Aaannnddd… They’re Off!

Posted on May 16, 2022 by grim

From the Star Ledger:

New home listings up 40%. What the market is like in all 21 N.J. counties.

Anyone who has shopped for a house in this red-hot market can tell you, there aren’t many to choose from.

The bidding wars and sky-high prices that have been the norm for the past two years were driven largely by the low inventory of homes for sale.

But the latest figures for new home listings show a 41% gain in new listings from February to March. Statewide, 9,281 homes hit the market in March, versus 6,566 new listings in February, according to the most recent data available from New Jersey Realtors.

The biggest increases were in Middlesex, Bergen and Monmouth counties. The smallest increases in new listings month over month were in Hunterdon, Salem and Essex counties, according to New Jersey Realtors.

Despite the month-over-month gains, the stock of houses for sale in New Jersey is still woefully low.

New listings were down 10.5% from a year ago. And if the trend of 9,200 new listings were to continue for the rest of the year, coupled with the number of current listings, that would put new listings for the year statewide at about 105,000.

“It sounds like a lot but it isn’t,” said Robert White president of New Jersey Realtors and a broker with Coldwell Banker in Spring Lake.

In 2018 there were 131,000 new listings and in 2019 there were 128,000. Inventory was already dropping before the pandemic and has slipped since.

“In a better market there would’ve been closer to 20,000 new listings,” White said.

Posted in New Jersey Real Estate | 307 Comments

NJ’s new tax rebate

Posted on May 13, 2022 by grim

From Patch:

$900M In Tax Relief Could Be Coming To 1.8M NJ Homeowners, Renters

Nearly 1.8 million New Jersey homeowners and renters could get some money back from the state under Gov. Phil Murphy’s new property tax relief program proposed in his 2023 budget.

Murphy highlighted the ANCHOR (Affordable New Jersey Communities for Homeowners and Renters) Property Tax Relief Program, which proposes to pay out $900 million in property tax relief to qualified homeowners and renters, during a visit to Somerville on Thursday.

“I am proud of the forward progress this administration is making on the affordability challenge we inherited several years ago,” said Murphy. “Through the ANCHOR Property Tax Relief Program, more New Jersey taxpayers will receive the support they need to offset the costs of property taxes, making our state stronger, fairer, and more affordable for all.”

This new program would replace the Homestead Rebate Program, which only affected 470,000 homeowners annually and provided an average benefit of $626. Renters were also not eligible for the current Homestead program.

Under the new program, homeowners making up to $250,000 per year will be eligible to receive an average $700 rebate in 2023 to offset property tax costs. Also, renters making up to $100,000 per year will eligible for a rebate of up to $250 to help with rent increases due to property taxes.

Posted in New Jersey Real Estate, Politics, Property Taxes | 127 Comments

Back to work?

Posted on May 9, 2022 by grim

From NJ1015:

Extended unemployment insurance to expire for 80,000 NJ workers

Eighty-eight weeks of unemployment benefits triggered by the coronavirus pandemic are coming to a close.

The New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development announced Thursday that approximately 80,000 New Jersey workers are due to exhaust extended unemployment insurance in the coming weeks, and they won’t be able to receive additional unemployment assistance until new earnings and work history requirements are met.

Claimants in this pool will have benefited from 26 weeks of regular state unemployment, up to 49 weeks of Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation that ended Sept. 4, and up to 13 weeks of state Extended Benefits that followed.

“We have distributed $37.5 billion in benefits to help more than 1.5 million claimants through the darkest days of the pandemic,” said Labor Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo. “Our team now stands ready to help these workers reenter the workforce by finding meaningful, dignified, sustained employment.”

Posted in Demographics, Economics, Employment, New Jersey Real Estate | 384 Comments

We’ve been discussing this for the last 10 years…

Posted on May 7, 2022 by grim

From Yahoo Money:

Mortgage rates hit highest level in 13 years and could cool housing market

Mortgage rates hit their highest level since August 2009 this week, following a sharp increase in the 10-year Treasury yield and continuing a breakneck ascent since the start of 2022.

The rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage increased to 5.27%, up from 5.10% last week, according to Freddie Mac. Mortgage rates have climbed over a half-point in the last four weeks and are up 2 percentage points from the start of the year.

The rapid increase in rates — tied to the Federal Reserve’s moves to hike interest rates to curb inflation — may be finally cooling the once-blistering hot housing market as affordability challenges become untenable for buyers.

