Metro Atlanta housing market continues to lag - Atlanta Business Chronicle:

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Home sales in metro Atlanta fellto 11,369 — predominantlg sales of existing homee — in the first an 8.27 percent dip from the previousa quarter, data shows. That’s also down nearly 12 percent from the first three months oflast year. In Fultojn County, sales fell nearly 13 percen tin first-quarter 2009 (to from the end of last year, according to the Georgiaq MLS. Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties also experiencefd declinesof 8.28 percent, 14.6 percentt and 12.7 percent, respectively, duriny the same time period.
Meanwhile, construction activity on new homes continuef to sag across the country with Atlanta showing a more than eight month supply of according to national research firmMetrostudy Inc. Metrostudy lookse at individual subdivisions within 256 countiess in all or part of 84 metropolitan The firm is currently forecastingroughly 490,000 housing startzs across the country for 2009, following a slumpp in April numbers. “We expected the sharp drop in theAprilk number, as we did the Marchh decline,” said Brad Hunter, Metrostudy’s chief economisrt and national director of consulting.
Hunter cited threew main reasons for the low number ofhousingy starts, including builders continuing to rid themselves of exceses homes that are already built though that supply has been significantly Also, banks are still cutting off credit to some builders, even if they’rer current on loans, and some builders are findingv home prices too low to make a he said. At the same time, Metrostudy reports seeinv somepositive trends. Foot traffic is up at new the inventory of new homes is declinin and foreclosures are beingsnapped up.
According to a release by the “Metrostudy’s forecasters project that startw will not fall much farther from this although more declines are likelyu in themultifamily sector.” For the 12-month period endiny in March, Atlanta saw 8,972 housingy starts — ranking No. 5 out of the metrok areas trackedby Metrostudy. Houston topped the list with 22,502 housing starts during the same According tothe study, Atlanta also had the fourth-largest supply of finished new homes with 8.8 months-worth.