January 07, 2007
How about that Houston housing market?

The other day, I lamented the lack of data on housing prices in Houston. As it happens, yesterday's Chron provided some.


Overall, single-family homes in Houston appreciated more than 6 percent last year, the best home appreciation rate since 2001, [Mike Inselmann, president of consulting firm Metrostudy,] said.

And under the proposals made by the Governor's Task Force on Appraisal Reform, the city of Houston could find itself unable to keep up with that appreciation in the housing market. They could hold a special election to try to gain that privilege, for which of course there'd be no guarantee of success. I continue to fail to see the point of this, other than the obvious one of benefitting people with expensive houses to the detriment of everybody else.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on January 07, 2007 to Budget ballyhoo
Comments

Kuff - the problem is that homeowners want to be able to claim that 6% annual appreciation rate when it comes time to set a sales price, but not when it comes to paying taxes on the value of the asset. Appraisal caps are little more than a gimmick promoted by pandering politicians who evidently aren't competent to deal realistically with taxation issues. Caps result in an inherently unfair system, in which owners of properties of similar value will be paying differing tax amounts. As long as we are letting our elected officials off the hook by wasting time and energy discussing caps, they are avoiding their responsibility to deal with the need to provide revenues to fund public services. They are playing us for suckers - and succeeding.

Posted by: Dennis on January 8, 2007 12:59 AM

Kuff:

Ask any young homebuyers from California what they think of appraisal caps.

As for your search for Houston real estate data, I think the A&M Real Estate Center web site has that sort of data for all the metro areas in the state.

Here's an internal link to the actual data:

http://recenter.tamu.edu/data/datahs.html

The Houston data is current through November 2006 and shows an average sales price of $192,100 in November 2006, up from 190,200 in November 2006 but down from a high of $208,100 in June 2006.

Posted by: Kent from Waco on January 8, 2007 8:58 AM