of single-family homes, an attempt to avoid comparing apples (i.e. four-bedroom Colonials) to oranges (i.e. one-bedroom ranchers).

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Categories: Housing stats
        

The typical asking price for a home in the Baltimore metro area is just under $232,000 these days, according to HousingTracker.net.

Four years ago? Just over $335,000.

Among pricier homes, the drop comes to $136,000 over the same stretch of years, to about $363,000. The price drop on less-expensive homes is $86,000, to just under $150,000.

Homes on the market now aren't necessarily close stand-ins for the ones offered to buyers four years ago, so there's always a question of apples vs. oranges -- but however you cut it, it's a notable change.

On a related note: The newest report from real estate site Trulia shows 35 percent of homes for sale in Baltimore City have had at least one asking-price reduction. That's up slightly from September. Average reduction: 12 percent.

It's not that no one's selling, of course. But all the recent talk about where things stand for homeowners in the mood to move has depressed Wonk reader Gina:

Continue reading "Asking-price decreases on local homes: $100k in 4 years" »

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Want a visual for the balance of power in the Baltimore metro area housing market? This is pretty much it.

The months of supply -- how long it would take to sell all homes on the market at the current pace  -- dropped to hardly anything during the housing boom/bubble  and zoomed upward after that. (The 2009 dip came as buyers reacted to the federal tax credit for first-time purchasers.)

Low supply equals power to the sellers -- you can really see why buyers found homes purchased out from under them if they didn't bid immediately back in the 2003-2005 days. High supply? That's a buyer's market, with sellers pressed to lower prices and cover closing costs. Economists normally say the point at which supply and demand balance out is around six months.

The chart above, which I put together using Metropolitan Regional Information Systems data, looks at the changing balance of power in the month of September from 1999 onward. It's a simple calculation -- number of homes listed for sale divided by the number of sales in that month. (Some suggest dividing listings by the average number of sales for the past 12 months, to smooth out seasonal gyrations, but since we're comparing September to past Septembers, I figured the newest numbers would be best.)

So, those of you (actively or nominally) in the market for a home: Do you feel as if you've got more power now than you did a year ago? Or are other market forces blowing you off course?

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (22)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Baltimore is less stressed, from a housing perspective, than most metro areas -- or at least that's what a Wall Street Journal analysis suggests. For a truly relaxed region, though, you'll need to move to North Dakota.

The newspaper's Real Time Economics blog put together a stress test that adds three stats for each metro area: the percentage of borrowers spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, the share of residents without health insurance and the percentage of people without a job (including retirees and others not working by choice).

By that measure, housing stress in the Baltimore metro area -- the city plus the suburbs -- comes to 76.3. People paying a lot of their income on mortgages were nearly 37 percent of all borrowers last year, 10 percent of residents didn't have health insurance and just over 29 percent weren't working.

That's 16th least-stressed among the 49 largest metro areas, the WSJ says. (Not sure why they featured 49 and not 50 ...)