This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Existing Home Sales Come At 4.68 Million, Miss Estimates Of 4.75 Million, Home Inventory At 9.5 Months Supply
Stocks are up which means another fundamental data indicator must have missed expectations (following the earlier GDP miss). Sure enough, the NAR just reported November existing home sales, which came at 4.68 million units, a slight improvement to the almost all time lowest number posted in October (4.43 million), a miss to expectations of 4.75 million, and 27.9% off the cyclical peak of 6.49 million from November 2009, when the first-time buyer tax credit expired, and was shockingly not extended. The data follows this morning atrocious MBA numbers which showed a plunge of 18.6% in mortgage applications, and 24.6% drop in refinancings. But if you listen to Goldman, the recent surge in mortgage rates is actually beneficial for everyone involved and just buy the f#&$ing dips! Sure enough, the ever cheerful Larry Yun had this to say: "Continuing gains in home sales are encouraging, and the positive impact
of steady job creation will more than trump some negative impact from a
modest rise in mortgage interest rates, which remain historically
favorable." Um, continuing gains from all time record low levels? Also, the part-time job creation which is the only thing that is being created on steady basis is sure to be the ground for a fertile surge in home prices. And with that the sarcasm is off.
Other highlights included the national median home price of $170,600, which eeked a minute improvement over November 2009. As per the report: "Distressed homes have been a fairly stable market share, accounting for 33 percent of sales in November; they were 34 percent in October and 33 percent in November 2009." As for the ongoing foreclosure halt, here is why it sure is having an impact: "Foreclosures, which accounted for two-thirds of the distressed sales
share, sold at a median discount of 15 percent in November, while short
sales were discounted 10 percent in comparison with traditional home
sales."
Housing inventory declined modestly:
Total housing inventory at the end of November fell 4.0 percent to 3.71
million existing homes available for sale, which represents a 9.5-month
supply at the current sales pace, down from a 10.5-month supply in October.
Of course, this excludes the countless millions in shadow inventory which the banks will never disclose.
And once again, just to soothe the worries of all those who don't buy the Goldman Koolaid, here is Larry once again on why raising mortgage rates are not, repeat not, a concern:
“In the short term, mortgage interest rates should hover just above
recent record lows, while home prices have generally stabilized
following declines from 2007 through 2009,” Yun said. “Although mortgage
interest rates have ticked up in recent weeks, overall conditions
remain extremely favorable for buyers who can obtain credit.”
Once again, we bolded the extremely important section.
A few other observations per the report:
Single-family home sales rose 6.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.15 million in November from 3.89 million in October, but are 27.3 percent below a surge to a 5.71 million cyclical peak in November 2009. The median existing single-family home price was $171,300 in November, which is 1.2 percent above a year ago.
Existing condominium and co-op sales declined 1.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 530,000 in November from 540,000 in October, and are 32.2 percent below the 782,000-unit tax credit rush one year ago. The median existing condo price5 was $165,300 in November, down 5.5 percent from November 2009. “At the current stage of the housing cycle, condos are offering better deals for bargain hunters,” Yun said.
Regionally, existing-home sales in the Northeast rose 2.7 percent to an annual pace of 770,000 in November but are 33.0 percent below the cyclical peak in November 2009. The median price in the Northeast was $242,500, which is 9.2 percent higher than a year ago.
Existing-home sales in the Midwest increased 6.4 percent in November to a level of 1.00 million but are 35.1 percent below the year-ago surge. The median price in the Midwest was $138,900, down 1.1 percent from November 2009.
In the South, existing-home sales rose 2.9 percent to an annual pace of 1.76 million in November but are 26.1 percent below the tax credit surge in November 2009. The median price in the South was $148,000, down 2.6 percent from a year ago.
Existing-home sales in the West jumped 11.7 percent to an annual level of 1.15 million in November but are 19.0 percent below the sales peak in November 2009. The median price in the West was $212,500, up 0.4 percent from a year ago.
»
- 4287 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
And here comes gravity to the mkt. US$ going to explode higher.
EUR/CHF 1.2499 and falling...
Every Swiss citizen will be driving a Porsche.
Through support on the weekly, if you believe in that sort of wizardry.
