Last year's home sales, starts leave little optimism to build on for '11
January 6, 2011
By Steve Brown/The Dallas Morning News

A year ago, if you'd been betting on the housing market, you'd have lost big time.

Heading into 2010, it looked like the North Texas residential market was staging a modest comeback.

Most analysts were predicting solid gains for both Texas and national housing.

But the year-end housing numbers show that was just wishful thinking.

Home sales in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have continued to slide. And prices are still drifting lower, albeit only slightly.

Builders started only about 15,000 homes here in 2010. That's down about 70 percent from the top of the market.

And new-home sales dropped an additional 6 percent from 2009 levels.

The only good news for builders is that the market doesn't appear to be sinking much further.

"At this point, there's not a lot of downside risk," said David Brown of analyst Metrostudy Inc. "I don't anticipate a quick recovery in activity because there are too many headwinds facing the industry right now."

Most housing economists are equally somber in their 2011 predictions.

And who can blame them after previous hopes for a home-sector comeback fell flat?

During the next few days, when the year-end pre-owned home numbers are released for North Texas, we're likely to see another double-digit drop in sales for December.

Through the first 11 months of 2010, sales of single-family homes through the Realtors' Multiple Listing Service were down 7 percent from the same period of 2009.

When the Realtors held their annual meeting last November, the national forecast was for continued weak market conditions in 2011.

Of course, Texas could do a bit better than that if our job market heats up. But the track record for predicting the employment market isn't much better than previous forecasts for housing.

Truth is you need jobs before consumers will take on big purchases like homes.

The nation's homebuilders meet next week in Orlando, Fla., and I expect there will be more people gathering to discuss where the economy is going than lining up to see the latest thing in shingles.

About 50,000 home construction industry representatives are expected to attend the industry's annual exhibition. It's about half the number of builders and vendors who attended these shows a few years ago.

Safe to say that any homebuilder who is at the national association's 2011 show is a survivor.

But I have to wonder how much longer some of these folks can hang on without a sustained increase in sales.

Courtesy The Dallas Morning News
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