Real Estate New York
Market Update August 2010
Real Estate New York continues 10% of our commission rebate up to $1,000 details
Real Estate New York continues REBATE while Fed program ends
After much soul searching, the sales associates and brokers of Real Estate New York have agreed to extend our 10% commission rebate (details) until September. For while this is a direct cut in our income at a time when we are all coming out of a tough year, the real estate market in New York is still struggling toward recovery. We believe our aid in helping New Yorkers will benefit our community for years to come. We are all in this together.
Also see our discounted Full Service Seller Commission
If you were fortunate enough to write a contract before April 30, 2010 you can cash in now and not as a tax deduction next year. read more
Click to comment on this article
U.S. Foreclosure Woes Not Felt in Albany
Rising foreclosure rates that are plaguing much of the U.S. are not mirrored in the Albany area or upstate New York.
A mid-year report released Thursday by RealtyTrac Inc. of California shows foreclosure filings in five upstate markets — Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Utica/Rome — rank at the low end of the 206 markets measured nationwide
Meanwhile, more than half of the metropolitan areas with a population of 200,000 or more posted year-over-year increases in foreclosure activity.
According to RealtyTrac, there were 592 foreclosure filings in the Albany area from January through June, or one for every 644 homes, up 0.17 percent. That placed Albany at 198th on the list.
“While we’re seeing early signs that foreclosure activity may have peaked in some of the hardest-hit markets, foreclosures continued to rise in three-quarters of the nation’s metropolitan areas in the first half of the year,” said James Saccacio, CEO of RealtyTrac. “The fragile stability achieved in many local housing markets hinges on improvements in the underlying economy, specifically job growth. If unemployment remains persistently high and foreclosure prevention efforts only delay the inevitable, then we could continue to see increased foreclosure activity and a corresponding weakness in home prices in many metro areas.”
Read more from The Business Review
Click to comment on this article
New home Sales Rebound, Prices Keep Falling
New home sales rose in June, suggesting that the housing market is beginning to recover.
The housing market is finally seeing a rebound of sorts: Sales of new single-family homes rose in June by a stronger than expected 23.6 percent over May's record low.
But how builders achieved those new home sales is less encouraging. The average selling price of a new home dropped to $242,900, the Commerce Department reported Monday. That's the lowest selling price for June since 2003 and the biggest year-over-year decline since the depths of the great recession in April 2009.
June's surge in sales "is the first good piece of news for the housing market in a number of months," writes Paul Dales, an economist with Toronto-based Capital Economics, in an analysis. "Nonetheless, it doesn't alter our belief that high unemployment, tight credit conditions and low confidence will mean that housing activity will remain uncomfortably weak for some time."
Read more from The Christian Science Monitor
Real Estate New York Launches iRENY.mobi
You can now use your smartphone: Blackberry, iPhone, Android, Blazer, Nokia, Opera Mobile, Palm, Pocket PC, Samsung Windows CE, Zune, Motorola Browser, and more to search the MLS, request showings, set up automatic cell phone alert listing notifications(as noted below), and First Look auto emailed listings at: http://iRENY.mobi (beta)
In addition, you can just visit the main Real Estate New York website at http://RENY.net with a smart phone and you should be taken to the mobile site.
Click to comment on this article
Home Tweat Home
Get Best Home of the Day Tweets FREE* at: http://twitter.com/HomeTweatHome
formerly: myReny, which is now the user name for
Capital Region Real Estate News
Each day Real Estate New York staffers pick the best
new listings based on condition, price, location, size,
and esthetics. Previous days Tweets are also available for a fast overview of the best
and most recent new listings.
Also, receive instant free* cell phone alerts when a home that
meets your requirements on First Look comes on the market.
Alerts are sent as voice or text messages.
Click to register for cell phone for alerts.
Privacy statement: your phone number is never given out for any reason.
Nor will anyone call uninvited.
*Your cell phone carrier may charge for the text message or voice notification.
Not Getting First Look Listings?
