April 27, 2006
Dump Boston, Buy Texas - The Housing Game
As home sales cool on the East and West coasts, some cities that missed out on the real-estate boom are becoming the strongest markets.
A look at inventories of unsold homes, prices and employment trends points to generally positive signs in Houston, Dallas and Atlanta — cities that have seen only modest home-price gains in recent years.
Metropolitan areas whose housing markets look less healthy, at least in the short term, include Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. All of them have growing inventories of homes and relatively weak job growth. As a result, houses that a year or two ago might have sold in hours now are languishing on the market for months, and some sellers are cutting prices.
To produce a snapshot of residential real-estate prospects for 18 major metro areas, The Wall Street Journal examined inventories of homes for sale at the end of the first quarter from a variety of local sources; pricing trends based on surveys of real-estate agents by Daniel Oppenheim, an analyst at Banc of America Securities in New York; and projections of job creation by Moody’s Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa. Inventory data provide a broad picture of the overall supply of housing, while job trends are the biggest driver of demand. The pricing data show how markets are adjusting to recent shifts in supply and demand.
