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Economy in Brief
U.S. Government Budget Deficit Surges Unexpectedly
The U.S. Treasury Department reported that the federal government ran a $204.9 billion budget deficit during November...
U.S. Initial Unemployment Insurance Claims Decline
Initial claims for unemployment insurance fell to 206,000 (-7.6% y/y) during the week ended December 8...
EMU Inflation Falls Back Into Place
The ECB targets inflation of just under 2%...
U.S. CPI Is Unchanged; Core Prices Increase Steadily
The Consumer Price Index held steady during November (2.2% y/y)...
U.S. Mortgage Loan Applications Post Another Strong Increase
The MBA total Mortgage Applications Index rose 1.6% (-13.2% y/y) during the week ended December 7...
by Robert Brusca June 26, 2007
Housing is still in the grip of a downtrend but prices are not plunging or even weakening further nor are sales trends worsening; in fact, they are showing some signs of stability. Housing rebounded in April and maintained most of its gain in May - a good sign for the sector. Question: How bad is this??
A tale of two suburbs? Maybe it’s not of two cities but definitely a tale of two suburbs – one affluent and one not. Average house prices are up and strongly at 6.5% year/year. Yes, some of that owes to a weak result a year ago, but not all of it. And year/year price declines for new homes are not very common. Median prices are off for two months running and the last year/year decline was in September of 2006. For average prices, they fell year/year in April 2007; they last fell year/year in November 2006. Obviously high-priced homes are faring better in this housing cycle.
Stability in sales by region is shown in the table below.
| Momentum: Annualized Rates Of Change | Prices | ||||||
| As of: | Total | Northeast | Midwest | South | West | Median | Average |
| May.07 | Month-to-month percent change | ||||||
| May.07 | -1.6% | -11.0% | 30.8% | -7.3% | -1.9% | 1.5% | 4.5% |
| Apr.07 | 12.5% | 3.4% | -7.9% | 22.7% | 8.1% | -9.9% | -7.9% |
| Mar.07 | -1.5% | 91.3% | 0.0% | -10.2% | -3.9% | 3.0% | 1.2% |
| Annualized Rates | |||||||
| Total | Northeast | Midwest | South | West | Median | Average | |
| 3-Mo | 35.7% | 304.3% | 81.9% | 8.7% | 7.8% | -21.5% | -10.2% |
| 6-Mo | -14.6% | 53.1% | 4.0% | -23.9% | -23.6% | -3.3% | 15.1% |
| 1-Yr | -15.8% | 19.1% | -14.5% | -17.9% | -21.1% | -0.9% | 6.5% |
