Home prices fell 13.3% in March

Posted Apr 24th 2008 12:05PM by Peter Cohan
Filed under: Housing, Recession

AP reports that home sales dropped to levels not seen since the George H. W. Bush housing recession in 1991. And home prices are plummeting faster than they have since 1970.

Here are the details: new homes dropped by 8.5% in March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000 units, the slowest sales pace since October 1991. And the median price of a home sold in March dropped by 13.3% compared to March 2007, the biggest annual price decline since a 14.6% plunge in July 1970.

What the current Bush housing collapse and the earlier one share is the after math of too much capital flowing in to the housing market. Under Bush the elder, the capital flowed in due to the deregulation of the Savings & Loan industry -- resulting in a $250 billion bailout. Under Bush II, the problem was the $1.3 trillion subprime mortgage market which made capital available to people who couldn't afford to pay the mortgage -- after all, 47% of those loans required no documentation of borrower's income.

The cost of Bush II's housing plunge has yet to be tallied but it looks like he'll beat his dad.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter.

Tags: housing prices, HousingPrices, inthenews, recession, subprime mortgage, SubprimeMortgage

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

4-25-2008 @ 12:19AM

LinebackerWA said...

The headline is completely misleading. Prices did not fall 13.3% in March; they fell 13.3% in a year-to-year comparison against March 2007. Those are two different measures...but then maybe no one would have read this posting without an eye-catching headline.