Market Forecasts

I just posted a few articles on www.AustinMarketInfo.com from HousingPredictor.com:

Best 25 Housing Market Forecasts in 2010

Worst 25 Housing Market Forecasts in 2010

Texas

Certainly I am pleased to see Austin among the 25 best, but I am equally happy to see us near the bottom of that list … for a number of reasons:

• Most of the metro areas above us on list suffered extreme losses of property value and equity, were the hubs of the worst kinds of subprime lending, and have experienced the largest proportions of defaults and foreclosures in the United States.
• I do not believe that market expansion in the 15% to 20% annual range is sustainable.  In fact, I would argue that years of that kind of growth is the reason many of those markets crashed so badly in the past couple of years.
• Because Austin and Central Texas did not experience the “irrational exuberance” of housing markets in the four states where the most serious losses happened, we have weathered the recession better than almost everybody.  Our market was among the last to enter the recession, and we were recognized as one of the first to enter the recovery phase.
• Since our average and median prices are very nearly where they were two years ago, we can enjoy reasonable growth and appreciation in the future.  This kind of predictable market expansion may be boring for the gamblers and speculators among us, but in my opinion this environment is far better for homeowners and local tax payers.

Being ranked #21, with a growth forecast of 3.6%, is great news to me!  Sure, I have been and I remain, an unapologetic cheerleader for the Austin area.  But sometimes being lower on a list is just right.