Home sales in Katy Tx & the Houston area still move at fast pace.

According to Nancy Sarnoff from the Houston Chronicle, www.chron.com, home sales in katy, tx and the Houston area continues to favor sellers, but the area’s buying frenzy could be starting to slow a bit. While the number of housing contracts set to close at the end of last month was up over the previous year, an indication of future sales, the increase was much smaller than in previous months, a report shows. “The frantic pace is down maybe a notch,” said Beth Wolff, chairman & CEO of Beth Wolff Realtors, www.bethwolff.com. To be sure, the fast pace of sales hasn’t gone away. Home sales across the area jumped 16.2 % in August & the supply of homes for sale remains low, according to the Houston Association of Realtors, www.har.com, which released its monthly housing report Tuesday. Buyers closed on 7,504 single-family homes last month, marking a strong end to the summer selling season.
Properties selling from $250,000 through the millions saw the greatest increase in sales volume, pushing the overall median price of a Houston-area home to $186,200. Houston’s inventory of available homes dipped to 3.3 months in August, meaning it would take that long to sell all the homes on the market based on recent activity. The number of available properties, at the end of August declined 18.9 % to 32,834.
Builders are ramping up new-home development, which should help ease the limited supply that’s been heating up the market. And rising mortgage rates are likely to affect activity as well. “When rates go up, it really cuts a lot of people out of the market, especially if the are pushing their incomes to buy the most house that they can get,” said Evert Crawford of Crawford Realty Advisors, a research and consulting firm. Rates on a 30-year mortgage averaged 4.57 % in the latest weekly survey from Freddie Mac, www.freddiemac.com. That’s more than a full percentage point higher that it was in May.
In the short term, rising rates may be enticing more buyers to jump into the market while they can still afford to buy. Danny Frank, the association’s chairman, said the summer selling season has been unlike any he’s ever seen. “It’s difficult to say exactly when Houston’s boiling real estate market will begin to cool down,” Frank said in the housing report.

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