Your spring/summer 2012 housing observations

[bdawk]

In my area of Alpharetta/Milton, houses seem to be moving as well. There are 2 new subdivions around the corner from me that did stall for a while, but both have started building again in the last year again. At the same time they increased their home prices. Most seem to be in the $500k+ range.

Sales have picked up in my subdivision as well. There is 1 overpriced house that has been on the market for a while. The others that were more acurately priced moved in a matter of months.

I think one of the main factors is that all of the schools in this part of town are highly rated which keeps demand higher than other areas.

Oh and my house since purchase over 2 years ago, just appraised for a 5% increase in value.

I know all of this is very local to me, but to me, that's real estate.

[RoslynHolcomb]

I think things are definitely picking up. When we moved here in 2008 there were "pipe farms" at either end of the street. They started building on one of them last year (after dropping the price from $700k to $400k). Five houses. Signs never went up and all of them have sold. Very nicely built homes too. Near as I can tell there were never any foreclosures on my street, though I definitely saw signs to rent houses or rooms. The house next door to us was a short sale right after we bought ours. I don't think the northern suburbs were ever in the bad condition the rest of the city was.

[ATLTJL]

I can say that earlier this year I was very frustrated with the stock market and on a whim, I took a pretty small but still significant percentage of my portfolio and bought a bunch of different homebuilder stock with it. My logic was it was probably about as low as it was going to get.

Even the stuff that continued to fall after I bought it is pretty much back up to where it was, but some of them have exploded and almost doubled in value in less than a year.

So, at least some of the national homebuilders out there have confidence. Or Wall Street has confidence in them.