This one’s for Pookie… - Posted by Barry (FL)
Posted by Barry (FL) on June 03, 2005 at 12:36:41:
Housing’s soft landing
Conway: Jobs, homebuilders helping to sustain market
By Andrea Coombes, MarketWatch
Last Update: 4:44 PM ET June 2, 2005
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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) – When will the housing market bubble burst with a loud pop? Perhaps never, as long as local area job markets remain strong and housing supply limited, some say.
Right now, the economy is producing enough jobs, and the supply of homes in hot areas is low enough to sustain local markets, said Delores Conway, an economist with University of Southern California’s Lusk Center for Real Estate, in an interview with MarketWatch.
“One of the basic things is that we have good job growth,” Conway said. But “most importantly, we have very limited supply,” she said, particularly in hot markets such as Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.
In those markets, she said, “there is very limited supply of land.”
Plus, homebuilders are more wary these days. “Builders have gotten much better,” she said.
“In the 90s there was overbuilding before the Southern California bubble burst. We don’t see signs of overbuilding right now,” she said.
“Many builders are held to strict standards, whereby they must if they’re building condominiums, for example, they must have a certain fraction of those sold before they can even break ground. We’re tending to see much less oversupply in the market and much more keeping up with the demand,” she said.
‘Some price declines’
What would cause a bursting bubble? Watch the full interview:
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