After the Great Recession, there were some pundits who theorized that real estate would make a “W-shaped” recovery. With the S&P/Case-Shiller housing prices out this morning, it’s now clear that there are not one, but two “Ws” in the chart — and that’snot a good thing. Index prices fell 1.1% from November to December. In other words, we’ve now experienced a quadruple dip.
Recently, there have been lots of positive signs coming out of the real estate market. Foreclosure rates are down, housing starts are up, and homes have appreciated in value in some markets for the first time since 2006. Even so, two reports surfaced last week indicating that, for the nation as a whole, home prices dropped [...]
Welcome back to the sour economy. It didn’t take long after the Memorial Day break to get the latest signs that the recovery remains in the gutter. The housing market has been looking like it was headed for a double dip for some time. On Tuesday, we got confirmation that it happened. According to the [...]
This morning’s happy housing news: homes are now worth what they were in the fall of 2003! Okay, so maybe that’s not the cheeriest way to frame the most-recent S&P/Case-Shiller data, though it does, I think, preserve an important piece of context. If you want to have a glass-half-full sort of day, then a better [...]
The latest Case-Shiller house price numbers are out, and they’re good: Data through August 2009, released today by Standard & Poor’s for its S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices … show that the annual rate of decline of the 10-City and 20-City Composites improved compared to last month’s reading. This marks approximately seven months of improved readings [...]
One positive byproduct of this real estate/financial crisis has been the elevation of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices to the status of standard measure of housing prices and the relegation of the National Association of Realtors’ average and median sales price numbers to sideshow. This is mostly a good thing, because the NAR numbers are [...]
