February Existing Home Sales Fell 23.8%

[girl gone mad]

February Existing Home Sales Fell 23.8%
Monday, March 24, 2008 | 10:16 AM

Today's fictional headline, via The Onion, National Association of Realtors: "Sales of existing homes increased in February and remain within a fairly stable range."

Why is this fictional? Changes from January to February are measuring seasonal differences, not actual improvements. January is one of the slowest months of the year for home sales. (We would never report retail sales from December to January this way; We always use year over year data).

What does that show? Year over year changes showed that single family home sales were 23.8% below February 2007 levels.

The national median sales price was also a big surprise, freefalling down 8.2%.

Single-family home sales decreased 22.9%, while the median existing single-family home price was $193,900 in February, down 8.7% from year ago prices.

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/03/february-existi.html

[gasperc]

1. I'm trying to swap my house with a newer one from a builder

we are trying to move back to the location where we want to be. Leaving for the better deal out in the country, wasn't.

[Mountainman]

3. Our house in the country has been for sale since Feb 2007. We moved to the city for better jobs

and now pay rent and a mortgage. Still I'm better off then some friends who's house payment went from $2,600 to $3,600. The are doing a short sale for $240,000. They owe $400,000, a first and second mortgage. Newly wed and newly broke.

[girl gone mad]

4. Was it the commute..

gas prices, jobs?

I like living in a rural area, but I don't have to commute. I pay about a third of what I would in the city and we have clean air, nature and very little crime.

I've spent a lot of time in large cities, but could never afford to own in any of the places I might want to live. When we feel like getting some urban experience, we rent for a few weeks.

[gasperc]

6. yep, this was meant as a stop gap

we wanted a bigger house but of course the city we were in was totally unaffordable. Now everythings affordable, but we're stuck. It's not all bad, I'm in fixed rate loans. The money I made for the down payment on the house was on sweat equity on other houses over the years, and I took so money out of those. So I deflate here to reflate in a location where we'll be happier. It's pretty impossible to time. We can't really know what financial crisis the next president will be bailing us out from, things could stabilize, a boom could slowly start. My area remains stagnant, while the city we want to move to booms. Really, really hard. For now, I'm trying to keep the payments even. I can take a loss but yet end up with a payment less than what I'm paying now. So, the trick is finding a buyer or get a builder to take on my risk.

[Chef]

2. Home Sales

You are right. The National Association of Realtors generally tries to put things in the best possible light for its members because optimism is everything when it comes to sales. The only reason I can guess for this is that it keeps the brokers off the window ledge. Locally, January '08 to February '08 numbers were pretty stable. However, February '07 compared to February '08, sales were down by 50% in both number of units and dollar volume sold. Average days on the market was up 37% from last year.

[dysfunctional press]

5. we can probably expect existing home sales to increase like this every month!

for the next 6-7 months, that is...

[Zynx]

7. In all fairness, it makes more sense to use month to month figures than year to year.

Using year to year numbers one never sees the turn in the economy one way or the other until it is already well under way.

[DadOf2LittleAngels]

8. No it does not...

Month ot month can be incredibly deceiving people dont buy houses in Jan / Feb / Mar so much as they do in Apr / May / June... They want to move when (a) kids are out of school and (b) weather is nice January is *always* lower than june..

[Zynx]

9. These numbers are *always* seasonally adjusted.

Familiarize yourself with how the data is collected or you can be manipulated by people with agendas.