Booming Populations Contribute to Shortage in Some Areas
MANY U. S. COMMUNITIES SEEING REAL ESTATE INVENTORY AND LEAD SHORTAGE LEON MCKENZIE
Here are just a few statistics that support the issues with the current real estate market according to Heavens:
•“ 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.” 3
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.” 4
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.’” 5