Improving Markets List Expands to Include at Least One Major City in Every State

                                Feb 6 2013, 11:11AM

All fifty states and the District of Columbia are now represented on the Improving Markets Index (IMI) that was released today by National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and First American Title Insurance.  The February IMI expanded to a total of 259 metropolitan areas with the addition of 20 cities to the list

The new cities represented 15 states with five of those states, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, and Texas adding two metropolitan areas each.  Among the new additions were Racine, New York, El Paso, Albuquerque, and Topeka. Three areas, Champaign, Illinois; Lebanon, Pennsylvania; and Amarillo, Texas dropped from the list in February.

Improving markets are defined as those that have posted six straight months of improvement from their respective troughs on each of three economic measures; home prices provided by Freddie Mac, employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and construction activity as measured by data on building permits from the Census Bureau.

NAHB and First American began compiling their list of improving markets in September 2011.  The number of markets, which was fairly static for the first half of 2012 has since risen rapidly, increasing from 80 cities to 259 in six months.