Jeffrey Allen Herald, 49 of Phoenix Arizona, was indited on October 19th on two counts of fraud and artifices and one count of theft for providing unlicensed legal and mortgage services.
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Fewer homes sold in July than a year ago in Las Cruces.
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Do you want to sell a house in Las Cruces? A couple of years ago, you could have probably had buyers knocking on your door within hours of putting the home on the New Mexico housing market.
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The New Mexico housing market within the Four Corners is experiencing minor jolts and bumps, but area realtors say the bubble has not burst locally as it has elsewhere.
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The Albuquerque housing market ranks first in home price appreciation in Housing Predictor’s annual survey of the nation’s top 25 markets.
The Duke City is projected to increase 9.1 percent this year.
Do you want to buy a home in Las Cruces?
The good news is that there are more homes on the market than in years past. The bad news? New Mexico home prices continue to rise.
Around the nation, the housing market has been repeatedly referred to as “troubled.” The U.S. Commerce Department reported Monday that sales of new homes fell sharply in February for a second consecutive month. While sales of existing homes rose in February, worries about bad credit mortgage loans and lenders tempers any enthusiasm, according the National Association of Realtors.
“Our view is that the tightening in the subprime market will have a negative impact on home sales,” David Lereah, chief economist for the NAR, told The Associated Press.
Even though 2006 was another record-setting year for home sales in Las Cruces with more than 2,300 homes sold, the first quarter of 2007 reflects a major step back from that pace. According to Annette West, a Las Cruces real estate agent with NM Apartment Advisors, 352 homes have been sold so far this year. Through March of last year, 507 homes had been sold.
“That’s a big change in volume,” West said.
The average price for a home in Las Cruces stands at $226,151. As of late March 2006 that figure was $193,481. The median price has increased from $170,000 in 2006 to $182,450 this year.
West bases her findings on the Multiple Listings Service, which while not an exact science - the MLS “is only as good as the agents entering data” - it still provides a solid comparison, she said.
Trend emerges
One pattern is clear: Fewer houses are selling in this New Mexico housing market and the ones that do are taking longer.
West reported that the average stay on the market for a home sold in 2006 was 106 days. So far this year, that average was 117 days.
The housing slump reported in other parts of the nation is affecting Las Cruces, experts said. The record-setting pace of the past several years was fueled in part of out-of-town buyers. Many potential newcomers are now having difficulty selling their old house, which makes it difficult for them to take out a New Mexico mortgage here.
Prices on rise
A housing index released Tuesday by Standard & Poor’s showed that prices of single-family homes across the nation fell in January compared to a year ago, registering the lowest growth since January 2004.
In Las Cruces, the average and median price of a home has risen from 2006. Despite that increase, many people still view the prices in southern New Mexico as a bargain. Let our brokers discuss the options you have in this region today.
SOURCE: Las Cruces-Sun News
Economists expect the housing market to rebound in 2007 for most of the nation, while New Mexico home builders are also expecting a rebound after a sharp downturn in 2006.
Housing starts in the Albuquerque housing market were down 30 percent in 2006, says Jim Folkman, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Central New Mexico. But, believe it or not, Folkman says “that’s probably a good thing.”
That’s because local home builders were operating at full capacity prior to the slow down, after years of double-digit growth in their industry locally, Folkman says. Therefore, even with the brakes tapped hard in 2006, business was still brisk. This year, he expects it to rebound somewhat.
“We’re in the 13th year of a seven-year cycle,” Folkman says, joking about the longevity and strength of the area’s housing boom.
Nationally, though, the industry has had a tougher time. It’s expected to rebound this year, but some areas will take longer to recover.
“We may be bottoming out on the sales side,” said David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors.
Sellers are “being a lot more flexible,” he said, and lower prices are bringing some home mortgage loan applicants back into the market. Home builders have cut back on production of new houses, which will “make for a much healthier market going forward,” he added.
David Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, expects house values nationally will decline about 1 percent in 2007. That’s not, he said, “a major threat to the housing wealth effect.”
In and around Albuquerque, the rise in prices is expected to slow this year, but not to reverse itself. Local realtors and economists say appreciation rates might be in the low single digits in 2007, instead of the 15- to 20-percent rate at which they rose in previous years.
In terms of buoying the national economy by supporting consumer spending, stock market gains have offset declining house values, said Martin Regalia, chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. People are continuing to spend - good news since 70 percent of the U.S. economy is dependent on consumption.
“It just doesn’t look like the American consumer is going away,” Regalia said.
A few more months of price declines actually will be good for the housing market because they will make houses more affordable, Lereah said. This will open up the field to home mortgage borrowers from all income levels.
The housing market will grow in three-fourths of the country in 2007, Lereah predicts.
Markets in the rest of the country - including California and coastal resort areas from Delaware to Florida housing markets - “are going to experience some pain,” he said.
One thing helping to sustain central New Mexico’s housing market is a robust economy generally, especially in terms of job creation.
“Jobs equals housing and housing equals jobs,” Folkman says.