“While housing affordability and inflationary pressures pose challenges for potential buyers, house price growth will continue but is expected to decelerate in the coming months,” said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist.

The cost of financing 80% of a typical home listed for sale has increased by nearly 50% in the last year, according to Realtor.com. Housing affordability has worsened in the first quarter of 2022, with the monthly payment for an average existing home with a 20% down payment up $1,383, which is $319 or 30% more than a year ago, according to NAR analysts.

Families are spending 18.7% of their income on mortgage payments, compared with just 14.2% a year ago.

Posted in Economics, Mortgages, National Real Estate | 62 Comments

Worst ever time to buy?

Posted on May 5, 2022 by grim

From Gallup:

Record Low in U.S. Say It Is a Good Time to Buy a House

Thirty percent of U.S. adults say it is a good time to buy a house, down 23 percentage points from a year ago and the first time the figure has been below 50%. Gallup has asked the question since 1978, including annual updates since 2003.

The results are from Gallup’s annual Economy and Personal Finance poll, conducted April 1-19. The survey was conducted as the median sale prices of U.S. homes reached a record $428,000, and as mortgage interest rates have climbed to their highest levels in over a decade.

Until now, at least half of Americans had consistently said it was a good time to buy a house. The percentage holding that view has varied, often in response to housing market conditions.

In the early 2000s, as U.S. homeownership reached an all-time high, a record 81% of Americans said it was a good time to buy a house. As housing prices rose sharply in the mid-2000s, creating a housing “bubble” and leading to an eventual market crash, positive evaluations of the housing market fell to the low 50s.

Posted in Demographics, Economics, Employment, National Real Estate | 208 Comments

To say it’s name is to summon it

Posted on May 3, 2022 by grim

From Marketwatch:

Recession is ‘almost inevitable’: former Fed Gov. Ferguson says

For months, former Fed Governor Roger Ferguson has worried the risks of a recession were rising. Now, he said, a recession in 2023 is nearly unavoidable, with the chances “definitely over 50%,”

What changed? In an interview Monday on CNBC, Ferguson said it was fresh signs of spreading global economic weakness, including in China.

“The rest of the world is also slowing pretty dramatically,” just when the Fed as other central banks are starting to raise interest rates to try to curb inflation.

“It’s a witches brew,” Ferguson said.

Posted in Economics | 189 Comments

Nothing to worry about here

Posted on May 1, 2022 by grim

From Forbes:

The odds of a home price decline hitting your local housing market, as told by one interactive chart

While the swift move up in mortgage rates is undoubtedly putting downward pressure on the housing market, it doesn’t mean home prices are about to crash. In fact, every major real estate firm with a publicly released forecast model, including Fannie Mae and Zillow, still predicts home prices will climb further this year. 

That said, industry insiders tell Fortune there’s increasingly a chance that the economic shock caused by soaring mortgage rates could see home values fall in some overpriced housing markets.

To better understand which regional housing markets might see a price decline, Fortune reached out to CoreLogic. The California-based real estate research company provided us with its assessment of close to 400 metropolitan statistical areas.

Posted in Housing Bubble, New Jersey Real Estate | 124 Comments

How did this survive?

Posted on April 29, 2022 by grim

From NJ1015:

This Historic New Jersey Beach Mansion Has the Best View on the East Coast

Posted in Shore Real Estate | 149 Comments

Almost Number 1

Posted on April 26, 2022 by grim

From NJ1015:

NJ foreclosure rate 2nd-highest in U.S. for March, and all of Q1

New Jersey trailed only Illinois for the highest foreclosure rate in the United States over the first quarter of 2022 as backlogs from pandemic moratoriums continued to clear, according to a report released Thursday by ATTOM Data Solutions.

One in every 792 housing units was in foreclosure here over the first three months of the year, a 69% increase from the fourth quarter of 2021 and a 312% increase from a year ago.

The Garden State’s second (or second-to-last) place ranking also held true for the month of March alone (1 in every 2,022 units), according to ATTOM executive vice president for market intelligence Rick Sharga, who said “normal” foreclosure levels won’t be seen again in the U.S. until at least the end of this year, or even early 2023.

“In a normal market, about 1% of loans are in foreclosure over the course of the year, and during the pandemic that dropped all the way down to about a quarter of a percent, so we have a lot of catching up to do just to get back to normal,” Sharga said.

