CDS Offers Input on 2016 Housing Growth Expectations

Local Housing Slows at End of Near-Record Year
The Houston Chronicle

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The Houston-area housing market continued to weaken in December amid growing concerns about the regional economy, but it ended the year with a near-record number of home sales for all of 2015, a report shows.

Buyers closed on 73,724 single-family homes last year, falling just 2.4 percent short of the market's 2014 sales peak, the Houston Association of Realtors said Wednesday.

"We have to remember the housing market from 2012 through 2014 was really quite extraordinary. It was really an overheated market," said Steve Spillette, president of CDS Community Development Strategies, a market research and economic analysis firm based in Houston. "We were adding so many jobs, and we really couldn't catch up."

That said, he added, "the hiring boom that drove so much of that increase in population and households in our region, that's over."
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The slowdown in housing began to take hold late last year. December marked the third straight month of year-over-year declines in single-family home sales.

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