Jed Kolko

Each month Trulia's Housing Barometer charts how quickly the housing market is moving back to "normal." We summarize three key housing market indicators: new construction starts (Census), existing-home sales (NAR) and the delinquency-plus-foreclosure rate (LPS First Look). For each indicator, we compare this month's...

Every three months or so, we take a close look at the home searches on Trulia: where are the searchers, and where are the homes they're looking at? This time around we're taking a close look at why people search where they do, and we've uncovered these...

One month ago, we introduced the Trulia Price Monitor and Trulia Rent Monitor as the earliest leading indicators of how asking prices and rents are trending nationally and locally. So what happened to prices and rents in April?

April's Price Rise Makes a Three-Month Streak
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What does a "normal" housing market look like, and how far away are we? To figure this out, each month Trulia's Housing Barometer summarizes three key housing market indicators: new construction starts (Census), existing-home sales (NAR) and the delinquency-plus-foreclosure rate (LPS First Look). For...

Find Out Where Asking Prices and Rents Are Heading, Almost In Real-Time, With the New Trulia Price Monitor and Trulia Rent Monitor

I rely on the major sales-price indexes -- Case-Shiller, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and CoreLogic -- as much as the next guy (or the...

Trulia's Chief Economist takes a monthly look at new construction starts, existing-home sales and the delinquency-plus-foreclosure rate to see how far away we are from a normal housing market.

On the long road of housing recovery, we're all kids in the back seat wondering: are we there yet? After years...

Time to buy? Since the housing bubble burst, prices have fallen so much that it is now cheaper to buy than to rent in 98 of the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. That's even true in many pricey real estate markets such as New York, Los Angeles and...

March marks the start of the housing season. Prices peak in May, sales in June, and inventories in July. In colder regions, seasonal swings are bigger, and the market peaks later.

The housing market rides the seasons.  Year in and year out, market activity has predictable ups and downs. Sometimes...

The February 2012 jobs report, released this morning, was once again very strong for housing. First, the jobs picture keeps getting better for 25- to 34-year-olds. Second, construction employment kept pace with solid overall employment growth.

Unemployment among 25- to 34-year-olds

Why does this indicator...

The housing crisis hurt some states especially hard. In those states, like Florida and Nevada, the Republican presidential candidates couldn't ignore housing. But in states that weathered the housing crisis better, the candidates won't spend precious money and attention on housing policy.

To see which states are suffering most,...

Things keep looking up for the construction industry. New construction starts in January were 10 percent higher than one year ago. Confidence among builders jumped this month to the highest level in four years, even though it's way below where it was before and during the housing boom....

The robo-signing settlement is the latest -- and potentially the largest -- piece in the U.S. housing policy puzzle. Even though it's partly punishment for banks' wrongdoing, it is also another answer by the government to the question of how it can help the housing market.

Our...

House hunters typically don't venture too far from where they live today. Most people look for homes for sale or rentals across town, not across the country. However, more than one-third of searches are to homes at least 100 miles away. And as anyone who's had to move...

Republican presidential candidates have kept housing on the back burner - until now. Next Tuesday's Florida primary is moving housing front-and-center. Bold new proposals? Don't be silly. (Hey, I'm an equal-opportunity critic - I said the same about Obama's State of the Union.) But Romney did hold a housing...

You might have missed it among the long, long to-do list Obama gave last night, but the president announced two new housing proposals: more refinancing, and more investigations of banks. Neither is a breakthrough: they fill in some of the missing pieces in the messy jigsaw puzzle of...

My crystal ball is never as crystal-clear as I'd like, but I do think that we can expect a gradual economic recovery to move the housing market a few steps back toward normal in 2012. Even so, we still have a long ways to go. As we exit 2011, prices...

Renting out REO properties would be a drop in the bucket -- it wouldn't clear much of the housing inventory and wouldn't ease rising urban rents, but it would help shore up neighborhoods where housing prices took the biggest slide, and that makes it worthwhile.

The Federal Housing Finance...

If you've been following the housing market as closely as I have this past week, then I'm sure you'll agree that the construction industry has reasons to be a little more optimistic these days. Looking at the numbers being reported on Housing Starts, the NAHB Builder Confidence Index and the...

The October jobs report was disappointing for the housing market: construction job growth was down 0.5 percent (annualized) versus last quarter, and unemployment among 25-34 year-olds rose to 9.8 percent. However, one bright spot was that job growth in "clobbered cities" was strong at 2.4 percent (annualized).

Today's new numbers...

Up this week are two areas of housing investment -- new multi-family construction and remodeling -- and a look at how people's attitudes about housing are affected by personal experience.

What's Bob the Builder Working on Now?

One of the clearest signs that the housing market is --...