The housing market is transitioning away from a rebound driven primarily by speculative forces to one where the underlying fundamentals will be much more important, according to a Special Commentary issued by Wells Fargo Economics Group. Over the past few years investor purchases have been the primary driver of the housing recovery, helping clear inventories of foreclosed and lender-owned properties and pulling home prices dramatically higher. Home prices, which tumbled 33.7 percent from peak to trough, have since rebounded 16.3 percent and are up 12.4 percent over the past year alone. The swing in prices exaggerates the extent of improvement and likely reflects the whipsaw effect of prices overshooting to the downside during the worst of the housing bust.

With a similar tone in a news release issued by Scotiabank of Toronto, ON, Canada, Scotiabank economists believe that a weakness in new homes sales could be leading to the Federal Reserve's concern that tighter financial conditions could be harming the U.S. housing market.   

Dr. John W. van de Lindt, PhD, the George T. Abell Professor in Infrastructure in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA, has been leading a research effort to develop a better understanding of the behavior of soft-story wood-frame buildings under seismic loads through numerical analyses and experimental testing.  This summer, Dr. van de Lindt and his project team built and tested 3- and 4-story wood-frame buildings and subjected them to full-sized tests at facilities in Buffalo, NY, and San Diego, CA.  "Soft-story" is defined as being "wood-frame structures, containing five or more residential units, having two or more stories over a 'soft' or 'weak' story, and permitted for construction prior to January 1, 1978."   A series of tests were designed to measure the relative effectiveness of a variety of retrofits to enhance structural integrity of soft-story wood-frame buildings. 

Soft-story test collapse at UC-San Diego

This project was undertaken in part to respond to laws requiring retrofits of older wood-frame buildings in regions of high seismic activity, like the Earthquake Safety Implementation Program put in
place in San Francisco, CA. 

Project sponsors included the National Science Foundation, the USDA Forest Products Laboratory, the Structural Engineers Association of Southern California, and others. To see video of the different tests conducted and their collapses, visit the following YouTube channel. 

Dr. van de Lindt's YouTube channel >>

The Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), based in Tampa, FL, issued a midterm update to its Rating the States Report, which reviews the progress that the 18 most hurricane-prone coastal states along the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coast have made in strengthening their residential building codes.   

The midterm update looked at building code activity in the same states featured in the original report issued in January 2012, assessing them according to whether they have taken positive action, negative action, or no action to improve their codes in the past 18 months.  Nine states were found to have taken positive action, seven took no action, and two (North Carolina and Louisiana) have acted to weaken their code systems.   

Read IBHS midterm news release >>