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68 | TH E M R EP O RT O R I G I NAT I O N S E R V I C I N G DATA G O V E R N M E N T S E C O N DA R Y M A R K E T THE LATEST DATA Homes Aren't Built in a Day Construction times for single-family residences depend on locations and whether they're for sale or custom built. F or folks considering building a house from the ground up, they'll have to sit tight a fair bit before moving in. And depending on the part of the country they call home, that wait could stretch, according to the National Associa - tion of Home Builders that cited data from the Census Bureau's 2017 Survey of Construction (SOC). The average completion time of a single-family home hovers around 7.5 months, the newly released survey says. That figure typically includes nearly a month from authorization to start, plus another 6.5 months to complete the construction, it notes. That authorization-to-completion timeline fluctuates across the nation and hinges on geographic location, metropolitan status, and whether the property is erected for sale or if it's custom-built. From obtaining a building permit to completing the project, it can take anywhere from under a month to 77 months to build a single-family home, according to the SOC. When considering all the single-family builds wrapped up last year, those constructed for sale took the least time: 6.9 months from scoring the permits to ending the job, the report states. By contrast, customized dwellings took the most time—12.3 months. Those created by hired contractors were in process for about nine months. A lion's share of single-family homes built for sale and custom- made ones built on owners' land launched construction within the same month after securing building authorizations, the SOC said. Custom residences built by owners who served as general contractors, however, had a one-month gap between obtaining permits and kicking off construction. The average time from authorization to completion in 2017 also differed across country divisions, according to the report. New England netted the longest time (10.4 months), trailed closely by the Middle Atlantic (10.3 months), East South Central (9.4 months), East North Central (8.2 months), and Pacific (8.5 months), the SOC found. Together, these five chalked up an average permit- to-completion time eclipsing the 7.5-month U.S. average. The South Atlantic division registered the shortest time frame at 6.4 months. What's more, the average waiting period from permit securitization to construction launch spanned from the shortest time of 17 days in the Mountain division to the longest of 39 days in the Pacific. Metro-area homes took an average 7.3 months to finish—a full two months shorter than their nonmetropolitan-area counterparts. This same pattern played out all over the U.S. last year, save for the West North Central division. There, the average time to completion in metropolitan locations charted longer than in nonmetro zones, the SOC survey said. House Prices Will Appreciate and Depreciate Home values in the West may outpace others, while those in the East and South may decline. R esidential home prices are set to appreciate at 4.4 percent nation- ally over the next 12 months, according to Veros Real Estate Solutions' (Veros) Vero- FORECAST. However, housing markets out West are likely to see a much-faster appreciation than those in the rest of the country, the forecast predicted. The latest quarterly forecast covers the 12 months from June 1, 2018, to June 1, 2019, and integrates data from 1,005 counties, 354 metropolitan sta - tistical areas (MSAs), and 13,877 ZIP codes covering 82 percent of the U.S. population. The forecast for Q2 2018 projected that the 10 highest-appreciating markets were concentrated in five states in the West. The forecast also projected 10 markets that will see a slight depreciation in home values over the next 12 months. All these markets were in the East and South, Veros said. "Washington State and Nevada occupy six of the 10 highest-appreciating MSAs in the U.S. and the remaining four are in California, Oregon, and Idaho," said Eric Fox, VP, Statistical and Economic Modeling at Veros. "Interestingly, the metro markets that are projected to appreciate the most over the next 12 months in this VeroFORECAST release are also among the most populated, while the markets that are ex - pected to depreciate most are all among the least populated. For example, the average population of the top 25 metros is 1.7 million and the average population of the bottom 25 metros is 318,000." Veros has predicted that all 10 of the highest-appreciating MSAs and 21 of the top 25 markets will be concentrated in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado over the next year. Narrowing down to MSAs, the forecast said that the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area in Washington would see double- digit price increases at 11.1 percent, followed by Olympia and Bremerton-Silverdale, Washington, at 9.8 percent. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara in California and Carson City in Nevada were set to appreciate at 9.5 percent. Despite migration to Seattle from California's Bay Area and Silicon Valley, the report said the San Jose market is one of the top five markets for appreciation this quarter. "The San Jose mar - ket remains exceedingly strong with a supply of homes at an extremely low one month, while its population is continuing to grow steadily. Its unemployment is an extremely low 2.6 percent," said Fox. "The Silicon Valley continues to attract workers for high-tech jobs, and there isn't enough housing to fill demand, making this one of the strongest markets in the country." Other markets among the top 10 included Reno-Sparks, Nevada; Mount Vernon- Anacortes, Washington; Pocatello, Idaho; San Francisco- Oakland-Fremont, California; and Eugene-Springfield, Oregon.