Register Real Estate Advisors

HOUSTON (Houston Chronicle) – Real estate experts are optimistic about the Houston market’s prospects in 2012. Several recently shared their forecasts with Nancy Sarnoff of the Houston Chronicle.   Here’s what they had to say.

Housing
Houston is going to see somewhere around a 5 percent increase in home sales and maybe as much 2 or 2.5 percent increase in median price, according to Real Estate Center Research Economist Dr. Jim Gaines. He said that’s still lower than the historical norm, but those are better numbers than the last two or three years.

Housing Permits
Bohlke Consulting Group Vice President Gary Latz predicts that the annual 2011 number will be 21,500 permits. This momentum will carry forward into 2012 due to strong job growth and low interest rates. The firm projects a minimum of 5 percent growth in new-home permits for calendar year 2012 over calendar year 2011. This translates to nearly 22,600 permits.

Foreclosures
Both foreclosure postings and actual foreclosures in Harris County declined year-over-year from 2011 compared with 2010. Amanda LeCureux, managing partner with Foreclosure Information & Listing Service, expects these declines to modestly accelerate in 2012.

Apartments
Apartment Data Services President Bruce McClenny said available high-end units are scarce, and it will take up to 18 months before any significant number of new units become available. He said to expect around 9,000 units to be delivered in 2012 and approximately 10,000 units in 2013.

Office Space
Transwestern Executive Vice President J. David Baker expects continued strong job growth to generate four to six million sf of positive absorption. He said the only thing that might hold it to the low end is energy and energy engineering companies not finding enough qualified people.

Retail
Wulfe & Co. President Ed Wulfe expects to see at least a 25 percent increase, or approximately 1.5 million square feet, in new retail construction in 2012. This will exceed the total amounts built and opened in each of the previous two years. Active growth within Loop 610, particularly of supermarkets, will prevail.

Bank of America is making a process change that will reduce cycle time.  Effective Dec. 1, 2011, Bank of America is reducing the cycle time to process all short sales submitted with an offer in which the homeowner is eligible for the Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternative (HAFA) program.

When a short sale is submitted with an offer and the homeowner is HAFA eligible, we will no longer halt work on the file while waiting to contact the homeowner. HAFA eligible homeowners are no longer required to call our Short Sale Customer Care to indicate whether they will participate in the program.

Instead, real estate agents can indicate a homeowner’s HAFA interest by submitting the necessary documents to Equator within 14 days. During that 14-day window, the short sale will continue moving forward. By the end of the 14 days, if we have not received the requested HAFA documents, we will continue to process the file as a traditional short sale.

This change is being made because we are transitioning the processing of all HAFA short sales with an offer from our outsourced vendor partners to Bank of America associates. A Bank of America specialist will be able to seamlessly transition a file from our traditional process to the HAFA process, thus improving customer service and the agent experience. Our outsourced vendor partners will, however, continue to process all short sales submitted without an offer.

At the end of 2009, 10% of mortgages had at least 1-payment past due and another 5% of mortgages were in the foreclosure process.  At the end of the 3rd quarter of 2011 8% of mortgages had at least 1-payment past due and another 4% of mortgages were in the foreclosure process.  Currently, there are fewer homes being foreclosed on.  Many families are concerned about inflation in the US.  It has caused prices to rise throughout the country by about 64% over the last 20 years.  That’s an annual increase of 2.5%. An example that looks grim is that a person who retired December of 1990 on a fixed income with no cost of living adjustments would have 61% of their purchasing power as of December of 2010.  That surprising example keeps consumers teetering between purchasing homes and staying in their current homes.  The good news for Houston is that our current housing inventory has reduced, interest rates are low, and we have the most stable housing market in the country.  Consumers buying homes in Houston, Texas have a lot more buying power than home buyers in other areas of the country.

Richard Peach, senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Board of New York is promoting moving foreclosures by giving incentives to military service members. His idea is to allocate certificates to 2.5 million service members who served in Afghanistan and Iraq that could be used as a down payment on a foreclosed home in the Fannie or Freddie portfolio. He said this could help to absorb the inventory and stabilize the housing market? What do you think?

