Housing Still on Down Slope,

The real-estate market has not reached bottom and will likely not begin to stabilize until the middle of this year, three economists say.
By: Steve Kerch: The Real Estate Journal Online
The U.S. housing market has not reached bottom and will likely not begin to recover until the middle of this year, three housing economists said this week.

The weakness will extend to existing-home and new-home sales and housing starts as well as to home prices, which are likely to show their first full-year decline nationally since records have been kept, the economists told home builders at their annual convention here.

"I don't think we've seen the bottom," said David Berson, chief economist for Fannie Mae. "We're going to see a much bigger drop in investor demand this year. But by the second half of the year the market will stabilize, if investors pull out quickly."

Berson said he expects the home-price index calculated by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight will show a nationwide decline in values for 2007, the first time that will have happened since the data began being collected in 1975. Unlike other measures, the OFHEO data measure the price changes on the same homes over time, meaning the index is less likely to be skewed by the types and locations of sales.

"It won't be a big decline, maybe 1%. And the declines will be far more centered in areas that have had the most investor activity," he said. "Real home-price gains, adjusted for inflation, will be negative this year, next year and possibly the year after that."

The biggest problem the housing market faces is "a seriously large inventory situation," said David Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, which is hosting the International Builders Show here this week. Seiders said the housing boom in 2004 and 2005 produced at least 400,000 more housing units than demand could support, and builders are having to push hard to move those homes off the market.

Seiders said, though, that he believes home sales did hit bottom in the fourth quarter and that housing will make a "gradual recovery" over the next two years. He said housing could actually begin to make a positive contribution to economic growth again starting in the second half of this year.

"One of the good things is that the U.S. economy has been able to handle the dramatic correction in housing," he said. "GDP growth, unemployment, the overall inflation situation and interest rates" have all been positive despite housing's woes, he said.

Seiders said he is forecasting housing starts to decline 14% in 2007 to 1.56 million units. Single-family starts will drop 15%, to 1.26 million. Those numbers would compare with a peak of 2.1 million units started in 2005 and represent a return to 2002 levels, he said.

Starts are projected to rebound to 1.7 million in 2008. Home prices will also recover in 2008, gaining 1.3% next year, according to the NAHB forecast.

"There is still a little room for sales and starts to weaken," said Frank Nothaft, chief economist for Freddie Mac. "We should hit the trough in the first half of the year. But we're a few years away from the robust levels of activity we saw in 2005."

Sales of existing homes are off about 13% from their peak in the summer of 2005, Nothaft said, but in some markets sales have tumbled 30% or more while in others sales remain robust. Weak markets include California, Florida and New England; in much of the South, with the exception of Florida, sales have remained steady or improved, he said.

Builder discounts build

To cope with the inventory overhang, home builders have been offering incentives to buyers. In its most recent surveys of its membership, the NAHB found that 50% of builders said they cut prices in the fourth quarter and close to 80% said they had either discounted homes or offered some other type of incentive to buyers, including paying loan closing costs, helping with financing charges or buying down mortgage rates for a set number of years, Seiders said.

"They know they have got to get those inventories down," Seiders said.

The biggest publicly traded home-building companies have seen results from their discounting efforts, Seiders said the NAHB surveys show. Big builder sales stabilized in the fourth quarter, Seiders said, as order cancellations - which are not reported in government figures tracking the new-home market - appear to have eased.

The flip side, however, is that home-building companies have watched their profit margins erode. "Margins have been taking it on the chin," he said.