Appreciating Markets Archives

Could This Be the Best Real Estate Market in 5 Years?

April 23, 2012 by Marco Santarelli

I've spoken many times on my radio show about how fear is used to move us. Well, recently I spotted a great example. Just last week I wrote about how a mortgage “expert” was predicting a “death spiral” in the housing market. That was last week. This week, the National Association of Realtors is saying that the housing market in 2012 will be the strongest in five years. February was actually a 9.2 percent increase in home sales from last year.

For most people those two things wouldn't compute, especially since the “expert” I quoted last week was predicting a 6 percent reduction in housing prices in 2012. This just all goes to show you something I've said for a long time: don't believe the doom and gloom.

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Single-Family Homes and Their Potential

April 2, 2012 by Marco Santarelli

As we continue to go through Morgan Stanley's “Housing 2.0: The New Rental Paradigm” we're more confident that 2012 will be a big year for real estate investors. For one, the financial services company boldly concludes, “…gross rents are historically attractive relative to current distressed prices. Adding to this attractiveness is the fact that multifamily data shows rents continuing to rise.”

This is a good indicator for real estate investments. Anyone who’s been active in the market clearly knows why rental properties have become precious assets among investors. And for the newbie, it isn’t that difficult to discover the logic here. A depressed housing market with very affordable properties means that demand for homes are down. This indicates that buyers opt to rent properties instead of buying a home. With this surge in rental demand, real estate investors are just as excited as everyone else who are poised to earn positive cash flows from their rental properties.

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The Roots of Appreciation

September 14, 2010 by Marco Santarelli

Even during the Great Depression some people made money. The same holds true today despite one of the toughest economic environments in decades. The key is to understand the roots of appreciation or what causes real estate to go up or down in value. Because all real estate is local, it is entirely possible to purchase a rapidly appreciating property even in a declining industry… in fact, often the property is able to appreciate because of the decline in the industry.

Today we will examine the major elements that cause real estate to appreciate or depreciate in value. Once you understand these simple concepts, it's possible to use each to create your own working checklist when searching for target acquisitions.

The level of motivation for both buyers and sellers. Although the real estate market as a whole is suffering a decline, there is a substantial need for housing for both buyers and sellers. Many sellers need another place to live and buyers are eager to take advantage of a once in a lifetime buying opportunity.
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What Housing Bust?

October 28, 2009 by Marco Santarelli

During the past three years, home prices grew in the beer-guzzling heartland and fell in the wine-sipping coastal states.

If you're a beef-eating, beer-guzzling, pick-up driving resident of heartland America, there's a good chance you escaped the housing bust. But pesto-chomping, chardonnay-sipping, hybrid-driving city-slickers were probably out of luck.

Over the past three years, 23 states recorded home price gains in the majority of their metro areas, according to analytics firm Fiserv. And where were most of those gainers? In much of the so-called heartland: the South, the Plains and most of the non-coastal West.

Meanwhile, the 16 states that posted declines were led by much of New England and the Northeast, plus California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona.

Most telling, however, was that the 12 remaining states — those that posted mixed results in their metro areas — were found in every region of America.

And even in the mixed results states, such as New York, the bust hit "blue" metro areas, like New York City and Long Island (both down 21.7%), and spared "red" upstate cities. Buffalo prices grew 8.3%, Syracuse climbed 8.4%, Utica gained 10.4%, and Binghamton was up 17.7%.

The states where metro markets rose generally share two characteristics, according to Mark Fleming, chief economist for First American CoreLogic: low prices and open space.

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