DALLAS (Dallas Morning News) – A recent study by the Dallas Morning News suggests that DFW’s housing market woes may have
hit bottom.

According to the study, home foreclosures in the first half of this year were down more than 10 percent from the same period last
year, and more than 25 percent from the same period in 2008.

Lenders foreclosed on more than 7,800 DFW homes during the first half of this year, reports Addison-based Foreclosure Listing Service. The
total value of those properties was almost $779 million.

Foreclosure rates are highest in places such as Celina, Anna, Princeton, Lavon, Little Elm, Lancaster, Glenn Heights, Forest Hill, Blue Mound and Fate.

D’Ann Petersen with the Federal Research Bank of Dallas said foreclosures bear watching and may remain elevated until there’s sustained improvement in
the housing market.

“The housing market is still wobbly, but it does appear to have reached a bottom,” she said.

DALLAS (Dallas Morning News)
– Metroplex home foreclosure filings for September are down 19
percent from a year ago, marking the seventh month in a row
that they have fallen year over year.

More than 4,700 homes are scheduled for sale at next month’s foreclosure
auctions, according to Addison-based Foreclosure Listing Service (FLS). So far
this year, home foreclosure filings are down 12 percent from the same period
last year.

Denton County had the biggest decline, with filings down 28 percent. Dallas
County had a 19 percent drop.

Some 42,380 homes in the four-county area have been threatened with
foreclosure so far this year, compared with more than 48,000 foreclosure
filings by the same time last year.

A growing number of those homes are “upside-down,” meaning they are worth
less than what is owed on the mortgage.

“Upside-down postings have surged 34 percent in the past year, with 28
percent of the homes posted so far this year involving homes in this no-win
situation,” said FLS President George Roddy.

Latest surveys show that about 12 percent of Dallas-area residents with a
home loan owe more than their property is worth.

A Foreclosure Seminar will be held at Register Real Estate Advisors in Spring, Texas on Thursday, September 1, 2011. This foreclosure counseling will help consumers understand how they can stop the foreclosure process and sell their home as a short sale. It will also look at how to buy short sales and explain foreclosure purchasing. If you or someone you know is at risk of losing their home, please have them come to this seminar or contact a Realtor in confidence for help. Please forward this information to them becuase there is help for distressed homeowners. The seminar will be held at 1614 Louetta Rd. Ste I Spring, Texas, 77388 from 6-7pm. These informative seminars will be hosted by Realtors and will sometimes have guest speakers such as Title Company Representatives, Lenders, Inspectors, Appraisers, and other industry experts. We hope you will attend and bring your questions!

AUSTIN (Austin Business Journal)
– The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and NeighborWorks
America have given Texas more than $135.4 million in federal grants to
help homeowners at risk of foreclosure.

The Emergency Homeowners Loan Program provides funding to help
homeowners who fall behind on their mortgage
payments because of involuntary unemployment or underemployment
caused by the economy or medical conditions.

One in every 1,074 homes in Texas received a foreclosure filing
last month.

SAN ANTONIO (San Antonio Express-News, Dallas Morning News)
– Foreclosure-tracking firms are reporting drops in foreclosure rates around
Texas, but at least one housing expert cautions against jumping to conclusions.

“What we’ve had is a slowdown in foreclosure activity because of the
‘robo-signing’ scandal,” Dr. Jim Gaines told the San Antonio Express-News.
Gaines is a research economist with the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M
University.

Foreclosure postings around the rest of the country have dipped because of
fraud allegations leveled against financial institutions where employees
“robo-signed” volumes of foreclosure paperwork without verifying the
information. Gaines said Texas could be following the same pattern.

San Antonio-based foreclosure tracking firm RexReport reported 6.9 percent
fewer foreclosures in the first half of 2011 than during the same period last
year.

Foreclosure Listing Service said postings in the
Dallas-Fort Worth area are down 7 percent so far this year compared
with the first six months of last year.

On the other hand, 2011 could, in retrospect, be seen as the
turning point.

“At the local level, it really could be some early sign that we’ve gotten
over the hump of the big wave of problems of foreclosures. It’s a relatively
small drop-off, but at least it’s a drop-off,” Gaines said.