🔒Realtors’ economist: CT’s housing scene not all grim

Lawrence Yun, the chief economist for the nation’s leading Realtor-member group, came to the Hartford Golf Club in late May, bearing a reassuring assessment of the Greater Hartford, Connecticut and U.S. housing markets and economies.

Yun, whose team of data and economic analysts routinely update the more than 1 million members of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) in Washington D.C., told about 100 members of the Greater Hartford Association of Realtors (GHAR) that Hartford’s housing market held its own in 2018 while much of the nation’s housing markets struggled.

Yun also said prospects for a recession later this year or next are dim, especially with a presidential election on the horizon, meaning interest rates should remain low enough to spur home sales and refinancings.

Statewide, the median price of existing houses sold in 2018 rose for the third consecutive year despite a 2 percent sales decline, according to The Warren Group, the Boston business publisher that regularly tracks such data.

Still, Yun said, Connecticut’s housing performance ranked among the top 10 U.S. housing-sales markets in 2018. However, he said the state’s continued loss of residents, or outmigration, remains a concern. Fewer residents reduces demand for housing, rippling forward into fewer homes that take longer to sell and at lower prices.

“One has to wonder how long can Connecticut stay in the top 10,’’ he said.

Sizing up the U.S. economy, Yun noted the nation’s total Gross Domestic Product — a tally of businesses output of goods and services — rose 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018 vs. a year earlier.

“It is the strongest economic growth in 15 years,’’ Yun said, adding, “this could be the longest economic expansion ever, come July.’’

However, he pointed to several anomalies in the nation’s economic data that have surprised analysts.

One, Yun said, is that typically the first sign of a looming recession is the so-called “yield-curve inversion,’’ in which investors bid up yields on bonds and other long-term investments beyond rates on short-term holdings, such as bank certificates of deposit.

This time, however, the inversion is occurring in a low-interest rate environment, Yun said. Also, U.S. consumers continue opening their wallets to goods and services, a key economic driver.

Moreover, the current U.S. economy has generated new jobs at a rapid clip, placing the nation and certain regions in the rare dilemma of having more jobs available — 2.6 million total nationally as of mid-spring — than people to fill them. Many are blue-collar openings for truck drivers and welders.

“There are more job openings … in America than at any time in the past,’’ Yun said.

While that’s good news for much of the country, Connecticut is the only New England state that has not fully recovered all of the jobs it shed during the Great Recession (2008 to 2010).

One plus for Connecticut and New England home-sales professionals and their clients, Yun said, is that the region continues to avoid the steep real estate price run-ups that ultimately preceded precipitous housing-price collapses, and eventual record foreclosures, which plagued the Southeast and West housing markets during the Great Recession.

Steady appreciation in real estate prices and values, he said, means more Hartford area and Connecticut residents can afford a home, or at least qualify for a mortgage to acquire one.

Yun also forecast improvement ahead in the inventory of new and used houses for sale, which GHAR noted recently has been problematic for Realtors and prospective buyers.