Builders to San Antonio: This is good housing market.
By Jennifer Hiller
Published: 04/10/2008 08:11 PM CDT

The national housing market looks pretty bleak and frankly, San Antonio builders have had enough already.

To counter the sour national news, the Greater San Antonio Builders Association on Thursday launched a marketing campaign to counter some of the negative news it feels has had the effect of scaring away some buyers even in a basically healthy and growing market like San Antonio.

The message: Buying a house is a smart move in steady and stable San Antonio.

The campaign will include a range of billboard and print advertising, along with a Web site that's in development.

San Antonio and other large cities in Texas largely were bypassed by the skyrocketing prices in states such as California and Florida between 2000 and 2006. At the time, it seemed like Texas was missing out.

But now that the real estate bubble has burst in other states, Texas cities are in much better shape than the rest of the country, said Jack Inselmann, vice president of the U.S. Central Division of Metrostudy, a housing research firm.

Prices still are rising in Texas, and San Antonio has had healthy job growth, Inselmann said.

Although builders here still are working through a higher-than-normal level of inventory and are offering buyer incentives on things such as kitchen upgrades, home builders have pulled back production and have been closing more homes than they've started for more than a year, according to Metrostudy.

And San Antonio ranked 21st in home price appreciation nationally last year, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight