With our Housing Market Seminar for the Greater DC and Baltimore area right around the corner on September 28th, we decided to take a look at how the region’s economy and housing market stack up against the rest of the country.  The nation’s capital has long been a stable employment market due to its political clout, high levels of education, and government and government-related industries.  So it should come as no surprise that the Washington D.C. metro area is outperforming national trends in just about every housing metric, especially in recent months.

The Commerce Department released the Census New Home Sales Survey data this morning, and some media were jumping on reported numbers as showing a decline where we would say they were largely in line with analyst expectations of flat volume.

The Commerce Department released the New Residential Construction data this morning and reported an incremental decline in starts but an increase in permits.  The number of new housing units permitted in August was 3.2% up from July, to an annualized level of 620,000.   New housing starts displayed a contradictory trend, falling 5% to an annualized pace of 601,000.

With a discouraging report on foreclosures last week indicating an increase in August, we thought we’d take the opportunity to examine the areas that have thus far done the best job at absorbing the distressed inventory that has come on to the market since the start of the housing decline.  According to data from Housing IntelligencePro, among the top 100 new home markets there were seven that have managed to absorb nearly all foreclosed homes back into the market on a cumulative basis since 2005.  Two were from Texas, two from New Mexico, and were joined with Albany, Boston, and Las Cruces, NM.  While housing is still a gloomy subject, some areas are definitely weathering the storm better than others.

July turned out to be yet another lousy month for home sales.  The Commerce Department released the Census New Home Sales Survey data last week, and the reported numbers were in line with analyst expectations of somewhat flat volume, especially after the downward revisions in the June data were taken into account.  Sales of new single-family homes for July came in at a preliminary figure of 298,000 on a seasonally adjusted annual basis, down 0.7% from a downwardly revised 300,000 rate in June.  Compared to a year ago, however, the July volume was up 6.8%.  The average sales price of new homes during the period was $272,300, up 1% from June and up 8% from July of 2010.