Monday, November 02, 2009

Rough Sledding Ahead for Housing

The “extra-seasonal” housing price rally brought on by the governments tremendously expensive and poorly targeted housing tax credit gimmick is now thoroughly and completely over.

How many “homebuyers” have jumped at that $8000 carrot only to now find that Uncle Sam was dangling it over an abyss of deflation?

I suppose someone had to buy all those homes but to use a “credit” as the bait… too cruel! … You actually got credit (a nice government-issued pat on the wallet) for making a poor financial decision.

Only in America!

I can’t stress enough the importance of following the housing price data published by Radar Logic.

Not only did the RPX series very clearly capture this season’s exceptional bounce across the majority of metro markets, it captured the top and now, the turn-down.

Better yet, the data is published daily for all of you (and me!) housing junkies that need that continuous flow of new information.

So, looking at the 25-MSA composite’s 28 day aggregate series (click on the Blytic chart below) it’s clear that prices “bottomed-out” between March and April and then climbed about 6.5% to top in mid August.

No small feat…

But since then prices have come down by 1%... ever so slight… but as you can see from a selection of other regional price charts below, they ain’t a comin’ back this season!

Las Vegas, Phoenix and Miami are obviously trending down.

Boston and Cleveland too…

Detroit is setting new series lows backing home prices down to likely somewhere not seen since the early 1990s.

Even Washington DC is turning lower while the New York area appears likely topped out from its snappy late season bounce.

San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Sacramento… everywhere you look, residential real estate is under serious pricing pressure.