My guess is that movement in the existing home inventory is a decent proxy total vacancies.
And the result has been the reduction of the residential home inventory to only 4.5 months of supply.
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The decline in home prices in the U.S. because of high rate of foreclosures and excess inventory of housing has weighed on the mortgage market in recent years but government programs and incentives to new home buyers should help to clear excess inventory and bring back life to the U.S. housing market over time.
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As home builders increase that inventory, they are set to gain pricing power, increasing their operating margins.
Each month, he and colleagues survey 4, 000 real estate agents across the U.S. The topics: what kind of foot traffic those agents see, the price movement of listed properties, incentives offered by home builders, overall inventory of homes on the market and the amount of time needed to close deals.
The people you allow into your home may be able to inventory your belongings and will forever know the details of your security system.
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Excess inventory is the enemy of home-builders, as it means adding to the supply (their business) would only serve to further misalign supply and demand, in time lowering prices.
Once the nation's credit shores dried up, there were few buyers who could reasonably afford the inflated prices, which quickly began dropping once inventory grew and buyers stayed home.
My father, Steve, encouraged his five daughters to learn about business and entrepreneurship and allowed me to take over a closet at home for a store, complete with inventory and a working cash register.
In responding positively to those relatively minor reports, the market rally supposedly ignored the big plunge in durable goods orders in October (the largest monthly decline since January, 2009), that new home sales fell 8.1% in October, worse than forecasts, while home prices declined further, and the inventory of unsold homes rose more than expected.
The revival of the housing industry was most noticeable with home sales, home prices, and home-builder confidence rising, while the inventory of unsold homes and backlog of bank foreclosures shrank.
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There were totally unexpected huge plunges in both existing and new home sales, permits for future construction starts, further declines in home prices, and big increases in the inventory of unsold homes, and pending foreclosures.
The theory was that after the crash of 2008 and 2009, with traditional outlets for home financing frozen, FHA would swoop in to the rescue to provide housing market liquidity to allow buyers to sop up all the millions of homes in excess inventory and thus prevent further deterioration in home prices.
"Rising home prices may begin to alleviate a lack of housing inventory ... by encouraging more homeowners to put their properties on the market, " said Maninder Sibia, an economist with Economic Advisory Service, in a note to clients.
There are already signs that home prices are poised to stay hot this summer because the inventory of homes for sale is still depressed and buyer urgency has intensified.
With home prices materializing a double-dip and banks holding a massive inventory of unsold homes, it is hard to see where Goldman derives its optimism from.
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Construction activity is withering, a dreadful development for the industry but one that is reducing inventory and sowing the seeds for an eventual recovery of home prices.
Housing experts have summed up 2012 as the year of the bottom, with national-level home prices finally beginning to rise as sales activity bounded and both inventory levels and mortgage rates plunged.
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Excess inventory sold by several dozen big companies--including Home Depot, Dell Financial Services, IBM and Sharper Image--accounted for 4%-plus of gross merchandise sales in the first quarter, up from about zilch a year earlier.
But home cooks can use the same strategies that help professional chefs manage kitchen inventory, says Ms. Welsh.
Housing has had a much rougher time of it with home sales and prices declining further each year, while foreclosures and the inventory of unsold homes rose at the same time.
Existing home sales were lower on Friday, as the increased demand has reduced the inventory.
Homebuilders like KB Home and Lennar, though, have managed to outperform markets, despite the shadow inventory.
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Schwan home sales were listless for four straight years, beset by high customer churn and inventory pileups.
Hopefully, once we get past that point, the combination of an easing credit crisis, a rebounding economy, and just lower home production, fewer new homes being added to the market, will all work inventory levels down and start to stabilize pricing.
We continue to see conditions in the existing home market as putting downward pressure on inventories and supportive of a gradual cleansing of shadow inventory.
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One, the Treasury should stop liquidating the foreclosed housing inventory held by the GSEs, as they were responsible for 10% of existing home sales in the first quarter this year.
On Wednesday, July pending home sales were at their highest level in more than two years, according to NAR, and inventory continues to contract.
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