The average American needs to make a little over $51,000 a year to afford the median-priced home — including the principal, interest, taxes and insurance — in the U.S., a study released this week by mortgage information website HSH.com. This assumes the
buyer has good to excellent credit (and thus would get a mortgage interest rate — depending on where he lived — of around 4%), put down 20% and would be spending no more than 28% of his income on principal and interest.
Click here to read the complete story.
Virginia Homes Sales Report: January 2016 Market Summary
January 2016 Virginia residential real estate sales showed typical industry seasonality. January tends to be the slowest month for home sales, and this year was particularly affected by catastrophic Winter Storm Jonas. In spite of blizzard conditions that halted market activity for several days, sales volume was nearly on par with the same month last year. The value of transactions in January 2016 exceeded $1.74 billion, an out performance of the previous January. Median sales price rose 3.26 percent year-over-year, and more than 7 percent from January 2014. Year-over-year elevation indicates sustainable market improvement. Click here for the complete report
http://tinyurl.com/j7k254s.
The Virginia Association of REALTORS® (VAR) publishes monthly and quarterly home sales reports to provide our members, the media and real estate-related industries with current data. The report data comes from a variety of sources and is analyzed by the Virginia Center for Housing Research at Virginia Tech. All data may be used with citation to the proprietary owner, the
Virginia Association of REALTORS®.
Key takeaways:
- Mortgage rates fell in every one of our metros during the fourth quarter
- Quarterly home prices fell in every metro but five, while home prices were up year-over-year in every metro but three
- The Orlando metro area had the largest year-over-year price gain at 13.89 percent (Denver came in at a close second at 12.29 percent)
- When putting 10 percent down instead of 20 percent, the required salary figures for our metro areas increased anywhere from $4,200 to $31,000
Washington, D.C. is only one of three metro areas on our list to see both quarterly and year-over-year price declines. With two straight quarters of salary reductions, affordability is moving in the right direction for homebuyers. If the required salary of $78,626 seems low for the D.C. area, the required salary increases to $91,494 when putting 10 percent down.
VARBUZZ.COM
