Trends

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Pending Home Sales Finally Reverse Course in March

It’s been a rough year for pending home sales, but March finally brought some good news to the beleaguered housing stat. Pending home sales reversed a longstanding trend of declines in March, posting their first increase in nine months, according

Houston’s Housing Market is Not Selling as Fast as You Think

We keep hearing about how time on market continues to fall, but what do the averages tell us about how fast our market really is? Earlier this week, we reported that nationwide, time on market has fallen seven days

5 Peculiarities in the New Construction Marketplace

Fresh numbers dropped this week on the nation’s new construction markets, but there remain oddities and curiosities. The Census Bureau this week released fresh numbers on new single-family home sales, and it was a verifiable bloodbath. At a seasonally

Real Estate, Once Again, America’s Favorite Long-Term Investment

As a long-term investment strategy, few consumers were willing to touch real estate during the downturn, but new research suggests that has changed. Back in 2011, few people wanted to touch real estate with a 20-foot pole – what

Price Per Square Foot Skyrockets in Houston

March was a very good month for price per square foot in our housing market, according to Movoto. Those signs of a housing recovery just became a bit brighter. According to the latest State of the Real Estate Market

6 Actually Important Findings From NAR’s Existing-Home Sales Report

While everyone fixates on the specific rate of existing-home sales, here were the similarly important findings in the report. By now, you’ve probably seen the headlines stemming from NAR’s latest existing-home sales report, namely that sales declined 0.2 percent

Lending Standards Have Barely Budged in the Last Year

We keep hearing from trade groups that lending standards remain high, and the data would seem to support that claim. It’s arguably the most common motif among housing trade groups today – lending standards remain high, and are limiting

Rent Takes a Much Bigger Bite Out of Houston Resident’s Incomes

We’ve been hearing for some time that rents are increasing, but new numbers from Zillow present the issue in a new light. Rising rents, like falling home prices, have been one of the prevailing narratives of the post-bubble housing

Why the Suburbs Aren’t Going Anywhere

Reports of suburbia’s death,  it would appear, have been greatly exaggerated. It’s been a common trope in post-bubble news coverage – the United States, after several decades of embracing suburban sprawl, is returning to its urban roots and, once

Taxpayer Deductions Very Level Across the Houston Area

Deductions are a big part of homeownership; how common are they here in our local marketplace? If you know homeownership, you know the mortgage interest tax deduction, the great grandmaster of tax deductions in the U.S. Indeed, homeownership and

Builder Confidence Inches Higher in April

Though still low, builder confidence showed improvement in April, according to new NAHB numbers. Builder confidence recovered somewhat from March to April, inching up from 46 to 47, according to the latest Housing Market Index from the National Association

New Home Construction Highs and Lows in March

Housing construction performed below expectations in March, according to the latest Census Bureau numbers. March was a month of good and not great news for new construction, according to the latest Census Bureau report, with housing starts rising 2.8

Housing Inventory in Houston Just Continues to Fall

It’s been a verifiable roller coaster ride the last couple years when it comes to housing inventory, but are we finally out of the woods? Housing inventory in the Houston housing market continued its downward slope in March, falling

Houston Among Nation’s Most Sprawling Urban Areas

In the age of new urbanism, where does our metro area rank in terms of density and sprawl? “Density” and “sprawl” have become big buzzwords in housing the last couple of years, and for good reason. With gas prices,

All-Cash Sales in Houston Remain Quite Prevalent

The housing market has made considerable strides in the last 18 months, but all-cash sales are still in abundance. We’ll cut to the big stat – in Jan. 2014, the latest month for which data exists, 34.2 percent of

The Relative Rarity of Million-Dollar Listings in Houston

Sure, our area has some wonderful luxury housing markets, but in the grander scope of the market, how common are those million-dollar listings? We may hear about luxury real estate on a consistent basis, but luxury listings in the

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