Below is an article to show the housing market starts to show a bit of strength. A smart investor should ask if the window of the great opportunities has started to close down.
----------------- From Washington Post on 12/20/2011
The deeply depressed housing sector finally seems to have found its bottom — and may even be starting to bounce back.
A wide range of housing indicators — construction, home sales, prices — have stabilized in the past few months, although they remain at historically very low levels. And it looks as if construction activity in particular will pick up in 2012.
The latest evidence of the momentum — new-housing starts for November — was released Tuesday. The surprising 9.3 percent gain bumped the rate of new-housing construction to its highest level in 19 months, to a rate of 685,000 new units a year. The number of building permits issued for new houses and apartments also rose, to 5.7 percent in November.
“The good news is that housing has switched from being a drag on overall growth, to modest positive contributions,” said Brian Bethune, chief economist of Alpha Macroeconomic Foresights.
Behind this improvement was a combination of powerful demographic trends, differences in the job and housing markets in various local economies, and the half-decade in which very few homes were built or renovated.
In normal times, about 1.2 million new households are created in the United States each year, because of rising population. That number falls during bad economic times as more young adults live with their parents, retirees move in with their children and immigration declines. But it doesn’t fall as dramatically as has home construction amid the housing bust and recession.
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