Tag: housing: Page 8

Are home prices too high?

According to this chart of the relationship between income and home prices, they are absurdly so. Nothing the government can do will get the housing market moving again until this ratio is brought back to reality.

January 6, 2010

How to read the housing news

It doesn’t take much to get a headline these days, but the whoopla over February housing sales was entirely misplaced. Note to media: home sales are seasonal. To get an accurate assessment of what’s going on compare this February with last February or February two and three years ago. Not this February to this January. A […]

January 6, 2010

How to read the housing news, continued

homes, home sales, foreclosures

January 6, 2010

Mortgage boondoggle

Last August Congress passed the HOPE Act: Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. They said it would help 400,000 homeowners refinance and stay in their homes. In the six months how many people have applied for the program? One.

January 6, 2010

Bailouts round two

Whoops. Fannie May last week posted a $15.2-billion second quarter loss. And now they say they need $10.7 billion to stem the bleeding. Pollyannas in the press keep trying to cheerlead the economy back to life, but it isn’t working–especially the housing market. Perhaps if the execs at Fannie Mae would read the New York […]

January 6, 2010

Housing numbers fail to improve

If the current trend continues we may be on track for the lowest number of housing starts since the end of World War II. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Case-Shiller index recorded a 19 percent drop, in the first quarter of this year, the biggest decline in it’s history. This is obviously […]

January 6, 2010

New home sales nonsense–market down 20+ percent

Today’s “breaking news” that new home sales are up more than they have been in eight years is yet another case of journalists who don’t understand numbers. This has become a common occurrence now with each new batch of numbers released by the Commerce Department. If you’re trying to make business decisions based on these reports, […]

July 27, 2009

Housing stats sink even further

November’s numbers are grim. Housing starts are down almost 19 percent from October, and down 47 percent from November 2007. Nobody I’ve read is willing to predict where the bottom of this market is, but housing experts say there are still several years’ worth of adjustable rate mortgages coming up on their balloon dates. Those could hamstring the […]

December 16, 2008

Page 8 of 8