Home Prices Soar, Er, Go Up A Little
I don't know if you happened to catch the news that home prices rose in August for the third consecutive month according to the well-respected Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller report. After three years of decline, prices this summer advanced at an annualized rate of nearly 7 percent nationally.
News was not quite so bright in the Tampa Bay area. Here, the price index increased a much more modest 0.4 percent. Experts blame rising unemployment, faltering consumer confidence locally, and the overall lack of speed of the economic recovery as reasons for the slow growth in the Tampa Bay region. I think you can also point to our traditional bugaboos of property taxes, homeowners insurance premiums and lower incomes as also contributing to the slow growth in real estate prices.
Robert Shiller, one of the creators of the report and a noted economist, said that he expects prices to rise for the next few months but can't forecast beyond that. Shiller said that this does not seem to be a time for home prices to be booming, so the future holds a lot of uncertainty. Despite some signs of economic recovery, economists feel that home prices could dip again due to unemployment and an expected rise in foreclosures combined with the end of the tax credit for first time home buyers. Overall, however, prices rose in 15 of the 20 major metro areas surveyed by the Case/Shiller.
I guess the question is whether this is the beginning of the end of all this, or just some kind of anomaly in the data. Only time will tell.
News was not quite so bright in the Tampa Bay area. Here, the price index increased a much more modest 0.4 percent. Experts blame rising unemployment, faltering consumer confidence locally, and the overall lack of speed of the economic recovery as reasons for the slow growth in the Tampa Bay region. I think you can also point to our traditional bugaboos of property taxes, homeowners insurance premiums and lower incomes as also contributing to the slow growth in real estate prices.
Robert Shiller, one of the creators of the report and a noted economist, said that he expects prices to rise for the next few months but can't forecast beyond that. Shiller said that this does not seem to be a time for home prices to be booming, so the future holds a lot of uncertainty. Despite some signs of economic recovery, economists feel that home prices could dip again due to unemployment and an expected rise in foreclosures combined with the end of the tax credit for first time home buyers. Overall, however, prices rose in 15 of the 20 major metro areas surveyed by the Case/Shiller.
I guess the question is whether this is the beginning of the end of all this, or just some kind of anomaly in the data. Only time will tell.
-30-
posted by Terry Ward at 6:16 AM
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