Saturday, August 22, 2009

Existing home sales are up, but...

From CNBC's Diana Olick:
Just like in retail, where the big bargain stores are showing gains, only the low end of the housing market is moving. ... I spoke with Spencer Rascoff of Zillow.com today, who claims, "this is not a real recovery." Higher sales on one end of the market do not a full recovery make.

4 comments:

  1. So just like in retail, the dollar stores are doing well. And you get what you pay for.

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  2. It'd be useful to know what % of the housing stock falls in these buckets. If the vast majority of homes fall in the lower two buckets (and I'm not sure if that's true) then it might signal a positive turn, no?

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  3. When majority of the the homes fall in the last two buckets, then also there won't be any notable positive effects. The thing is that higher scale market houses are not making a recovery. That's the point.

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  4. One has to be careful when making a lot of assumptions because there is a big difference between affordability in the central US vs the coasts. In many of the central states $250k is considered high end and there is no supprise that they would be experiencing very weak sales.

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