Thursday, March 26, 2015

U.S. Home Prices Are Surging 13 Times Faster Than Wages. You can blame investors for that

Bloomberg reports:
For most people, buying a home is no cheap venture. That's especially the case when the growth in U.S. home prices is beating wage increases 13 to 1.

Wages climbed by 1.3 percent from the second quarter of 2012 to the second quarter of 2014, compared to a 17 percent increase in home prices around that time, according to a new report from RealtyTrac. The real-estate data provider used the Labor Department's weekly earnings data to measure wage growth, while home prices were derived from sales-deed data in December 2014 and compared to December 2012 on the hypothesis that a change in average wages would take at least six months to affect home prices.
There's an explanation:
How could this happen? Enter the investor.

In many markets, the housing recovery has "largely been driven over the last two years by buyers who are not as constrained by incomes -- namely the institutional investors coming in and buying up properties as rentals, and international buyers coming in and buying, often with cash," Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac and author of the report, said in an interview.
The easy money of the Federal Reserve is giving you: the next housing bubble.