Huntington News (04/09/08); Kinchen, David M.
In its latest housing forecast issued on April 8, the National Association of Realtors predicts that the residential property market will remain stagnant for the next few months as a result of the credit crunch, but will begin to show marked improvement in the last six months of the year as liquidity improves. "We're looking for essentially stable sales in the near term, before higher mortgage loan limits translate into more sales in the high-cost markets," noted NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun. "The wider access to affordable credit should increase sales activity notably this summer as pent-up demand begins to be met." Sales of previously owned homes are projected to surge to an annualized pace of 5.9 million units in the 2008 fourth quarter from 4.9 million in the first quarter, rounding out at about 5.39 million units for the whole year and climbing to 5.74 million in 2009. New-home sales, meanwhile, are likely to slide more than 25 percent this year to 576,000 before rebounding 4.6 percent to 602,000 next year.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment