Housing affordability: 1 in 3 aren’t! (Chart)

From the Hallmark Abstract Service, New York blog.

As housing continues to heal from the financial crisis that had devastated real estate markets around the country, the question then becomes whether at some tim ewe reach a point where affordability becomes an issue!

We recently wrote an article here that had provided an interactive chart of the stability of housing markets on a state by state basis and, truth be told, the results were not stellar with only 11 stable and the rest in varying degrees of instability (How stable is your state’s housing market? (Interactive Chart).

So given the fact that in many cases the improvement in housing sales and prices may have been due to cash investors as opposed to buyers looking for a long-term place to live, at what point do non-investment fund buyers simply get priced out?

And, to make matters worse, a fact compounding the affordability problem at some point will be a move up in mortgage rates when Fed easing in the form of QE officially comes to an end.

So what is the deal with home affordability? This chart is from an article at HousingWire on the subject titled ’1 in 3 homes is unaffordable and a bubble is forming’ may help to clarity things!

But, at the same time, the data is not definitive as evidenced by the New York market which states that 41.8% of the homes are unaffordable by historic standards while the % of monthly income that needs to be devoted to housing is well below historic norms!

Home Affordability!

See the chart at HAS here.