The season of real estate is here but builder confidence is slow and not where the market would like it to be. Also there is a growing concern about the amount of foreclosures still hitting the market. So much so that there is a bill in place that may offer a solution to the problem. If the bill is passed the process of shorts sales will increase. The premise here is that if the realtor can facilitate the short sale for the home owner everybody can win. The homeowner will stay out of foreclosure and gets to sell the house. The realtor wins since they can actually make the sale and of course the banks win since this keeps the loans from defaulting. The problem with these is that currently the short sale approval process takes too long and therefore cannot beat the deadline on foreclosure.

New measures would have to come into play for the short sale approval process to be sped up to accommodate the deadlines. For builders the confidence rating actually fell in March leaving the index in a stagnant position for the last 6 months. It appears that the blame is shifted to the South for the cause of the decline in confidence rating. The bright side of this is that housing starts rose around 7% in March, which means that home builders are beginning to restock their inventories in hopes of an upcoming improvement.

It is believed that home sales will increase and that the lure of real estate deal and low cost homes will bring the buyers back into the market. Time will tell as always but areas like California, Arizona and Florida may be a tell tale. Even for Mountain House Ca real estate or smaller areas surround larger markets may be some of the areas to gain insight into the home sales market. The next few months and through the summer will give us more indicators on how much confidence is gaining or waning.   

Comments are closed