Now Is a Good Time to Buy (Especially in Indianapolis)

Homes are affordable at last!

Even if you're one of the many people who are scrambling to find cash until payday, now may be a good time to buy a house. Plunging house prices and rock-bottom interest rates on secured loans have made housing across the nation more affordable in the second quarter of 2009 than it has been in the last 18 years, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) released on August 19.

“The increase in affordability — along with the $8,000 federal tax credit for home buyers — is stimulating demand, particularly among young, first-time buyers,” said NAHB Chairman Joe Robson, a homebuilder from Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a prepared statement.

According to the press release:

The HOI showed that 72.3 percent of all new and existing homes sold in the second quarter of 2009 were affordable to families earning the national median income of $64,000, down only slightly from the record-high 72.5 percent during the previous quarter and up from 55.0 percent during the second quarter of 2008.

The NAHB/Wells Fargo HOI is a measure of the percentage of homes sold in a given area that are affordable to families earning that area's median income during a specific quarter. The NAHB considers a home affordable if a family making the area’s median income would devote no more than 28% of its take-home pay to housing costs.

The winners are . . .

The older, industrial, Midwest cities generally offer the best housing prices. Indianapolis, Indiana, has led the HOI for 16 straight quarters. At the end of July, 2009, nearly 95% of all homes sold there were affordable to families earning the area’s median income of $68,100. Other leaders were Youngstown and Dayton Ohio; and Detroit and Grand Rapids, Mich. … click here to read the rest of the article titled “Now Is a Good Time to Buy (Especially in Indianapolis)“