The research team here at Redfish Emerging Markets is pleased to release the December rankings in our free Homeowners’ Market Fundamentals Index.

For the large number of new readers that have joined us over the past month or two, here’s a bit of background and history of the Homeowners’ Market Fundamentals Index –

The Homeowners’ Market Fundamental Index is a unique real estate market ranking tool developed by the team at Redfish Emerging Markets during the spring and summer of 2008. 

As the destabilization, in fact some might even say crisis, in single family housing became broader and deeper during late 2007 and 2008, we as a team became increasingly concerned that ongoing discussions concerning single family housing were not addressing the needs of everyday homeowners, or those “on the sideline” waiting for “the magic signal” to purchase or sell a home in a given market. 

There is a great deal of data published by various sources which painstakingly details the changes in value of single family home units across the country, most often aggregated into index values looking at housing valuation as if the entire nation or very large regions of the nation were a uniform and unified “macro-market”.  There is additionally a great deal of discussion tracking the numbers of foreclosures in various markets around the country. 

Without question these “macro-view” studies of housing have some meritorious qualities, and will continue to be utilized, quoted, discussed and argued.  

However, our study of real estate markets over the past five (plus some) years for real estate investors has proven once again a simple fact that real estate professionals and savvy homeowners have known for decades – there isn’t a “national real estate market” – every market has unique features that make it perform a bit differently than the next community down the road. 

We at Redfish Emerging Markets happen to firmly believe in real estate market cycles, and history well proves the existence of such cycles.  We also firmly believe, and see evidence of it every day as we study markets around the country, that different markets amble through the real estate market cycle out of synch with one another.  Market A is at a different place in the market cycle than Market B and so forth and so on. 

At Redfish Emerging Markets we’ve been tracking unique features in real estate markets, analyzing that unique data, and ranking markets for some time now for real estate investors. 

After many requests to do so, and in answer to what we felt was a genuine need in the marketplace, we elected apply many of these same analysis processes to single family markets for homeowners – resulting in the creation of our Homeowners’ Market Fundamental Index data. 

Our premise is simple – the health and vitality of a housing market is far from being solely related to the changes in single family housing unit pricing.  The health and vitality of a housing market is related to a number of important areas – including key demographics, employment and job growth, economic development efforts by the community, as well as a number of critical single family and multifamily real estate metrics in addition to just considering single family unit price changes.   

This month’s data allowed us to assign grades to and rank 189 markets as we did last month.  The full report and ranking list is available here and the press release from today’s press conference here. 

Today’s data shares at least one common feature with November’s – four of the top five markets are in Texas – where continued job growth despite the ailing economy, unemployment lower than the national average, affordable housing predominates (relative to market median income measures), and there exist reasonably well balanced inventories of homes for sale. 

We’ll be running through several interesting features of the HMFI data over the next several days. 

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