Home sales surge. Time to party?
by ilene - November 23rd, 2009 6:35 pm
Home sales surge. Time to party?
By Barbara Kiviat, courtesy of TIME
The pace of existing-home sales was 10.1% higher in October than it was in September, according to figures out today from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). That jump puts sales back where they were in February 2007 and is sure to bring renewed optimism about the state of the housing market. In September we had an eight-month supply of houses sitting on the market. Now we’re down to a seven-month supply. That’s in the neighborhood of normal.
Realize, though, that a lot of the sales activity is still happening at the lower end of the market. Sales of properties costing less than $100,000 are up 18% from a year ago, and houses priced between $100,000 and $250,000 have seen a 30% surge in sales. Beyond that, sales dwindle. Homes in the $250,000-$500,000 range are up less than 8%, and sales of residences selling for $750,000 to $1 million have increased just 2% over the past year. Depending on where you stand, you may or may not be seeing a more-robust real estate market.
Two things have been driving sales at the low end. Thing one: first-time home buyers, who represent nearly half of all folks out there buying, according to a Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance survey of 1,500 real-estate agents. Part of the October surge in sales surely had to do with the impending expiration of the $8,000 first-time home buyers tax credit. That credit has since been extended into next year. Will sales drop off in coming months now that everyone knows they’ve got five more months to lock in those contracts? Very possibly.
That Campbell/Inside Mortgage survey points out something else interesting: that the Federal Housing Administration is guaranteeing about 60% of all first-time home-buyer loans. That’s not necessarily a bad situation if it helps to kick-start private lending, but having the Feds insure such a high percentage of mortgage finance isn’t exact a normal state of affairs, either.
The other low-end driver has been sales of distressed properties like foreclosures. Some 30% of October sales could be chalked up to such properties, according to NAR. There’s some notable movement there, too. NAR reports people starting to get into bidding wars over foreclosures, and Campbell/Inside Mortgage reports that investors are starting to pull back from
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MORE ON THE HOUSING DATA….
by ilene - October 23rd, 2009 5:15 pm
MORE ON THE HOUSING DATA….
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Mark Hanson delves even deeper into the housing data. It’s very hard to make an argument that sheds his superb analysis in anything other than a bearish light:
Year-to-date 2009 sales are 20k FEWER than 2008, one of the worst years on record. And we spent hundreds of billions to achieve these results.
From 30k feet, this is your housing recovery. What would have sales been without spending hundreds of billions on pulling out and forward demand from first time homeowners and investors?
Remember, organic move-up/across/down buyers have always led the market. First timers and investors have always been the weakest segments and cannot carry the market for long. This highlights the most important factor plaguing the housing market — epidemic negative equity prohibiting the typical homeowner from selling and re-buying. Epidemic negative equity is only fixed by ‘years’.
The tax credit extended the 2009 purch season a month (green) but as you can see from the MoM drop, seasonality reigns supreme. When this last push to get in before tax credit sunset, it sets the market up or a cash-for-clunkers effect over the near-term. If the credit is extended, it simply takes the pressure off and allows buyers to shop vs panic buy. Either way, the fundamentally weak housing market will show itself over the near term.
Lastly, in today’s release Lawrence Yun commented on the falling prices saying that…
“The national median existing-home price3 for all housing types was $174,900 in September, which is 8.5 percent lower than September 2008. Distressed properties continue to downwardly distort the median price because they generally sell at a discount relative to traditional homes in the same area.”
But distressed sales were the lowest of the year at 29% from 31% last month due to HAMP and the lack of foreclosure inventory. Therefore, the median is actually being skewed higher as more orginic and short sales went off towards the end of the season.
“Early information from a large annual consumer study to be released November 13, the 2009 National Association of Realtors® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, shows that first-time home buyers accounted for more than 45 percent of home sales during the past year. A separate practitioner survey shows that distressed homes accounted for 29 percent of transactions in September.“
Some of the best real estate analysis around. Thanks Mark!
Source: www.mhanson.com
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