“The states with the highest levels of foreclosure activity right now are also the states that had the highest levels of foreclosure activity a couple of years ago. So this isn’t, again, a sign of any new problems,” Sharga said. “States that do foreclosures through the court systems, and Illinois and New Jersey are two of those, tend to have more backlogs because it takes longer to get these foreclosures processed through the courts. The courts themselves are backed up right now.”

New Jersey benefits in some ways by being bracketed by New York and Philadelphia, according to Sharga, but when it comes to foreclosures, its positioning is a mixed blessing.

Case in point: another second-place ranking, as the Atlantic City metro placed behind only Cleveland, Ohio for first-quarter foreclosure rate in areas with a population over 200,000 (1 in every 600 housing units in foreclosure).

Sharga reminded residents that statistics like the 188% jump in foreclosure starts from the beginning of 2021 to the beginning of 2022 may look “frightening,” but that’s coming off historically low activity.

Posted in Economics, Foreclosures, New Jersey Real Estate | 343 Comments

If you have to ask…

Posted on April 25, 2022 by grim

From Fortune:

Another housing bubble? ‘We’re skating close to one,’ says Realtor.com economist

This might be the hottest housing market ever recorded. Over the past 12 months, U.S. home prices are up a staggering 19.2%. For comparison, in the years leading into the 2008 housing bust, the biggest 12-month jump was 14.5%.

Heading into 2022, real estate research firms forecasted that the ongoing housing boom would lose some steam and home price growth would decelerate. It hasn’t come to fruition—yet. Actually, if anything, this year it has gotten a bit hotter, with housing inventory on Zillow down 52% from pre-pandemic levels. 

That stubbornly hot housing market now has housing economists flirting with the real estate industry’s most feared word: Bubble.

“We’re not in a housing bubble just yet—but we’re skating close to one if prices continue rising at the current pace,” said George Ratiu, a housing economist at Realtor.com, in an article published last week on the home listing site.

It isn’t just Ratiu. There’s a growing chorus of economists speculating that if home price growth doesn’t abate soon, the housing market could eventually overheat. Or worse: We could wind up in another full-fledged housing bubble. 

Back in March, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas sent a shockwave through the industry after releasing a paper titled “Real-time market monitoring finds signs of brewing U.S. housing bubble.” The Dallas Fed researchers were blunt in their assessment: “U.S. house prices are again becoming unhinged from fundamentals.”

But even if we’re in a housing bubble, the Dallas Fed researchers don’t think it’d be a 2008 repeat. For starters, homeowners are in much better shape now than they were heading into the 2008 meltdown. At the height of the 2000s housing bubble, U.S. households were spending 7.2% of disposable personal income on mortgage debt payments. As of the fourth quarter of 2021, that figure is just 3.8%. In addition, subprime mortgages are less of a worry these days, given the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act outlawed many of the shady loans that plagued the aughts.

“There is no expectation that fallout from a housing correction would be comparable to the 2007–09 global financial crisis in terms of magnitude or macroeconomic gravity. Among other things, household balance sheets appear in better shape, and excessive borrowing doesn’t appear to be fueling the housing market boom,” write the Dallas Fed researchers.

Posted in Demographics, Economics, Employment, Housing Bubble, National Real Estate | 79 Comments

How not to do NJ real estate

Posted on April 24, 2022 by grim

From the NY Post:

Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz lose more than $6M on NJ mansion sale

What a hit! Grammy Award winners Alicia Keys and her producer husband Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean have finally sold their 5-acre New Jersey estate — at a massive loss.

The music power couple bought the property from Eddie Murphy in two separate transactions for a $12.1 million sum nearly a decade ago. 

They first put it on the market for $14.9 million in 2015, but slashed the price to $9.9 million last August. It was still asking that price when it went into contract in February.  

Now, Gimme can exclusively reveal the closing price: The spread went for just $6 million. 

“It’s an insane price. I can’t believe it went that low,” said an insider familiar with the deal.

…

The 25,000-square-foot property at 191 Brayton St. comes with six bedrooms, an indoor pool, a two-lane bowling alley, a movie theater, two elevators — and a state-of-the-art recording studio. 

Keys and Dean had first plunked down $10.42 million on the 32-room mansion in 2013. A year later, they bought an adjacent empty lot from Murphy for $1.7 million at 286 Johnson Ave.

