2014 Housing Outlook: Home Prices Head Higher

from MSN.com | November 19, 2013 | by Pat Mertz Esswein

Home prices will rise in 2014 but at a slower, more steady pace compared with historical trends.

The housing recovery has pushed up home prices nearly everywhere. In the past year, home prices rose in 225 of the 276 cities tracked by Clear Capital, a provider of real estate data and analysis. (See how home prices are shifting in 276 metro areas.) Prices nationwide increased  by 10.9 percent, pushing the median price for existing homes up by $30,000, to $215,000. For people who have waited to sell their home or refinance their mortgage, that's good news. (Bing: How are interest rates looking this week?)

Rising home prices in Seattle enabled Mike and Kristin Litke to refinance their first mortgage last summer and pay off a second mortgage that had an 8.2 percent interest rate. The Litkes, who bought their three-bedroom, 1.5-bath home for $512,500 in 2007 at the peak of Seattle's housing market, had used the second mortgage to avoid paying private mortgage insurance. In 2010, just as home prices in the area hit a trough, they refinanced their first mortgage to a 30-year fixed rate of 4.375 percent but were stuck with the second mortgage because they didn't have enough equity to do a "cash-out" refi.

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Springs Listed as #4 U.S. Military Boomtown

Published in The Colorado Springs Business Journal | November 20, 2013 | by Cameron Moix

Colorado Springs came in at No. 4 among America’s top 10 military boomtowns, according to a list compiled using U.S. Bureau of Statistics data from 2009 to 2011.

The list, compiled by Texas-based tech startup SpareFoot Inc., showed that Colorado Springs has seen average annual population growth of 2.3 percent and an annual per-capita income growth of 1.6 percent. The metropolitan area average annual growth in per-capita military gross domestic product is 7.9 percent, while the same growth for non-military is only .4 percent, according to the list.

“Military spending contributes billions of dollars to the U.S. economy, and nowhere is that spending felt more than in American communities that host military bases,” SpareFoot said in a news release. “Some of these communities are booming — enjoying growth in population, per-capita personal income and gross domestic product, a key indicator of an area’s economic health.”

Colorado Springs — with five major military installations — places behind Hinesville, Ga., El Paso, Texas and Elizabethtown, Ky., as one of most rapidly expanding military communities.

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