A number of people have told us that our First Look listings have stopped arriving in their email box.
Most often this is caused by the clients spam filter stopping the email listing from arriving.
Usually this can be remedied by including: Email@ParagonMessaging.com as a Safe Sender or white listing the above email address as safe. If help is needed to do this you may contact:
Dennis Maier 518-312-4030 extension #1 or 888-749-3384 toll free
Tell a Friend
If you know someone who may benefit from our monthly market update please forward this page. To sign up for our free, no obligation, market update click here: Market Update SignUp
__________________________________________________________Archives
We've been asked to again include links to past market updates. But since our stories link to other web sites over which we have no control we only want to link to our most recent issues. Otherwise, the article links may fail to work as they once did.
The Skinny: Video Market Update
The Greater Association of Capital Region Realtors XXXXXXXXXX If video window does not appear allow blocked content. |
New Home Sales Rebound 24%
New home sales rebounded in June from the record low hit the previous month but remained sluggish.
New home sales increased 23.6% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 330,000 last month, up from an downwardly revised 267,000 in May, the Commerce Department reported Monday. Sales year-over-year fell 16.7%.
The June sales pace is the second slowest ever on record since the Commerce Department began tracking the data in 1963.
But it was slightly better than the annual rate of 310,000 economists were expecting, according to a consensus survey by Briefing.com.
"While the increased rate was positive, it's a bit of a head fake based on the decline we had with May's lower revision," said Anika Khan, Wells Fargo economist. "And if we look at other indicators, like mortgage application volumes and builder sentiment, we can see that the housing market remains very weak.
Home sales had surged in March and April as homebuyers scrambled to sign contracts ahead of the April 30 deadline for the tax credit. But sales plummeted 40% in May, the first month after the incentive expired.
Khan said the end of the tax credit will likely trigger a couple more months of "payback," but then the housing recovery will pick up, though at a snail's pace.
"We're coming from extremely depressed levels, so it will probably be another two years before we get to a point where we see anything even vaguely close to a normalized rate," she said.
Click to comment on this article
Credit Scores Slide Downward
Credit scores for a quarter of American consumers are now too low to qualify for a mortgage or credit card.
Americans are sliding down the ladder of creditworthiness – and it's not at all clear that the slippage will end anytime soon.
In normal times, about 15 percent of consumers falls into the poor credit category with a FICO score under 600. In April, that figure stood at 25.5 percent, according to a recent FICO report.
That's a huge jump, involving millions of Americans, who now no longer generally qualify for a mortgage, a car loan, or a credit card.
The damage isn't limited to the lowest tiers of creditworthiness. At the top of the heap, the share of people with scores of 800 to 850 – essentially perfect credit – also slid from 18.7 percent to 17.9 percent in just two years. That was the biggest slide of any category during that period.
While that percentage is still well above the historical norm of about 13 percent, it suggests that the strengthening of Americans' balance sheets during the decade has now been thrown into reverse across the spectrum of borrowers.
Read more from The Christian Science Monitor by Laurent Belsie
Click to comment on this article
Credit Rescoring Can Help You Qualify for a Mortgage
Rapid rescorings by independent, legitimate firms use procedures approved by the three major credit bureaus. They can help correct errors or omissions that are dragging down your scores.
Call it the great real estate disconnect of 2010: Mortgage rates have been at half-century lows and home prices have stabilized, but applications for mortgages to buy houses have declined most weeks during the last three months, as measured by the Mortgage Bankers Assn.
What's going on here? Shouldn't 30-year fixed-rate loans well below 5% be flying off the shelf? Economists say part of the reason is the expiration of the federal home purchase tax credits, which encouraged thousands of buyers to accelerate their transactions — starting with mortgage applications — into the early spring months to qualify for the April 30 contract deadline.
But other key factors are at work: More stringent underwriting standards imposed by private lenders, declining consumer credit scores in the wake of the recession, and rule changes by Fannie Mae, and the Federal Housing Administration have all combined to make qualifying for a new mortgage more challenging than it has been in years.
