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At the halfway point of 2015, David Crowe, Chief Economist for the National Association of Home Builders, reviews the first half of the year for the housing market and notes that “there are many positive signs suggesting a better second half and beyond.”
Starting with the economy, the first quarter turned negative, but the second quarter likely will reverse that and the second half is staged for even better growth.
Basic housing market conditions remain fertile for growth. Mortgage rates are low by historic standards and while they’re expected to rise as the economy grows, rates will remain affordable. Access to credit has constrained home buying, but some changes have been initiated that should attract more buyers to the closing table – especially first-time buyers.
The need for additional homes comes primarily from newly formed households. Existing households can move from one place to another, but that does not increase the total number of homes needed (with some exception to that rule if the change involves a move from a high- to low-vacancy market). But young people moving from their parents’ homes into their own space does increase the total number of homes needed, and if they are first-time buyers, it increases the number of single-family homes needed (which is what most first-timers buy). The good news here is that for the first time in nine years, household formations have exceeded 1 million. Rising household formations mean rising housing production, especially since vacancy rates also are back down to more normal levels. As this revival in living independently evolves, many of these young adults will turn back to homeownership and increase the demand for more single-family homes.
A new article from The Wall Street Journal reports on how wider access to 3-D printing technology today is giving homeowners more choices for how they can decorate their homes.
Push a button and out pops a toothpaste-tube clamp or a Steampunk-inspired birdhouse. That is the promise of 3-D printing, a 30-year-old technology that has gained ground with home-furnishing designers and manufacturers in recent years as printers have become more accessible and versatile.
The relatively quick and inexpensive printing process lets designers create products on-demand, which allows for instant customization and cuts the cost of experimenting with new designs.
For homeowners, that means a seemingly limitless new frontier in home decor that can be quirky or refined.
“It’s not only that they love the product,” says chandelier-maker Michael McHale, who uses 3-D printers. “They’re enamored of the story.”
Thingiverse, the online design community for MakerBot, a Brooklyn-based maker of 3-D printers, lets die-hards download more than 700,000 files, free of charge, and print home products, such as a Tyrannosaurus Rex-shape showerhead or a honeycomb-pattern vase. Early next year, MakerBot plans to launch a line of filaments – something like the ink cartridges in a regular printer – made partly of limestone, maple, bronze and iron. The composites take on the characteristics of their base materials, says Johan-Till Broer, the public-relations manager for MakerBot. Think 3-D-printed wood that can be sandpapered.
It’s hard to believe it’s only officially been “summer” for 19 days so far, because in many parts of the U.S., it feels like it’s been swelteringly hot for months now. So with 76 more summer days to go before autumn begins, this article from U.S. News offers some cool and inexpensive tips to help you save money while keeping the heat out of your home.
Unless you’re swimming, live in a cool climate or have access to A/C, the heat can be nearly unbearable. And though you can’t spend every day in a pool, you can find ways to avoid letting the outside heat drastically increase the cost of your bills. Here are a few easy, inexpensive ways to mitigate the cost of staying cool in the warm summer months so your wallet doesn’t get burned.
One of the most obvious ways to keep your living space cool is to utilize your windows. The quickest way to cool your house is to crack them open when you go to bed at night to allow the cool, nighttime air in your house. For good cross-ventilation, make sure you open at least two windows. An added bonus is that you may get to hear the crickets, frogs or even cicadas. It’s like a free sound machine.
Another (free) option is to keep the blinds on sunny windows closed. It may sound simple, but according to the Energy Department, using interior blinds that are completely closed and lowered will reduce heat gain by roughly 45 percent. The Energy Department also suggests using the slats to redirect the rays to a light-colored ceiling, which will diffuse the light without much glare or heat.
Where in the U.S. is the use of rooftop solar systems on the rise? And how fast is solar growing? To answer those questions, BuildZoom looked beyond traditional solar data sources, such as state agencies and utility companies, to analyze its own data of approximately 75 million building permits throughout the country, providing a more anticipatory indicator of solar installation trends.
For decades, the notion of capturing solar rays to produce clean energy on a grand scale has been an elusive dream; today, there are signs that this may finally be changing. One indication of this is that firms promoting rooftop solar systems are becoming familiar brands, whose ads, slogans and sales booths are an increasingly common sight. What’s more, some of the larger firms in the space are now publicly traded companies with valuations in the multi-billion dollar range. Ten years ago, most of them did not even exist.
