While some real estate experts remained optimistic as the housing market slowly thawed out of winter at the beginning of this year, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation pointed otherwise with gloomy statistics at the end of May. For those unfamiliar with the FHLMC, they are better known as Freddie Mac and attempt to monitor the condition of the US and Connecticut housing market as well as answer questions about the affordability of local CT housing markets.

Unfortunately, Freddie Mac’s most recent report was unenthusiastic. From their MiMi (Multi-Indicator Market Index) data, the mortgage giant stated that only the District of Colombia and 10 of the 50 states have housing activity that is considered to be “stable”. Austin, Houston, New Orleans, and San Antonio are the only 4 of the 50 metropolitan areas observed by MiMi to fall within the “stable” range. As Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac’s head economist explained, “Less than half of the housing markets MiMi covers are showing an improving trend, whereas at this time last year more than 90 percent of these same markets were headed in the right direction.”

According to MiMi, the states of Montana, Hawaii, West Virginia, Texas and Vermont are the top 5 most stable housing markets, while the worst 5 (beginning at the bottom) are Nevada, New Jersey, Georgia, Illinois, and Florida. Freddie Mac also pointed towards factors that are keeping housing from recovering more quickly, such as the weak job market. Freddie Mac’s information is fairly wide ranging, as MiMi draws from various sources, such as thousands of US mortgage lenders and historical trends. While MiMi does not include cash-only sales, it does look at critical housing factors such as jobs and employment, applications for purchasing a home, and delinquent mortgages to come to its most recent summaries.

Seeing as we are at the middle point of this year already, this is not good news for those seeking to sell their homes. While sales of new houses are expected to keep increasing, construction of new homes and sales of existing homes remain slow. In fact, compared to around this same time in 2013, sales of existing houses are down by nearly 7 percent. There are also signs that the US / CT housing market is beginning to moderate in terms of its prices, though it is hard to tell whether this is indicative of a greater cooling trend.

Previously, with higher prices, rising mortgage rates and stricter lending standards, some potential buyers were not able to enter the housing market. However, in this softer housing market situation, sellers of existing homes end up competing to attract the attention of buyers. This not only results in the need for prospective sellers to lower their home’s asking price just to get looked at, but requires a lot of time and effort to stay competitive.

This stalled CT housing market can be especially bad news for sellers who need to move forward as soon as possible. If time is of the essence for your situation, consider Elite House Buyer to get your CT house sold .