Today is D-Day for the NAR. I'm anxious to see how they spin numbers that I believe will be horrendous based on their pending home sales index during the last two months. Let's see if the trend of revising last month's figures downward (so this month doesn't look so poor by comparison) continues. Will they admit that housing is crashing, or will they manipulate the figures and call bottom one more time?
I'm also enjoying the fact that an egregious bout of price inflation, supported by the government at the expense of 30% of its citizens (actually more if you count all of those young house-poor couples who bought at the peak), has been over for quite some time now. Most of those who were left out earn lower wages those who owned their house already, who were insulated from the damage. (They could just trade their overvalued house for another... didn't need to pay $4000 a month like a first-time buyer in California.) Don't forget that the whole reason that families needed to take out those toxic subprime loans was because they couldn't afford to buy a house any other way.
The consensus is a seasonally-adjusted rate of 6.6 million homes, down 2.9% from last month's figure of 6.8 million homes. I'm also expecting another significant YOY decline in median house prices.
Fingers Crossed...
- eternitus
2 comments:
Can't wait to see it! It's always fun to watch the NAR try to spin! Did you notice they haven't been talking about an existing home sales recovery for a while?
Wow, you hit that one right on the nose! Prices rose, but this can be due to a change in the mix of homes sold. S&P Case / Shiller, a better indicator, according to economists, dropped.
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