Posts Tagged ‘National Association of Realtors’
Housing…. overheated again?
“Home price increases appear to be unstoppable,” — a quote from David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Down Jones Indices, as quoted in a Tuesday article by Christopher Rugaber of the Associated Press, and featured on usatoday.com. Am I the only one who felt cold chills reading that?
C’mon, David, exactly how did that turn out last time? Prices, by the way, are headed up because money is still relatively cheap, demand is incessant, and supply is constrained. S&P, which is in business, among other things, of promoting their Case Shiller index, notes that buyers are in bidding wars. That index, released Tuesday, showed that house prices are up 6.1% from a year ago — well above inflation — and in 45% of the cities tracked, the house price increase has surged from a month earlier. In short, not only is the car speeding, it’s accelerating.
However, sales volume has fallen 1.5% from a year ago. That may not sound like much, but in a market that was already not at equilibrium, that’s economically significant. Plus, the number of homes for sale was down 6.4% from a year ago, to the lowest level since the NAR started tracking these statistics. Ever. In history.
Sigh….
Share this:
U.S. housing market — good news and bad
The good news, such that it is — home sales are inching up — a 0.7% rise in January from the previous January.
Now, for the bad news — the median home price in America, measured on a January-to-January basis, just hit its lowest point in 10 years, according to a recent announcement from the National Association of Realtors. Indeed, 35% of home sales were “distress sales”, driving the median home price down to $154,000.
- graphic courtesy CNN-Money
This represents a 6.9% price decline from 2011, and a drop of 29.4% since the peak in 2007.
From a small northwestern observatory... 