“The bidding wars are back,” said Les Christie in CNN.com. Almost overnight, “the nation’s major housing markets have gone from stagnant to sizzling.” In California, New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Seattle, listings have generated intense bidding wars as homeowners scramble to buy “before home prices and mortgages rise.” That’s left the housing market in an “awkward ‘tweener’ phase,” with a big imbalance between supply and demand, said Jeff Culbertson, a Coldwell Banker executive in Southern California. Available housing inventories are still shrinking as potential sellers wait and new home construction “moves forward at a snail’s pace,” so don’t expect housing prices to falter in the near future.
That’s good news for the economy at large, said Christopher Matthews in Time.com. The housing sector has historically carried a “disproportionate burden” in leading the economy to recovery. And no wonder: A house is generally the largest purchase someone will make, and buying a home “usually necessitates other big-ticket purchases like furnishing and appliances.” And in many parts of the country, home construction is a prime generator of jobs. Despite the heat in some local markets, though, the national trend is just “modestly positive,” so don’t “expect a housing boom any time soon.”
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