Pending Home Sales Up
The Pending Home Sales Index rose for the second month in a row.
It declined September, declined 4.6 percent to 89.2 from an upwardly revised reading of 93.5 in August, but was 1.6% higher than September 2007 when it stood at 87.8.
The wrong-way crew at the NAR got this wrong again, running the negative headline: “ Pending Home Sales Down on Tight Credit and Economic Slowdown.”
As we have noted repeatedly over the years, it is the year over year data that matters much more than the monthly data.
The NAR writes: “For all of 2008, home prices will have fallen by more than 20 percent in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and many California and Florida markets, while many markets in middle America will experience little change. Wide variations in home price movements will continue in 2009, with Houston and Denver likely to see respectable price gains while most other markets experience no notable change.”
The takeaway from this data is that areas where prices have normalized — fallen significantly from the 2005 highs — sales volume improves.
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Source:
Pending Home Sales Down on Tight Credit and Economic Slowdown
NAR, November 07, 2008
http://www.realtor.org/press_room/news_releases/2008/phs_down_on_tight_credit
November 17th, 2008 at 10:58 am
When will these guys get it?!
YEAR OVER YEAR
not Month to Month…
Its starting to get a little ridiculous.
November 17th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I just posted a horrible set of Real estate statistics for the Alabama Real Estate market at
http://tbrander.wordpress.com
The Pending stats are generally fairly meaningless, particularly in these miserable times, sales is about all that counts, and while I agree that one month is difficult to draw conclusions from the truly lousy October figures are scary. I generally don’t pay too much attention to month to month but this was pretty exceptional.
Year over year is not so great either.
November 17th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
This is also one time when YOY data is misleading. If you remember, last year was a bit of an anomaly Sept. - Nov. as the credit crunch and housing was just hitting it’s stride. Home prices had not budged much if at all vs. the collapse in available credit. This caused a significant drop that was bit exacerbated. Therefore YOY is a bit misleading as house prices dropped dramatically following that lag. This accounts for the small bump in YOY, but still the AWFUL state of housing in general. Don’t mistake this for a positive until the trend holds true for 6 months. It won’t.