The housing market has been slowly but surely getting back on its feet and on the road to recovery, with last week’s third quarter Zillow Real Estate Market Reports showing the strongest quarter of home value performance since 2006. Mother Nature doesn’t take into account consecutive months of positive news, however, as we’ve seen with past natural disasters like Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Katrina. With Hurricane Sandy currently coming ashore on the east coast and working its way up to some of the most densely populated areas of America, we wonder what sort of impact this aggressive storm could have on hard-hit areas. Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries is only anticipating temporary delays in the housing sector.

“The effects of Hurricane Sandy will be spread over a wide geographic area, increasing the cumulative economic costs of the storm but meaning that no single area will be damaged anywhere close to the extent that, say, New Orleans was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. I wouldn’t expect anything more than very temporary delays in new construction activity and in the ability of prospective home buyers to go home shopping,” said Humphries. “And when assessing the impact of new construction versus home buying, remember that while historically about 14% of the housing starts for the entire year occur in the months of November and December, most home buying is now done for the year. So new home construction has more exposure to climatic events during this time of year than home sales themselves, but I suspect builders are more than ready to face whatever Sandy throws their way. Particularly in light of five long years in the wilderness with housing starts so far below their normal pace, these guys are ready to build homes again, literally come Hell or high water.”