ABC World News Features KC Housing Market

ABC World News Features Kansas City Housing Market

Kansas City’s housing market was featured ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson Thursday night in a look at the housing market. Kansas City was focused as a Midwestern city where the new-home market has bucked national trends and began to show positive signs and the early markings of a recovery.“Locally, permits have been up over the last three months,” local home builder Kevin Enyeart of Gale Homes said in an interview with ABC News. “We just wrapped up the local Parade of Homes where we open up all the homes from all the builders metrowide. In our sales office we saw triple the traffic – over 150 car loads of families coming through sales office compared to 40 or 50 during a typical Parade of Homes.”
Enyeart explained that builders have significantly reduced their inventory of new of new homes and that homebuyers were realizing that opportunities to take advantage of competitive prices and low mortgage rates are dwindling.“They are wanting to jump in and take that last opportunity on a purchase before things start to hit that uptick on the bell curve,” he told ABC News.“The general consumer confidence seems positive right now,” Enyeart said. “They are watching the headlines; they are watching the credit tightening. I’ve seen folks coming in worried about where the credit tightening is going to and looking to either take advantage of it before things changes too dramatically or get locked in on rates as they are a little bit lower since there is some uncertainty over where rates are going to go.”While national new-home sales plunged 11.5 percent in August, Midwest sales activity rose more than 7 percent, according to the Census Bureau.“I say to my clients, ‘It’s a buyer’s market – why aren’t you buying?’ ” Chicago Realtor Jeanine Wheeler told ABC News. Despite tougher credit and lending standards, mortgage broker Ken Perlmutter explained that credit remained available for buyers in the new-home market.“There is a misconception out there that we aren’t lending money,” Perlmutter said. We are. We’re certainly eager to lend it to people who want to buy homes.

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