Take credit scores. While most lenders have raised the bar on minimally acceptable scores, Fair Isaac Corp., creator of the widely used FICO score, says there has been a deterioration in millions of Americans' scores during the last two years. More than 25% of all consumers who have active credit files — roughly 43 million people — now have FICO scores of 599 and below. On Fair Isaac's scale, which runs from 300 (highest risk) to 850 (lowest risk), a 599 score is considered unacceptable by most lenders.
In fact, since the housing boom went bust, lenders prefer to see minimum scores well into the 700s. Fannie Mae, for instance, gives its best combinations of rates and fees to applicants with 740-or-higher FICO scores.
How can buyers deal with the tougher rules? Tops on the list: Be aware that there are work-arounds and creative solutions to some of the roadblocks. For example, say your credit scores appear too low to qualify for the mortgage you need. Ignore the online and junk-mail "credit repair" come-ons that promise miraculous FICO-score improvements overnight. They are often rip-offs and may not even be legal in some instances.
However, an experienced mortgage broker or retail loan officer can get your credit file into a "rapid rescoring" program that just might get you the legitimate lift you need to qualify. Rapid rescorings performed by independent credit reporting firms — most of them members of the National Credit Reporting Assn. — use procedures approved by the three major credit bureaus to make direct changes to the information contained in credit files.
Read more from The Los Angeles Times by Kenneth R. Harney
Click to comment on this article
New York’s Consumers See a Bright Future for the Real Estate Market
Consumers here see it generally as a poor time to sell and feel very strongly that it’s a great time
to buy.
The Consumer Real Estate Sentiment Scores in the Albany Metropolitan Statistical Area show a slightly negative view of the current overall market during the past 12 months at ‐6.9, but New Yorkers in this area have a very positive outlook for the future of real estate as indicated by the 30.6 overall future score. Consumers here see it generally as a poor time to sell and feel very strongly that it’s a great time to buy. The Albany MSA is very optimistic about the next 12 months with both future sell and future buy scores showing that great improvement for both buyers and sellers is expected.
The Albany MSA scores indicate consumers here felt less negatively about the current overall market and current selling conditions than their counterparts across the state. Consumers were more optimistic about the future of real estate, returning higher scores for overall future, sell future and buy future than the statewide scores.
Click to comment on this article
Mortgage Rates and Trends
The link to up to the minute New York State mortgage information seems to work better than presenting the actual graph. Click for up to the minute mortgage rate information
Buyers' versus Sellers' Market Report
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The graph above shows the number of sales in a given month divided by the number of homes on the market in the four main counties of the Capital Region.
July sales figures show a continued reversal into seller territory. This is a direct result of the large number of properties on the market (5776) and the lack of buyers since the Stimulus expired.
*This ratio can be used to determine whether we are in a buyers' or sellers' market as indicated in Dennis Maier's article on Market Timing featured in eZine Real Estate. In general, if it would (theoretically) take less than 6 1/2 months to sell the current inventory it's a sellers' market. If it would take more than 9 months to sell all the homes on the market it's a buyers' market.
Market Statistics as of August 1, 2010
Average Sale & List Prices for Albany, Schenectady, Rensselaer, Saratoga Counties
The average list and sale prices for the month of July 2010 show another reversal of trend back to heretofore lows. The unexpected dip in average sale prices was indeed the result of the Federal tax credit's end April 30th, 2010 that required closing (until extended) by June 30, 2010
The average asking price to sale price has decreased slightly from 97.19% in June to 97.06% for July. The number of sales at 1,133 is way up from 808 last month, which also reflects the rush to close mandated for the buyer stimulus.
a note about the Skinny video (below left). The data used for our immediate update is calculated as of the first day of the month while other sources such as the Greater Capital Region of Realtors uses final stats compiled much later. In addition, the Skinny reports data from the entire Capital Region MLS rather than the four main counties, as is reported above.