Over the last decade (2005 to 2014), the estimated rate at which new solar power systems were added grew more than twenty-fold. In 2005, only about 10,000 new solar systems were introduced nationwide; by comparison, in 2014, some 230,000 were added.
Solar power production already takes place everywhere in the U.S., but its market penetration is higher in some places than in others. The highest ranked metro area is San Diego, which has almost 6.5 times more solar systems per capita than the nation as a whole. However, all of the first 14 metro areas on the list have more solar systems per capita than the US as a whole, including sunny places like Phoenix and Las Vegas, as well as some less obvious places like Baltimore and Boston. Not coincidentally, 6 of the 14 are in California, 5 of which are in the top 10.
Solar is picking up throughout the country, but it is growing the fastest in the Northeast. The number of new systems introduced in the Northeast increased by a staggering 227% between 2013 and 2014. Even after the growth spurt, though, it still clocks less than 1 system per 1,000 residents, suggesting there is plenty of room in the Northeast for solar to continue to grow. The number of new systems in the South and the Midwest has grown as well, but at a lower pace than in the Northeast.
Just in time for the busy summer moving season, a new article from U.S. News offers new homeowners six ideas on how to slash your costs for the big move. Read on to find out how applying these six strategies could help you get settled into your new home…with money to spare.
Summer is a great season to move into a new home. Kids are out of school, offices tend to be more flexible with granting vacation time and most importantly, the weather is nice. (Who wants to move boxes in the snow?)
If you’re moving this summer, you’ve probably noticed how quickly costs add up. From renting a truck to purchasing cardboard boxes and bubble wrap, there’s no shortage of moving-related costs, designed to bust your budget. Here are some strategies to help you save on moving expenses.
Around a month prior to moving, start minimizing purchases of perishable food, drinks, coffee, shampoo, soap, moisturizer and other consumables. These types of items tend to get thrown away during a move.
You can reduce this waste by “shopping your pantry,” or eating whatever is in your cupboard, and using whatever bathroom products are already on your shelves. Don’t continue with your normal consumer habits, only to throw away these items on moving day.
You should also try to reduce clutter before the move. The more stuff you need to pack, the more expensive your move will be. More items require more boxes, packing materials, hours on the clock for movers, a bigger truck, more fuel to power that truck and more hours on the other end when the movers unpack those boxes.
That’s a good reason to conduct a massive cleaning of your home before you move. Donate unused clothes, games, appliances, kitchen gadgets and anything else you haven’t used in the past six months to a year. Unless an item is an heirloom or otherwise highly sentimental, remember that you’re not going to miss the items that you don’t use, and you’ll be glad when there’s less to unpack.
Keeping a close watch on your credit reports periodically is an important step in securing your financial future. In this article from Bankrate, financial journalist and author Jean Chatzky offers a roadmap for how to obtain and check your credit report, and what steps you should take if you find any inaccuracies.
In May, Bankrate released a piece of research that found more than a third of Americans have never checked their credit reports. That’s right – never.
Credit reports can be intimidating. They’re lengthy, with a lot of numbers and small print. So in an effort to get more people to take a hands-on approach to their credit, here’s all the information you need to obtain yours – and read it.
Due to federal legislation, you’re entitled to one copy of your credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus per year, for a total of three.
Understand what you’re reading. Your credit report is divided into four main sections: personal information, account information, negative information (judgments, bankruptcies and liens), and inquiries (a list of attempts to access your credit).
Be sure to call out any inaccuracies. There’s really no such thing as a small error when it comes to your credit report. A misspelled name could cause your file to get mixed up with someone else’s, and an incorrect address could indicate that someone has tried to take out credit in your name. Inaccurate borrowing information could drag down your score unfairly, so be sure to look at every account and make sure that the information reported is accurate – most importantly payment history.
When you buy a home, you should never have to compromise – especially when it comes to your family’s health. New homes can be healthier than existing homes because they may come with the latest in design, materials and technology to promote good health for your entire family. A new interview by EcoBuilding Pulse with Larry Zarker of the Building Performance Institute provides a detailed look into the advantages of a healthier home.
Humans have been building houses for millennia, but it’s only been in the past half century or so that we’ve begun to grasp how they actually function. The mysteries of heat transfer, moisture retention, and air flow – long more a matter of folklore and conjecture than of hard science – are finally yielding to empirical research.