With the new Tesla Motors electric car company agreeing to set up shop in Albuquerque, fledgling Eclipse Aviation expanding beyond 1,000 jobs and Intel announcing it will invest $1 billion or more in its Rio Rancho facility, the metro area seems to have jobs aplenty.
This story compiled by Dan Shingler, editor, New Mexico Business Weekly, and Kent Hoover, Washington bureau chief for American City Business Journals, the Business Weekly’s parent.
The New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority has been named a Tier 1, or top performer, by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of HUD’s Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loss mitigation initiative.
As a Tier 1 servicing lender, MFA is eligible for additional incentives - from an additional $100 payment for each special forbearance agreement to a two-month extension on pre-foreclosure sale time frames without prior HUD approval.
HUD implemented the tier ranking system in 2000 as a pilot to measure servicers’ use of HUD’s loss mitigation program. Servicers in Tiers 3 and 4 are usually targeted for training by HUD as well as possible investigation and audit.
Jay Czar, MFA’s executive director, says loss mitigation efforts are critical to MFA’s mission. Around four percent of all New Mexico home loans are delinquent, he says, and New Mexico is only second to Colorado in the Rocky Mountain region in the number of foreclosures.
Irene Moreno, MFA loan collections workout specialist, says households often fall into delinquency through events such as the loss of a job or an accident that leaves someone in the household disabled.
SOURCE: New Mexico Business Journal
The Albuquerque housing market continued to decline in December, posting nearly a 16 percent drop compared to a year earlier.
For Dec. 2006, 877 existing homes were sold - compared to 1040 the year before. However, the average sale price showed a 10.2 percent increase to $238,172. This bump is why first-time home buyers are having trouble affording the region.
The median sale price also rose 14 percent to just under $200,000, according to statistics released by the Albuquerque Metropolitan Board of Realtors.
Despite these setbacks, the year ended with 13,092 homes traded, the second best year on record; only 2005’s 13,448 dwellings sold topped it. Overall, New Mexico mortgage demand was still considered strong throughout the year.
There are currently 729 pending sales, compared to 787 pending sales in Dec. of 2005.
“The Albuquerque resale housing market has slowed down with an increase in housing inventory over last year, but unlike many areas around the country, resale home prices continue to be fairly stable in the Albuquerque market,” said Scott Dean, chairman of the AMBR.
Combined with reasonable home mortgage rates, the area should see new residents moving in as the weather warms up to start 2007.
The widespread housing market slowdown across the U.S. apparently reached Santa Fe late last year, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports.
Sales in both the city and county of Santa Fe in the fourth quarter of 2006 were well behind figures for the same period a year ago, continuing a trend that became apparent in the third quarter.
A softer real estate market and low New Mexico mortgage rates favor buyers for at least the time being, and more than likely mean real estate agents are having a harder time making a living.
But while the number of home sales in the city dropped from a late-2005 peak, the median price remained steady when compared with a year earlier.
“In looking at the entire year (of 2006), there’s no question there was a slowing down but not a going down,” said Wally Sargent of Santa Fe Properties, one of Santa Fe’s largest real estate agencies.
“We didn’t experience the type of drop they had in Phoenix, Las Vegas or some of the Southern California markets, but there was definitely a slowing down. There are more sellers than buyers, and properties are selling when sellers get realistic and don’t hold out for top dollar.”
The Santa Fe Association of Realtors reported a total of 221 homes in the city sold during the fourth quarter of 2006 - a 25 percent drop from the same period of 2005.
The median price was $375,000, which was close to the $379,500 figure reported for the final three months of 2005. The median price means as many homes sold for more than that price as sold for less.
It was a similar story outside city limits. County totals for the fourth quarter of 2006 show 177 homes sold - a 27 percent decline from a year earlier - while New Mexico home prices dropped by 4 percent to $442,000.
The association cautions that not all sales are reported to the local Multiple Listing Service. For all of 2006, business at Santa Fe Properties was about on par with last year, maybe slightly off, officials said, a statistic they say is most likely true for the city in general.
On the other hand, the high-end market - homes costing $1 million and more - “heated up quite a bit in the last year,” said Sargent, who anticipates 2007 being “a decent year but not a red-hot year like we had in 2004 and 2005.”
The drop in sales came at a time when the number of agents trying to sell real estate in the New Mexico housing market increased, which has meant less sales-commission money to go around.
“There’s an awful lot of people who have real estate licenses who do little or no business,” Sargent said. “A market like this tends to wring a lot of that out, which at the end of the day, for those who remain, is not bad.”
David Barker of Barker Realty agreed that there was some softness in sales in the third and fourth quarters, a slowdown that has led to an increase in inventory and foreclosure, as well as the number of days it takes to sell a house in Santa Fe.
“More properties are on the market, and fewer are selling,” Barker said, a situation that favors buyers at least temporarily. “It’s good for the balance of the market.”
But Barker said the softness was a “temporary aberration” that’s likely to result in a stronger market in 2007. The relative affordability of home mortgage loans in New Mexico, combined with a growing economy, makes the Land of Enchantment a good bet to rebound in the next 12 months.