REI Wealth Magazine Featuring Paul Finck | Page 115
Here are just a few statistics that support the
issues with the current real estate market
according to Heavens:
"We have more customers than we have houses to
sell, and we are getting multiple offers on houses."
Shad Bogany
• “At the current sales pace nationwide, the
supply of previously owned houses would
take 7.8 months to exhaust, not including
the vast "shadow market" (houses whose
owners are waiting to sell until real estate
recovers) and "distressed properties"
(foreclosures and bank repossessions).
• The inventory of unsold new houses is at
9.1 months of supply, and the volume for
sale is flat at 234,000 homes — a 30year
low.
• At the end of the fourth quarter, 24 percent of all U.S.
homes with a mortgage were worth less than the loan
balance. The housing vacancy rate in the fourth quarter
was 2.7 percent.
• The U.S. homeownership rate is 67.2 percent, down
from its peak of 69.2 percent in fourthquarter 2004 and
decimated by record foreclosures.”
Booming Populations Contribute to Shortage
in Some Areas
With the population in the United States continuing to
shift to areas with temperate weather, positive economic
conditions and those that don’t have issues with fresh
water supplies, some areas are seeing a boom in
population that no level of construction can meet. Connor
Hyde writes, “The Sugar Land and Missouri City area
experienced a record number of home sales in 2014.
However, population growth in the area paired with
various construction woes has led to a low home
inventory, causing a rise in home prices and a dip in sales
since January. Since 2012 Sugar Land and Missouri City
real estate agents have classified the area’s housing market
as a seller’s market due to the decreasing inventory of
available homes and climbing home costs. As a result,
many of Fort Bend County’s masterplanned communities
are struggling to keep up with the demand brought on by
the influx in population in the region.”
In fact, these changes to the market have driven up the
prices of the homes that are currently on the market. Hyde
quoted a local real estate agent, Shad Bogany, who has
seen these changes first hand, “‘We have more customers
than we have houses to sell, and we are getting multiple
offers on houses,’ said Shad Bogany, a real estate agent
with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate in Sugar Land
and Missouri City. ‘We do not have a lot of houses to sell,
[and] we have the builders, who have been the biggest
pushers of home sales in Fort Bend [County], behind in
construction.’”
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