Demand Pushes Median Price of U.S. Homes Over $200,000

The median price of a previously owned American home topped $200,000 for the first time in April, capping the biggest increase in a quarter century as consumers bought housing at a record pace.Low mortgage rates and increased employment drove resales of houses, condominiums, and co-ops up 4.5% from March to 7.18 million units at an annual rate, the National Association of Realtors said yesterday in Washington. The price for all housing types rose 15% from April 2004 to a record $206,000, led by condominiums and co-ops and houses going for more than $500,000 dollars in California.“Every single month this year the annualized sales pace exceeded the record-breaking number last year, and we’re gaining steam,” said James Gillespie, chief executive of Parsippany, N.J.-based Coldwell Banker Real Estate, in a telephone interview. Coldwell is a unit of Cendant Corporation. “This year we very well could see a new high.”Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan last week said the housing market has “a lot of local bubbles” and “a little froth.” Investors’ increased confidence that the Fed is keeping inflation at bay is holding down long-term interest rates, and average mortgage rates fell in recent weeks.“Consumers are still apparently confident enough about their personal financial situations to undertake the housing investment despite the recent softness of confidence surveys,” said the chief economist at Banc of America Capital Management in Boston, Lynn Reaser. “Mortgage rates have remained less than 6%, which has helped fuel demand, and builders report that sales are strong across most price ranges.”Resales were a record 6.78 million last year. The April high suggests that sales may even do better in 2005, said David Lereah, chief economist for the Realtors. The April figure “is a bit unexpected, but so is the performance of mortgage interest rates, which have been lower than expected,” he said.Sales rose in three of the four U.S. regions, led by a 7% increase in the South and a 5.8% gain in the Midwest. Sales stalled in the West.The 15% annual increase in the median price was the biggest since November 1980. The price of single-family homes rose by the same amount, to $203,800. Condominiums and co-ops rose even more, increasing 18.4% to $223,600.The increases may support the idea that purchases of real estate for investment are rising. Condo and co-op prices rose 28% in the South from a year earlier. They rose 23% in the Northeast. The biggest gain in prices for single-family houses was 22% in the West, to $309,800. In California, the median price surged past half a million dollars for the first time, to $509,230, from $452,680 a year earlier, the state’s Realtors Association said.“There seems to be, anecdotally, a rise in speculative investing in certain areas of the country, such as Florida, Arizona, some big metropolitan areas like New York, and Washington,” Mr. Lereah said in a telephone interview. “To me now, it’s raising a yellow flag.”Thirty-six percent of all home purchases last year were second homes, Mr. Lereah said. Twenty-three percent were bought as investments and 13% as vacation homes, Mr. Lereah said. He said there was no “national bubble” – or speculative surge in prices – although “there are some local markets that are beginning to take on a life of their own and could be bubbling over.”Mr. Greenspan is among the economists who say the price increases can’t go on indefinitely.“There are a few things that suggest, at a minimum, that there’s a little froth in this market,” he told the New York Economic Club on May 20. “This big price surge is going to soon simmer down.”Mr. Greenspan and other members of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s policy-making arm, discussed the direction of prices. “House price appreciation was expected to moderate over coming quarters, but a number of local real estate markets were still regarded as ‘hot,’ with signs of possible speculative excesses in some areas,” according to minutes that were released yesterday.The committee raised the target for overnight loans between banks to 3% from 2.75%, an increase that hasn’t passed through to mortgages. Policymakers were determined to offset rising inflation risks and “regarded the recent slower growth of economic activity as likely to be transitory,” the minutes said.Single-family houses accounted for most of the increase in April, rising 4.5% to a record 6.28 million annual pace from 6.01 million in March. Sales of condos and co-ops rose 4.8% to 899,000.Sales received a boost from 30-year mortgage rates that have exceeded 6% only twice since the end of July. The average rate dropped to 5.71% last week, according to Freddie Mac, the no. 2 provider of money to mortgage lenders, after Fannie Mae. That compares with a four-decade low of 5.21% in June 2003. The average rate for the past decade is 7%.The Realtors may lower their forecast for 30-year mortgage rates to 6.1% for the end of the year. That compares with forecasts of 6.2% and 6.4% earlier this month.Jobs and population growth contributed to demand. The economy added 2.2 million jobs in 2004, the most since 1999. Non-farm payrolls have expanded an average 211,000 a month so far this year, close to 217,000 in the first four months of 2004. The U.S. population grew 1% to almost 291 million people in the year that ended July 1, figures from the Census Bureau show.“You’re going to have areas of the country where you have high speculation where values could stabilize or even deteriorate,” said Angelo R. Mozilo, chief executive of Countrywide Financial Corporation, the Calabasas, Calif., company that is the biggest U.S. mortgage lender. “But on the national level there’s no reason to believe that values will collapse, because the demographics are so compelling.”

Demand Pushes Median Price of U.S. Homes Over $200,000

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