Many Americans say it’s a good time to buy a home

Low interest rates and home prices that have fallen sharply from their peaks likely have many Americans believing now is a good time to take action — even if it’s still difficult to get financing and there’s potential for prices to dip even lower, said Dennis Jacobe, chief economist for Gallup. Read about the five states where housing will recover first.

Many Americans are still worried about their home values, with 27% saying that home prices in their communities will fall this year and 42% concerned that their own house will lose value, according to the survey results. Twenty-one percent said they expect home prices in their area to increase. A random sampling of 1,018 adults participated in the poll earlier this month. Read about double-digit rent hikes coming this year.

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Home prices in Dallas-Fort Worth see largest drop since early 2009

Dallas area home price losses ballooned in November – down 4.2 percent from a year earlier.

The decline was the largest for the Dallas area since early 2009, according to the latest Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index report.

It was the fifth month in row that home prices for Dallas dropped in the closely-watched housing market indicator.

Dallas’ price decrease was significantly worse than the overall 1.6 percent year-over-year decline Case-Shiller reported for all of the 20 U.S. markets in the index.

“With these numbers, more analysts will be calling for a double dip in home prices,” Standard & Poor’s David Blitzer said Tuesday in the report.

The slide in Dallas-area home prices has wiped out all the gains the market made in late 2009 and early 2010 when residential values were moving higher.

Since then, the number of home sales in North Texas and nationwide has fallen sharply and the supply of distressed houses – mostly foreclosures – on the market has grown.

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New-home sales, starts sink in Dallas-Fort Worth

Homebuilders hoped that 2010 would be the comeback year for the battered Dallas-Fort Worth housing market.

But after a flurry of sales early in the year, buyers retreated, forcing builders to cut back on construction.

North Texas builders started only 3,341 homes in the fourth quarter – 10 percent fewer than in the same period of 2009, housing analyst Metrostudy Inc. said Wednesday.

At the same time, the number of new homes sold in the final three months of 2010 fell almost 20 percent from a year earlier.

"Those numbers are definitely unwelcome news to a sector of our economy that has been down for such a long time," said D'Ann Petersen, business economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. "They show the North Texas housing sector is still weak, despite the temporary uptick from the tax credits.

"The high level of foreclosures and existing homes on the market will likely continue to dampen new-home demand and construction in the near term," she said. "The good news is that job growth continues to be positive, and builders' inventories are relatively lean."

Residential starts in North Texas last year were more than 70 percent below where they were at the peak of the market in 2006. And it was the lowest total for fourth-quarter home starts in the D-FW area in almost two decades.

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Housing Statistics Hit Rough Waters

A widely repeated statistic on underwater homes could use a cold shower.

Several research companies track the troubling spread of negative equity—where the value of a home falls below the debt owed—as real-estate prices have tanked. And the number of such homes has risen from almost nothing during the housing market's peaks in the middle of last decade to nearly one in four U.S. homes with mortgages today.

The statistic has been wielded by the media and public officials to paint a troubling portrait of homeowners trapped by crippling debt, unable to tap their homes for credit or to sell and move for jobs elsewhere.

But in a rare instance of mild good news in the housing market, the 1-in-4 figure, and the fear it provokes, seem overblown. It is calculated using assumptions in ways that inflate the number of underwater homes. And more than half of these homes are underwater by a small margin, meaning that for various reasons those homes are unlikely to trigger an epidemic of defaults.

"Everyone likes to get headlines, so they tend to overstate problems like this, without doing ground-level research," says Kenneth Rosen, chair of the University of California, Berkeley, Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics. "We probably overstate the number of people who are in trouble by quite a bit."

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