We just got pending home sales figures from the National Association of Realtors. Here’s what they looked like:
* Pending home sales surged 6.1% in September. That was much better than the unchanged reading that economists were expecting. It’s also the eighth consecutive monthly rise.
* On a year-over-year basis, the pending sales index jumped 21.1% to [...]
From the category archives:
Housing Market
The latest S&P/Case-Shiller home price index figures were just released. On a month-over-month basis, prices were up 1.2% in 20 top metropolitan areas in August. That marked the fourth consecutive monthly gain. On a year-over-year basis, home prices were down 11.3%. That was better than the 11.9% decline economists were expecting and an improvement from [...]
The September existing home sales figures recently hit the tape. Here’s what the numbers looked like:
* Existing home sales jumped 9.4% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.57 million units from 5.09 million in August. That was twice the gain that was expected and the rate of sales was the highest since July 2007.
* [...]
We just got the latest data on housing starts and permits. Here’s what the numbers showed:
* September housing starts inched up by 0.5% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 590,000 from a downwardly revised 587,000 in August. Single family starts rose 3.9%, while multifamily starts dropped 15.2%. Starts are still down 28.2% from year-earlier [...]
The latest National Association of Home Builders index was just released. The index fell to 18 in October from 19 in September. The subindex tracking present sales fell to 17 from 18, the subindex tracking expectations about future sales dropped to 27 from 29, and the subindex measuring prospective buyer traffic slumped to 14 from [...]
There’s an interesting debate going on in D.C. right now over the FHA loan program. FHA was a non-player during the housing boom because private lenders were falling all over themselves to offer crappy loans to crappy borrowers. Now they’re out of the business … and all those crappy borrowers are going to FHA instead. [...]
The latest data on home prices from S&P/Case-Shiller was just released. It showed prices down 13.3% in July from a year earlier in the 20 metropolitan areas tracked by the group. That was a smaller rate of decline than the market was looking for (-14.2%) and a smaller decline than we saw in June (-15.4%). [...]
August new home sales figures inched higher, but only because of revisions. The raw number of sales missed forecasts. Details below …
* New home sales rose 0.7% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 429,000. But the “increase” stemmed from a downward revision to July’s number (to 426,000 from 433,000). Sales missed the average forecast [...]
The August existing home sales figures were just released. Here’s what the numbers looked like:
* Existing home sales fell 2.7% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.1 million units from 5.24 million in July. That was below the 5.35 million units that economists were expecting.
* Single-family sales dropped 2.8%, while condo and cooperative sales [...]
We just got the latest data on home construction. Here’s a recap of what they showed:
* Overall housing starts climbed 1.5% to a nine-month high of 598,000 in August from 589,000 in July. That was exactly in line with the average forecast of economists. Building permit activity rose 2.7% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate [...]