Larry Zarker is the CEO of the Building Performance Institute (BPI), and a veteran of over 30 years in the field, 20 of those with the National Association of Home Builders Research Center. Here’s how he sees the importance of home health issues in determining the future of home building.
“Most of the country’s government and utility incentive programs for energy efficiency are focused on high utility bills – that is, on improving energy efficiency. What we’re learning from contractors, though, is that consumers are more interested in the non-energy benefits. They’re worried about drafts and rooms that they can’t bring up to temperature, or asthma, sinusitis, and dust allergies. Health and comfort issues are actually more important to people than the utility bill. Lowering the utility bill can be a benefit of doing upgrade work – and it typically is – but it’s not the primary goal.”
Zarker continues by explaining the kinds of health issues that can be found in existing homes.
“About a third of owner-occupied homes are at least 45 years old and another third are at least 25 years old, so two thirds or more of our homes predate modern energy codes. And with old houses, you end up with a lot of issues: energy efficiency, comfort, and indoor air quality. When I give presentations to builders and remodelers, I show slides of a basement that’s typical of what we see during building inspections. One photo shows fiberglass band-joist insulation that is black with mold and other material being carried in through air leaks from an adjacent crawl space. And because the air-handling equipment is five feet away, it effectively distributes the mold throughout the house. It’s sending up into the house everything that came in from that damp crawl space; that’s the air the occupants are breathing. That’s just one scenario, but we see similar things all the time.”
For today’s college graduates who are beginning a new phase of their lives in the “real” world, this new article from Bankrate offers some solid advice on how to get your finances off to a good start, by avoiding five common financial mistakes.
Unless you want your 20-something years to be defined as the decade you drowned in debt, you must be proactive about how you handle your finances.
A major part of stepping out of college life and into adulthood is taking control of your cash and setting up financial goals – for the not-too-distant future and the decades ahead.
You won’t get very far if you ignore your finances, says Gail Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling in Washington, D.C.
“Not having years and years’ worth of financial experience under their belt yet, (millennials) really may be quite confused and not know what to do,” she says. “And often when that’s the case, people tend to just look the other way.”
But pretending the money issues don’t exist won’t do you any good.
“I’ve never seen a financial problem resolve itself,” Cunningham says.
Once you have that degree in your hand, you may feel like your picture-perfect career is right around the corner. But bring that optimism down a few notches. It’s too costly, Cunningham says.
“For (young adults) to assume that they’re going to land that job of their dreams can be too optimistic in this current environment,” she says. “What they would do wrong then is maybe they’ve driven an old clunker through college and they’re anxious to get a new one … and they rent more of an apartment than they can actually afford.”
Alan Moore, a CFP professional and founder of Serenity Financial Consulting in Bozeman, Montana, thinks the reason young adults make decisions like this is because they expect to have the same comfy lifestyle they had while growing up.
“We tend to forget that it took our parents 20 years to build up to the point that they had that lifestyle.”
It’s extremely important to set up a budget, and a savings account.
“The first mistake people make is not even having a budget and just not even thinking of it as something that they need to do right now,” says Moore.
With a savings account, you may not be able to save thousands of dollars right away, but you can start small.
Let go of the mindset that opening a savings account is for retirement purposes only, Moore says. Everything from planning a long-distance family visit to taking care of car repairs requires setting money aside.
“The alternative is you end up in a hole where you put it on the credit card because you didn’t have the money, and then you’re paying that off for the next six months,” he says.
And not taking the time to look over your credit reports is a huge no-no. This is especially important if you frequently change addresses.
As the housing market continues its recovery in 2015 with positive trending data regarding home sales and prices, many are wondering if the market will see continued strength in the months ahead. This article from Trey Garrison, Senior Financial Reporter for HousingWire.com, provides some predictions for housing going forward.
The recent strength of housing activity suggests the market is in a good place, relatively speaking, to handle the inevitable – though certainly not imminent – gradual increase in interest rates.
In a client note, analysts at Capital Economics – who tend to be on the optimistic side – say that they believe with credit conditions gradually loosening and affordability very favorable, they expect sales and prices to enjoy further gains.
“We expect the economy to rebound from the weather-related weakness at the start of the year. GDP growth should reach 2.3% this year and 2.8% in 2016,” says Ed Stansfield, chief property economist. “Interest rates will soon begin to rise. However, favorable valuations and affordability will support the housing recovery for some time yet.”
Stansfield says that a long-overdue upturn in mortgage lending should support further growth in new and existing home sales over the next couple of years.