Ultimate support at zero...I think I can see the bottom from here..the water is very clear.
Swiss are trying to poop in the water by selling just-swapped-brand-new-USD and buying EUR as fast as they can hit their keyboards with their little chocolate covered fingers?
http://www.snb.ch/en/mmr/reference/snb_usd_repo_results_20101222/source/snb_usd_repo_results_20101222.en.pdf
Breaking Travel News
16 hours ago
Citi's analysts upgraded the engineering giant to a "buy" recommendation with a target price of ... but it did increase Rolls-Royce's target price to 665p. ...
Bright because the flames from RR jet engines put off so much light when they explode in mid-air?
*snicker*
AUD just hit dollar parity. A swiss franc is now worth $1.05.
IYR up, up, and away.
Good thing only two robots are trading the market today. The news flow is frickin' fantastic.
It's unreal, isn't it? Why waste the opportunity to simply keep shoving everything upward? With the vapors on the volume, it's so cheap it's irresistible.
"But if you listen to Goldman, the recent surge in mortgage rates is actually beneficial for everyone involved and buy the f#&$ing dips! "
What dips? There aren't even any dips to buy anymore. Just a straight line up. If you're lucky, the SPY might drop .01 or .02....before it is bought higher.
There also won't be anyone to afford mortgages at the higher rates. Expect housing inventories to rise much much higher.
It will be interesting because house prices will have to drop but people still won't be able to pay for them if interest rates go up to 10%+.
To anyone who thinks today's system is "capitalism", consider:
- in capitalism, there is no fiat paper and endless printing
- there is no ministry of truth to keep spinning (i.e. lying)
- there is no TBTF
- there is suppression of interest rates
- there is no subsidy to consume
- there isn't 20% of the population unskilled and unmotivated
- there isn't endless wave of speculative bubble after bubble
- there is no debate "crash to true value vs. Bernanke printing DOW 100K"
Your last two points can't both be true at the same time.
Uhhh, yeah they can. Speculative bubbles have all been caused by money printing. BB is printing like crazy, and may well drive the DOW to an arbitrarily high value. Remove the money printing, and it all comes crashing back to Earth. Use gold as money (ie coins in circulation OR free banking), and you never see this kind of crap again.
Increased speculation is a function of credit-money growth which will be an issue with or without the Fed Reserve or even fiat currency. See 'endogenous money' theory for details.
It's nuts isn't it? I've never seen anything like it.
A snake under every rock you try to hide your money.
I guess uncertainty works for TPTB, since they can change the rules when they want.
Banksters to Ben " can we go back to the Fog a Mirror Method of qualifing for a mortgage?" Pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. -
Hmmm driving around KC I still see that all the STILL FOR SALE signs have not been taken down as those bright orange/green foreclosed window tags have faded to bleached. NAR is just another joke.
I'm going to sell my house like a Chinese house-flipper while I still can. Willing to finance.....
Look at www.nacocapital.com, he has a very good trading system!
unless you've got 30% down, plus another 10% in reserve, same job for 5 years, and a credit score of 720, you are not getting a mortgage. not happening.
Huh? I say huh as this story seems to have brought sellers into the financials. I thought this was a positive story about the recovery in US housing. Huh?
Oh! I say oh because I remembered. The spot price for oil, which is priced for stupid, is holding up the Roach Motel [SPY]...so that HFTs can rotate out of all of those really, really bad bank shares that they had to buy in order to advance the S&P past some technical point that Wall Street criminal bankers told us represented a "breakout." That's right. Oh!
Funny. I say funny because in these wonderful and modern days, that selling does not necessarily mean falling prices anymore. Nope. But that has to do with the Roach Motel [SPY] and other such ETFs and their corresponding creation units machines all chugging along doing their thing buying or selling infinity shares...but I'm NOT going to go back over that just now because I only just got rid of my headache from last night's chat about buying or selling infinity shares. Funny.
Anyway. I say anyway because, for right now, nothing matters as large US oil companies moved oil from one above ground tank to another above ground tank making it look like Americans are using oil at an UNBELIEVABLE pace. And when I say move, I mean not physically...'cause that would be time consuming...but move in the same way that The Bernank prints money...which is to say he plays with his computer a little. Anyway.