Posted in Lowball, New Jersey Real Estate | 15 Comments

Nothing to worry about

Posted on April 22, 2022 by grim

From Wealth of Common Sense:

4 Reasons the Housing Market Won’t Crash

  • Millennials are the biggest demographic in the country
  • We don’t have enough housing supply
  • No one wants to sell
  • Consumer balance sheets remain strong

Discuss.

Posted in Demographics, Economics, National Real Estate | 152 Comments

Expensive everywhere you’d want to live

Posted on April 20, 2022 by grim

From Yahoo Finance:

Homebuyers just got another grim new statistic: Average home prices in 11 housing markets now exceed $500,000

The U.S. housing market’s half-million dollar club is growing, with more cities than ever posting average home prices above $500,000.

Across the nation, home prices have soared during the pandemic, as low home inventory ran into surging demand. Fervent competition ensued, and home prices have since gained 19.2% over the past 12 months, locking many would-be homebuyers out of the market.

But while prices have been rising most everywhere, some housing markets have become prohibitively expensive to some prospective buyers. A recent analysis by online real estateand financial planning site OJO Labs found that a housing price benchmark that was once considered rare is now becoming increasingly common, as average home prices are now topping $500,000 in more and more cities.

…

Austin, is the newest arrival in the exclusive club, according to OJO Labs’ survey, which crunched the numbers of March final home sale prices in America’s largest cities.

The list now includes 11 metro areas. Prices in some of these cities were already well above $500,000 even before 2020, while in others they have soared spectacularly since the pandemic started.

Here is the full list:

  1. San Francisco (median home price: $1.3 million)
  2. San Diego ($825k)
  3. Los Angeles. ($720k)
  4. Seattle ($626k)
  5. Denver ($565k)
  6. Boston ($560k)
  7. Sacramento ($550k)
  8. New York ($520k)
  9. Portland, Ore. ($505k)
  10. Salt Lake City ($503k)
  11. Austin ($500k)

Some of these cities, including Austin, San Diego, and Denver, have seen home prices rise more than 20% over the past 12 months. In Salt Lake City—which has enjoyed a population and job market boom during the pandemic—prices are up over 30%.

Posted in Demographics, Economics, National Real Estate | 84 Comments

Priced Out

Posted on April 19, 2022 by grim

From CNN:

Renters are growing pessimistic they will ever own a home as prices keep rising

Faced with a white-hot real estate market, renters are losing confidence they will ever own a home.

On average only 43.3% of renters expect to own a home at some point in the future, down sharply from 51.6% in 2021, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey released on Monday.

That’s the lowest level since the NY Fed began asking the question in 2015.

High prices appear to be a driving factor: Twenty-two percent of households in the survey report they planned to buy a home but now view renting as a better financial decision. Most respondents either prefer to rent (36%) or said they were waiting for prices to come down before buying (42%). 

The findings come after home prices spiked last year by the most on record, surpassing even the blockbuster growth of the early 2000s housing bubble. Some people who had hoped to buy have been priced out of the market, forcing them to rent instead. That in turn has helped to drive up rental rates.

The shift in sentiment in the NY Fed survey was driven by families with less college education and lower income.

Posted in Demographics, Economics, National Real Estate | 83 Comments

What does 3000 new units look like

Posted on April 18, 2022 by grim

From TAP Wayne:

Mapping the New Housing Developments in Wayne 

This article is to help Wayne residents visualize where each of the proposed new residential developments will be built in Wayne over the next several years. Below, you will find images of concept plans taken from the Wayne Township Planning Board Department webpage on Affordable Housing over sections of Google Maps showing where each will be built in Wayne

 As part of the township’s affordable housing obligation, seven new developments will be built in Wayne, adding a total of 2,961 new residential units – 528 of these units will be “set aside” as “affordable.”

An eighth development at 1655 Valley Rd is still under negotiations. This is currently an office building with several tenants – each with long-term leases. It is unclear how many residential units will be added, or if the project will move forward at all. But it is mentioned in the final Fair Share Housing settlement agreement, so is worth mentioning here.

The largest development by far will be built on the Toys R Us property. This is also still being negotiated, though the number of units has been settled. A whopping 1,360 residential units will be created, likely in several multi-level apartment buildings. No details are available as to what this will look like.

Posted in Demographics, New Development, New Jersey Real Estate | 63 Comments