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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Affordability conundrum: Prices dip, yet homes remain out of reach
A cooler real estate market isn’t doing much to ease the affordability squeeze, according to the National Association of Home Builders’ latest Housing Opportunity Index, released today. That’s because rising mortgage rates have offset a dip in prices.
It says the typical Palm Beach County family could afford 29.9 percent of the homes that traded hands in the second quarter. That’s down from 30.5 percent in the first quarter.
NAHB says the Palm Beach County median home price fell slightly to $286,000 in the second quarter from $295,000 in the first (it includes condos and single-family homes, which aren’t combined in Realtor reports). And it says median family income remains at $64,400.
In the Treasure Coast, NAHB says the typical family could afford 20.5 percent of the homes that sold in the second quarter, down from 22.7 percent in the first quarter. That’s based on a median home price of $250,000 (down from $255,000 last quarter) and median family income of $54,600.
Springfield, OH, was the nation’s capital of affordability: 91 percent of homes sold there were affordable to a typical family. Los Angeles, where fewer than 2 percent of homes were affordable, remained the least affordable housing market.
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Sputtering market ‘moving in the right direction,’ state’s largest broker says
The state’s largest real estate broker has a sanguine view of what he acknowledges is “a correction” in Florida’s once-blistering housing market.
“All of this was not unexpected,” says Budge Huskey, president and chief operating officer of Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate.
After all, Huskey says, 36 percent annual appreciation was more an anomaly than a birthright. And while he acknowledges that the slowdown in recent months hasn’t exactly been fun, he says once-ballooning inventories are beginning to shrink a bit.
“We think it’s moving in the right direction,” Huskey says of the all-important supply-and-demand equation.
As for beleaguered agents, Huskey is telling them that this is the sort of market that weeds out the serious agents from those who flocked to real estate because it was the hot industry.
“This is the very best time to build your business,” Huskey says.
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