"Palm Coast, FL, Housing is Back!"

For those of you who read this blog, you know I watch the "S&P Case-Shiller Index," as the most perceptive peek at where the real estate and housing markets are trending.  In a 3/28/11 CNN-Money piece, these are the snippets that jumped out at me:

• If all the noise you're hearing about housing has you totally confused, join the crowd! One day you'll read that owning a home has never been more affordable. The next day you'll see news that housing starts have plunged to nearly their lowest level in half a century... (as headlines announced in March)... After four years of falling prices and surging foreclosures, it's hard to know what to think. Even Robert Shiller and Karl Case can't agree. The two economists, who together created the widely followed S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price indices, are right now offering sharply contrasting views of housing's future. Shiller recently warned that the chances were high for a further double-digit drop in U.S. home prices. But in an interview with Fortune, Case took a far brighter view: "The lack of new home building is a huge help that a lot of people are ignoring," says Case. "People think I'm crazy to be optimistic, but housing is looking like "The Little Engine That Could."

• Foreclosure markets: The outlook is brightening

The true disaster areas for housing since the bubble burst have been Sunbelt cities such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami, AND MOST OF FLORIDA -- places that boasted great job and population growth in the mid-2000s, only to suffer a housing crash that swamped them with empty homes and condos and crushed their economies. But people always want to live in those sunny locales, and their job markets are starting to recover, albeit slowly. In foreclosure markets the inventory problem is far greater because it includes not just traditional resale homes but millions of distressed properties. Fortunately those houses are now such a screaming deal that investors, including lots of mom-and-pop buyers, are purchasing them at a rapid pace.

• Even with investors jumping in, buying activity in foreclosure markets hasn't yet increased enough to bring inventories down. But, it will soon... Prices will fall a couple of percentage points lower in the distressed markets in the short run. "But that will be overshooting," he says. "It's like an elastic band (Remember The Elasticity of Demand, from Econ 101?) - If prices do drop this year, they will need to bounce back because they'll be far too low compared with rents and replacement cost." Renters will come off the sidelines to purchase homes in the years ahead, precisely the opposite trend of the past few years.

• So let's state it simply and forcibly: Housing is back!  Think about it.  The trend has been down for five and a half years in most of Florida.  It's time...

.