Texas to lead other states in housing rebound, analyst says

AUSTIN – Texas will be the first state to recover from the housing market downturn, one of the country's top homebuilding analysts predicts.

"The Texas markets are much healthier," said Mike Inselmann, founder of Metrostudy Inc., which tracks homebuilding across the country. "We are the most active state."

Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth already lead the nation in homebuilding and population growth. And Texas didn't suffer from the plunge in housing prices seen in many major U.S. markets, Inselmann told real estate journalists meeting Thursday in Austin.

The ready supply of new housing in Texas kept prices from overheating, he told members of the National Association of Real Estate Editors.

"Dallas-Fort Worth, going back to 1995, never got to 10 percent" gains in annual home prices, Inselmann said.

By contrast, many markets on the West Coast and East Coast saw home prices more than double in just a few years.

"We did not have that housing bubble," he said.

Inselmann said the U.S. home market is "on the bottom and edging up."

Nationwide, home starts are expected to be up about a quarter this year from 2009.

But the recent expiration of the federal homebuyer tax credit, which fueled thousands of home sales, makes it hard to gauge where the market is going.

"It's going to be slow and sloppy in the recovery," he said.

Builders say the market has already slowed since the tax credit, for as much as $8,000 toward the purchase of a home, expired at the end of April.

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