My City Talk column today is about the slight year-over-year increase in Savannah metro area home prices and the likelihood that we could see prices change relatively little for an extended period of time. I cite Zillow’s latest estimates for…
NBC’s Today show had a piece this morning about the changing lifestyle choices of Americans, who are moving into denser urban areas and core suburbs in significant numbers. We’ll likely never see “the end of the suburbs” in any true…
Americans are driving less — a trend that started in 2005, before the recession. We’re increasingly seeing young American adults opt for living in places that provide a variety of transportation options, especially cities with significant infrastructure for bicycling and walking.
So what happens over the next decade or two, as aging suburbanites need to sell their homes? Will younger middle-class and upper middle-class Americans buy those homes in the numbers that will be necessary?
There were some very strong numbers released this morning for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. In addition to the monthly data for the 10- and 20-city composite indices, we also got the national index, which is updated quarterly. All of…
Jessica Leigh Lebos has a provocative and interesting column in Connect Savannah this week: Nightmare on 61st Street. It’s definitely worth reading. There are some fluid elements to this controversy, and my next column doesn’t come out till Sunday. I…
OK, this really isn’t photos of Drayton Tower as much as photos from the freshly renovated international style apartment building at Liberty and Drayton streets here in Savannah. Check out my Tuesday City Talk column about last Thursday’s grand opening,…
From the AJC’s More than 40 percent of Georgia homes are underwater: “The nationwide data, complied by Zillow at the end of last year, identified the worst 1 percent of ZIP codes in terms of the percentage of mortgage holders who owe more than their homes are worth. Georgia has nearly a quarter of those ZIP codes, most of them arrayed in a crescent around Atlanta’s southern flank. Michigan, the next hardest-hit state, has only half as many ZIP codes in the worst 1 percent.”
There’s a really interesting post by James Hamilton at Econbrowser that explores a central question of the housing bust: did those who were primarily responsible for making bad loans realize that they were making bad loans? In other words, did…
From the S&P/Case-Shiller press release for home prices through December, Home Prices Closed Out a Strong 2012 According to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices: Data through December 2012, released today by S&P Dow Jones Indices for its S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price…
From one of Calculated Risk’s post last night: I’d like to mention a few key economic themes that I will write more about soon: • Residential investment (RI) has bottomed and is now contributing to economic growth. Since RI is…
I expected house prices to bottom at some point in late 2012 or early 2013, but they bottomed last spring. Even with the usual seasonal declines this winter, it is exceedingly unlikely that prices will fall below their lows of the winter of 2011/2012.
I was accused of being a crazy pessimist years ago too when I wrote about the Savannah housing market, but I called the bust pretty well — although I should have been more aggressive much sooner in my City Talk columns. But that pessimism wasn’t bias — it was just a realistic assessment based on objective data.
With numbers like these in housing, which is typically a strong driver during economic recoveries, we could see a stronger economy in 2013 than many are expecting.
One of the big stories of 2012 has been the recovery in home prices across the nation. Home prices apparently bottomed in the spring: even if there is some considerable seasonal weakness this winter, it seems unlikely that home prices…