Hopefully. Hopefully, my shot at becoming Dr. Frontrunner will pan out. So far, little Miss Euro is dangerously close to having some German photographer catch an upskirt shot of her as she is leaning pretty far out over that railing. Burritos priced for stupid seem to be moderating in price, and stocks priced for Dot com...well, those are pulling back after first opening higher. There is an utter lack of volatility on drug companies that cannot make new drugs, and playing Whack-a-Mole with the shares of the largest petroshrimp maker is still good business despite that whole stupid spot oil thingy. Hopefully.
But seriously...what do I know? [Answer: at least as much as Jan Hatzius]
"priced for stupid"...+2
But didn't Harry Wanger say rising mortgage rates would increase sales as more buyers try to lock in at current rates before they rise further?
Nike is down big today even though they beat their estimates. The reason? Fear of margin compression due to high input prices, namely cotton.
I wonder when (or if) the term "margin compression" makes its way to CNBS and the other MSM talking heads. I also wonder how (not if, how) they will spin it as bullish for stocks.
"Stocks are up which means another fundamental data indicator must have missed expectations (following the earlier GDP miss). "
Since when does stock trading has anything to do with fundamentals??? Seriously now, this is a flawed assumption, every real trader knows it...
You can always trust a bunch over over-glorified use car salesmen to tell you when it is a bad time to buy a house...right?
I once hired Foxtons to sell my house.. just to ps off the
realtors in Town..the small town shops are closing down yet all the realtors remain, theres no biz either.
Foxtons is out of business but they were hated by RE for charging a 3% commission.
The 6% commission is the holy grail of RE..what a joke. Enjoy eating the alpo with that!
Here in the sunbelt the only buyers are Canadians with cash. When their housing bubble pops they will disappear too.
Except that the Canadians didn't have a MBS bubble, since, believe it or not, their banks actually kept the loans, so they enforced practical lending standards.
+1
dont forget the PROPERTY TAXES......nothing will be going up higher and quicker than this theft
HOUSING: the greatest Ponzi scheme in history. This one will never be resuscitated:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4gHcJlQRfw
These numbers are a fucking lie. There isn't even close to that many houses being built. Housing is DEAD!!!
anecdotally people in the rental market tell me rents are high (SoCA) equivalent rents being the CPI measure, which means the Fed will have more trouble tweaking its GDP deflator. We've never been through a business cycle with a 70% service economy, where labor wages are not quite as robust as they were during the manufacturing boom, and where people can hunker down more, (in the old economy you still needed food and gasoline) in this economy you stop buying Jack burgers and Starbucks coffee, and goes right to the heart of the employment index. The oxymoron here is single family housing, and as far as the rental business goes, they pretty much limit how many people you can stuff into a unit. If all the people living in loosely defined single family homes, had to move into apartments the economy would break in an instant.
Bernanke and Co should wish that the housing market remains stagnant and even drops, if it picks up, and speculators start coming in, flippers, these shadow residents will start paying a lot more to live. (housing as a commodity, demand really means less than what is happening to the money supply if inflation gets a bit hyper. I've seen how high spec markets can quickly jack up costs, and take supply off the market, even without a change in underlying demand) There no way they can control inflation in that kind of environment, which would likely be stagflation, as interest rates ran higher than CPI.
Damnmit, forget the rest of the crap and attach some of those "up skirt shots" next time! :)
Life is just a Phantasy. I'm going back to bed. It all seems more real there.
Equity market does not care about the Housing market. Corporations are restructuring to prosper without a thriving housing market (and without a thriving employment market). To Equities/Corporations, housing and employment seem to not matter - they have moved on.
I have observed that: what if the US economy (defined as the economic activity of a particualr group of corporations in the US) is really not affected by unemployment and bad housing numbers and all the accompanying misery? Perhaps the Dow Jones and the S&P only measure a somewhat insulated portion of our economy, and by no means reflect the health of the entire organism, only some very visible parts of it.
Meanwhile, rust never sleeps, as the cancerous fraudclosure and mortgage securitization fraud poisons inexorably work their way through the systems they will soon be responsible for shutting down.
This will not go away folks, and cannot be contained.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40720247/ns/business-real_estate/