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发帖数: 608 | 1 Commentary: Pending home sales up 13.1% compared with last year
By Lee Adler
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (MarketWatch) — The mainstream financial media is
widely misreporting the National Association of Realtors’ pending home
sales data Thursday morning, simply parroting the NAR’s seasonally
manipulated data.
As it turns out, the NAR is screwing its own pooch because the actual, not
manipulated data is actually much better than the seasonally smoothed
numbers imply. That’s not to say sales are great. They remain 25% below the
peak levels reached during the bubble, but the fact is that sales were up
in August, and not just by a little. They were up by 9.4% month to month,
and were 13.1% above the level of last August.
That’s the strongest August gain since at least 2001.
It is clear that the collapse in prices is beginning to at least bring some
buyers back into the market. While a high percentage of contracts are still
falling through, this increase in demand over last year’s levels is not a
one-month wonder. It has now persisted for four months. It is not yet up to
2009 levels when the market was false stimulated by government tax breaks to
buyers, but it is 3.4% above 2008 levels.
Another key metric is the inventory to contracts ratio. That fell to 6.96 in
August from 7.77 in July. It is down from 9.06 last August. This is the
lowest this ratio has been since August of 2006, at 6.40 as the bubble was
peaking.
All of this data fits my thesis that the housing market has stopped getting
worse. Is it bottoming, or is it the calm before the next storm? I think the
former, but it could be a very long time before a sustained recovery in
home prices takes hold. That will depend largely on employment growth. |
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