The National Association of Realtors (NAR) today picks right up where we left off yesterday. The Census Bureau had reported another month suggesting a rough spot in real estate. More recent housing data isn’t encouraging, either. The lower the unemployment rate goes, the main emphasis of this “boom”, the worse the housing market becomes; not because one follows inversely the [...]
Back in March, the Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve stated the obvious. US home construction was stuck near the lowest level in the 60 years of records being kept. Despite a decade having passed since the prior bust turned to boom, and with the economy booming, it was apparently worth mentioning. Obviously, it wasn’t obvious to everyone since [...]
Home construction estimates are notoriously variable. They can change oftentimes by a substantial amount on a month-by-month basis, and the numbers are just as frequently subject to serious revisions in the short run. Still, we have to note when there are big moves even in these high frequency series, though keeping in mind no definitive conclusions are available from them [...]
There are three major housing related data series published each and every month. The first is on construction of new units, the intersection of real estate and the macro economy compiled by the Census Bureau. The second is the number of newly built single-family homes that have been sold, relating obviously to the level of construction. These numbers are also [...]
Even after several years of them, monetary policymakers continued to tread carefully with large scale asset purchases (LSAP). Otherwise known as quantitative easing (QE), in the US they were first announced all the way back in the darkest days of global financial panic in 2008. Yet, in 2012 and 2013 concerns remained that they could prove too powerful. Then-Richmond Fed [...]
While there are those who saw October and more so November spikes in real estate and housing estimates as the beginning of the something big, all the December 2017 statistics suggest nothing more than the easily anticipated hurricane anomalies. Housing construction was back in line with weaker earlier 2017 estimates (particularly starts), while resales were, too. Today we found that [...]
The August appearance of Hurricane Harvey has made economic analysis a little more challenging than usual. That it was followed closely by Hurricane Irma only compounded the difficulty. What we have observed, however, is pretty much what we expected. In several economic categories and among various statistics, there was a rush of activity in October that in most places continued [...]
The economy ended 2017 with current growth just slightly above trend. In general the reports of the last two weeks of the year were pretty good with housing a standout performer going into the new year. We are still trying to get past the impact - positive and negative - from the hurricanes a few months ago though so it [...]
New home sales rose sharply again for the second consecutive month. After rising more than 18% in the month of September 2017 over August (subsequently revised down to 14%), sales rose another 6% month-over-month in October. At a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 685k, that’s the highest pace for any month going back exactly ten years to October 2007, a highly [...]
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) estimates sales of existing homes rose 2% in October 2017 from a downwardly revised September estimate. The trade group tries its best to put recent results in the best possible terms, claiming in its press release that at 5.48 million (SAAR) the number of resales is “their strongest pace since June.” That’s technically true [...]
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