NO END IN SIGHT: HOUSING MARKET STILL HAS LEGS, ECONOMISTS SAY
After nearly six years of rising home prices, what’s next?
Will 2018 be the seventh year home prices go up? Or the year the market stalls? Will this be the year that tenants get the upper hand over landlords? Or will rent hikes just keep coming?
In other words, will the seller’s market of the past 69 months continue in 2018?
We interviewed 10 economists and reviewed nine forecasts to find an answer to that question. It can be summed up in one word.
Yes.
Yes, home prices and home sales are projected to keep rising in the year ahead, although the gains will be smaller.
Yes, the supply of homes for sale will fail to keep pace with demand, fueling more cutthroat bidding wars.
And yes, rents will keep rising while apartment vacancies stay near all-time lows.
The economists all cite the same reason: “As long as the economy keeps growing, that’s going to give a push to the housing market,” said Anil Puri, director of the Woods Center for Economic Analysis and Forecasting at Cal State Fullerton.
Jerry Nickelsburg, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, put it this way: “When you have increases in employment, you have increases in household formation, and that increases demand for housing. That’s what we’ve been seeing.”
To get a grip on the year ahead, we highlighted five topics: Prices, sales, mortgage rates, number of homes for sale and rent.
The picture that emerges shows a market that still has more room to grow.
Ultimately, we ask the question on the minds of those still seeking to buy a home but are worried they missed their chance: How long will this crazy, runaway train of a market last? Is it too late to buy a home?
Here’s what we learned.
5 Homeownership Changes Coming Under New Tax Law
Source: Nerdwallet
Will the new tax law save you money or cost you money? The answer depends on a complex array of
factors that touch on just about every aspect of your financial life.
This article is about a subset of your
finances: How the tax law will affect homeownership and mortgages.
Among other things, the tax law changes whether and how homeowners deduct mortgage interest and
property taxes. Many of these revisions for individuals and families are set to expire at the end of 2025.
Here are five elements of the tax law that could affect homeownership, home selling and moving.
California Today: The Tax Bill’s ‘Spiraling Consequences’
As Republicans in Washington work to combine their tax bills into one, economists and tax specialists on the West Coast are adding up the ways that the changes could hurt California.
Among the most publicized is the capping of the mortgage interest deduction, which could make buying a home in California even less affordable than it is now. The abolishing of deductions for state and local taxes, which could sharply raise Californians’ tax bill, is another.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Gonzalo Freixes, a tax expert at the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management. “It could have spiraling consequences — the economy, the real estate market, revenues to local governments — it goes further and further into things where it could have a negative impact.”
But the sweeping tax bill extends well beyond headline changes.
The House bill called for the elimination of the tax credit for electric vehicles, a potentially big blow for Tesla, which has large manufacturing facilities in California.
Under the Senate bill, single filers earning $160,000 to around $200,000, of whom there are many in coastal California, would see their top marginal tax rate increase to 32 percent from 28 percent.
Bay Area residents seek the California dream — in Sacramento
Lower housing prices are the big draw
Source: The Mercury News
SACRAMENTO — They laugh at it now — the conversation that set in motion their move to a city that neither of them had ever seen.
“What about Sacramento?” Cat Perez asked her wife, Aja Blue. “What about Sacramento?” Blue responded.
After a decade of renting in San Francisco and a brief stint in Los Angeles, Blue and Perez became part of a great migration to one of the last affordable urban areas in the state. Drawn by lower housing prices, Bay Area residents are pouring into California’s capital and its surrounding areas, trading a temperate climate for triple-digit summers; hustle-and-bustle for a slower pace of life; and redwood hiking trails for expansive fields and distant, snow-capped mountains.
The region has become the top destination in the country — ahead of trendy Seattle and Portland — for those looking to flee the jammed roads and high costs of the tech-dominated Bay Area, according to new migration data from Redfin, a popular real estate site. Each year, nearly 20,000 Bay Area residents are resettling in cities stretching from Davis to Sacramento and further east to the Sierra foothills, according to census data analyzed by the Greater Sacramento Economic Council.
“It’s becoming a place for the next generation to live,” said Sacramento’s mayor, Darrell Steinberg.
So many Sacramento-area residents have jobs based in the Bay Area — roughly 120,000 as of the council’s last estimate — that business leaders tout a burgeoning “megaregion” encompassing both Silicon Valley and the capital. Many workers make the long commute, at least occasionally. But some Bay Area employers — like the health care enrollment startup that Perez co-founded, HealthSherpa, and the mobile video platform developer Fantag — have opened offices in Sacramento, offering employees (and themselves) a cheaper place to live, without the long trek.
Sacramento was the fastest-growing big city in the state last year, a growth spurt largely caused by the Bay Area exodus. Roughly 75 percent of Redfin users moving into the greater Sacramento region come from the Bay Area, said the site’s chief economist, Taylor Marr.
Mortgage Cap Would Hit California, Florida, New York Hardest
Source: Bloomberg
Property owners in California, Florida and New York have the most to lose if Congress limits tax
deductions for interest payments on home mortgages, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Zillow data.
Assuming a 20 percent down payment, the three states together are estimated to have more than 80,000
homes currently listed for sale where the mortgage could reach at least $500,000, the limit laid out for
new home sales in the House Republican tax plan. In California, that’s 44 percent of homes on the
market.
Colorado and Massachusetts follow with one third of the number of homes on the market. Hawaii, though
it has fewer homes for sale than California, New York and Florida, could see a high percentage of
mortgages that would be affected by the proposed cap — more than half.
