Wenatchee now the hottest market in the nation!

This article, from KTVZ.com in Bend, OR, now cites Wenatchee as the hottest market in the nation:

http://www.ktvz.com/Global/story.asp?S=6592947

Bend home prices chill, but still in U.S. Top

10Five-year appreciation still 100 percent

By Barney Lerten, KTVZ.COM

Bend's once-sizzling home price appreciation cooled to a near-standstill in the first quarter of 2007, but years of red-hot momentum meant the city still finished in the top 10 of U.S. housing markets for the past year, a federal report said Thursday.

The first-quarter figures from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight show Bend snapped a three-quarter streak in which the city had been the nation's hottest metro-area real estate market for much of last year, in terms of year-to-year price appreciation.

Wenatchee, Wash. has now captured the top spot, with prices rising there 25.6 percent from the first quarter of last year, including a nearly 6 percent jump in the first quarter.

Bend, by contrast, had an anemic. 0.37 percent home-price rise in the first quarter for a one-year figure of 13.67 percent.

On the other hand, Bend was by far the hottest market in the OFHEO's top 20, when it comes to home-price appreciation over the past five years - just over 100 percent, or a doubling of the city's average home price since early 2002. No one else comes close, the closest being Tacoma, Wash. at 76 percent.

Last year, Bend-area home prices, based on repeat sales and refinancings, jumped more than 21 percent, though each quarter saw the price appreciation figure drop, from 7.37 percent in the second quarter and 2.82 percent in the third to 1.73 percent in the last three months of 2006.
Realtor Rob Eggers of Bend's Duke Warner Realty said the cooldown is most evident in a big jump from last year in how long homes are on the market, now 4-5 months on average. Bend's Westside now has a year's worth of housing inventory on the market, with the Eastside not far behind, at 10 months.

Nationally, the rate of home price appreciation as measured in the Home Price Index "remained slow but positive in the first quarter," the federal agency said, up 4.3 percent from a year earlier but showing an overall quarterly growth of 0.5 percent, down from a revised estimate of 1.3 percent growth in the fourth quarter.

"Although some forecasters expected to see a drop in the HPI, nationwide house prices continued to rise in the first quarter of 2007, albeit at the lowest rate in 10 years," said James Lockhart, OFHEO director.

Five Washington cities and three in Utah made the top 20 list. States with the biggest appreciation in the past year include Utah (topping the list at 17 percent), Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Washington. Michigan and Massachusetts actually saw home prices drop under 1 percent, on average.

The full report is available at http://www.ofheo.gov/media/pdf/1q07hpi.pdf (Adobe Acrobat Reader required).