Lehigh Valley Market Update for February 2014

I hope this Post Finds you well!

1. Recently, I have been sharing the Zillow.com Market Updates first. This month I will diverge  from that to show Bank Owned Supply vs Non-Bank Owned supply of houses. It is my belief that this trend could be instrumental in allowing the Lehigh Valley to see price accretion and I am going to follow this trend closely as the year goes forward.

     (I) Supply of Bank owned Vs Non-Bank Owned property

      Analysis- Year over Year bank assets are down -43%. In addition, bank properties are down -24% from January to February.

    (II) Supply and Demand Chart -- For Sale homes are down 6%, homes going Under Contract      increased 2% and homes reaching settlement decreased 17%.

     Analysis- While it would be ideal for the amount of settling homes to increase, this becomes   difficult as supply decreases. As the amount of homes available for sale declines, there is simply a less nominal amount of homes to be settled. Its great to see the amount of homes going under contract increase month over month despite the weather.  Supply keeps decreasing month over month which you can see in the chart in section (I). Supply for Feb 2013 was 6.7 and this past Feb it was 6.1

Momentum is Positive overall.

2. Click here for the Zillow Report

Analysis-  I like this report as it follows the negative equity in the housing markets. At the moment, the Lehigh Valley has been at a negative equity percentage of 23.6 % which trails the national average by 2.6%. This has been a consistent rate throughout the winter.

3. Federal Housing Finance Agency

Their seems to be a correlation between Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley. The Lehigh Valley seems to shadow Philadelphia's momentum, when Philadelphia witnesses price growth or decline quarter over quarter, so does the Lehigh Valley.

I keep this report for reference from month to month: The FHFA is a nice index because it only pertains to mortgage resale's where the mortgages are owned by FHFA, Freddie, and Fannie. The reason that its a different kind of index is it differentiates between cash buyers and buyer's using investor financing. Its also nice because it does a good job of comparing different metro's. The link I provided compares Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the Lehigh Valley.


4. Here is a BHHS Fox and Roach's 


Northampton County

Lehigh County


I think the video reporter does a pretty good job of taking a few metrics and succinctly giving their meaning.