New Home Market Optimism Defies Materials Cost Rises

Disparate Reports Indicate Strengthening New Homes Market

Utahl homeowners don’t have to be planning to sell anytime soon to be curious about the market value of their property. A home is such a major part of any family’s financial picture, it’s only natural.

One important indicator of the direction of Utah home values is how the builders of new homes gauge the future market. After all, if you build new homes for a living, your bottom line is largely dependent on being able to predict future demand. 

That is why this month’s rise in U.S. home-builder confidence in the market for single family new homes is a convincing follow-through to what we have been seeing for a while now. I find two unrelated sources that, taken together, point toward that conclusion.

The first is CNBC’s web site, which zeroes in on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index. Current conditions are reported to have risen three points in just one month, while the index measuring expectations for future sales hit 53 — and that’s the highest level since February 2007.

The second, CoreLogic’s Case-Shiller Indexes Report, confirmed the home price increases of 2012 as having grown at the strongest rate in nearly seven years. The report included a (for them) remarkably bold headline: “More to come in 2013-2017.”

The new homes optimism was doubly good news because it comes

despite increasing building materials costs, which usually dampen home-builder confidence. But the impact of rising single family home prices and reported sense of urgency among potential buyers “as a result of thinning inventories of homes” more than compensated for the building cost increases. This may be good news for buyers targeting new homes in Utah: better builder confidence should mean more new homes. 

While we’ve already seen a lot of this spring’s inventory enter the market — whether you’re looking at existing or new homes , there is a good case to be made that today’s low mortgage rates plus the remaining bargains make 2013 a fortuitous year to purchase. If that’s how it looks from your vantage point, contact me today to begin pre-qualifying!