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Rates of Home Price Appreciation

Thursday, February 08, 2007 | 05:45 AM

This simple chart depicts several different measures of changes in home prices:

chart courtesy of PMI

Rates of home price appreciation are obviously slowing, and in a few cases, slipping into negative territory.

Yet, home affordability continues to be an issue for many buyers. Mortgage insurer PMI observes:

"Price appreciation has slowed in many areas and incomes continue to rise. As a result we saw slight improvements in many areas’ Affordability IndexSM scores this quarter, the first improvements we’ve seen for some time. Still, after years of record increases prices are still far ahead of incomes in many areas, and affordability has a ways to go to catch up. We expect appreciation rates to continue to moderate, allowing prices to move back into better alignment with incomes over time."

That's a polite way to say that prices remain too high in most regions.

Why? Consider the issue of down payments:

"Using the traditional model of a 20 percent down payment, buying the national median-priced home, at $218,000, means saving more than $40,000—a challenge for many low- and moderate-income borrowers. In high cost areas such as California, where the median home price is more than $550,000, saving a 20 percent down payment is even more of a challenge. Because the American dream of homeownership is alive and well but home prices remain high, low down payment mortgages will continue to be a significant factor in the marketplace."

Hmmm, I wonder if there's a clever way to get around this lack of a down payment issue:

"With prices increasing much faster than incomes in many areas, consumers often turned to nontraditional mortgages, including piggyback loans (a first mortgage for 80 percent of the home price and a second mortgage that covers the difference between the borrower’s down payment and the first mortgage), interest-only loans, and payment option ARMs.

These products offered low initial monthly payments in exchange for higher payments down the road, when interest only periods ended, option ARMs reset, or interest rates on seconds increased."

Hence, the ongoing risk of foreclosures in the sub-prime space.

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WSJ: Toll's Housing Outlook May Have Some Soft Spots

When luxury-home builder Toll Brothers last reported earnings, its chairman, Robert Toll, said the housing market was seeing "a floor in some markets."

The comment added to a bounce in the whole sector. Toll's own stock is up about 10% since then. Investors will get a better idea about how solid the floor is when Toll gives its outlook for its first quarter and fiscal 2007 today.

The company's fate will likely depend on which markets have hit a floor. Toll is highly exposed to one of the softer housing markets in the U.S.: the mid-Atlantic. Nearly 40% of its earnings derive from the region, according to Merrill Lynch.

But it isn't clear mid-Atlantic sales have really stabilized. A Raymond James report shows new orders for homes in the Washington area -- which includes northern Virginia -- were down 22% in December from a year ago. That isn't as severe as the 40%-plus year-over-year drops seen in the summer, but still not convincing enough to call a bottom.

What's more, the average number of days homes sat on the market in northern Virginia jumped 28% in the fourth quarter from the third -- and was up 139% from the same period in 2005, according to the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors.

The floor, in other words, might have some cracks.

Posted by: Andy | Feb 8, 2007 7:01:14 AM

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