Source: Tim Iacono-Seeking Alpha
After last week’s NAR June existing home sale release and the always interesting press release [sarcasm] that goes with it.
>Resales of U.S. single-family homes and condos rose 3.6% in June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.89 million, the highest level since last October, the National Association of Realtors reported Thursday. Resales have risen for three straight months. The housing market appears to be healing, said Lawrence Yun, the NAR chief economist. The increase was higher than expected.
I started to write about the fact that we have seen this before. Before I finished writing about it, I came across Tim Iacono’s excellent chart(see above) in his Seeking Alpha post where he shows it much better than I could have. It is clear that the 3-peat pattern happened in late-2006 and early-2007.
I’m not trying to be a wet blanket here and I know these are seasonally adjusted but the inference is that we are close and things will improve shortly thereafter …but its still to make such a call. Housing is local (per NAR)… James Hagerty at WSJ drives home the point that housing is local in his “Home Sales, All over the map” piece.
And Andrew Leonard at Salon summarizes the economic reality we face quite succinctly.
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And as usual NAR seems to have not a clue that people need money to make house payments and that most people get their money from jobs of which there aren’t enough right now or into the foreseeable future. I don’t blame NAR for trying to sell houses and being upbeat in that effort, but we have systemic illness called unemployment that appraisers need to be aware of. When individual income shows a significant and sustainable improvement then appraisers will have a solid hook to hang optimism on.
The danger with the NAR approach is that somebody might believe them and give up on desperately needed economic repairs, like figuring out what to do with unemployed blue collar workers.
I’ve learned, when NAR is quoting Yun the highest and best use of the quote is for entertainment, period.
Yun gives substance to the comment that anything, true or not, can be pr oven with statistics.
In this case I really think trying to convince us the crises is over is a dis-service to the country and a distraction.
[…] of the federal tax credit for first time buyers which expires at the end of November. However, this seasonally adjusted sales 3-peat was also seen at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007 before sales activity fell sharply. In […]
[…] of the federal tax credit for first time buyers which expires at the end of November. However, this seasonally adjusted sales 3-peat was also seen at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007 before sales activity fell sharply. In […]