A little more good news for the struggling housing market Tuesday, as a closely watched home price index showed increases in prices for the third straight month in July.
The news comes from the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index, which shows that home prices rose by 1.2% from June to July.
Despite the recent run up in home prices, we are still well below where we were this same time last year. In fact, home prices were still 13.3% below their average during July of last year.
The 1.2% increase from the prior month is the biggest monthly gain since October 2005.
Could we be seeing the bottom for the housing slump on the horizon? Mark Vitner, who is a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC believes so. He stated that "the worst has passed," and that prices will probably bottom out sometime during the middle of next year, and then we can expect to see homes appreciating for several years to come. He did state that we are still dealing with oversupply of inventories in most major markets.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-29-2009 @ 12:55PM
Iridium said...
Appreciating past what the market would bear is what got us in this mess. We still haven't dropped below the point where this whole BS run began. Homes are still far overvalued.
I suspect there is a lot of fudge in the numbers just like the pending contract numbers. We'll take an area with high foreclosures for example. Say a whole mess of homes sold at $15,000. The next month the glut of $15,000 foreclosed is gone but there are a number of $30,000 foreclosed homes that sold. When you average the sales out you will get an increase on the average sale price even if the top end price is still falling. That is what is going on.
It makes logical sense that investors buying up properties for land would buy the cheapest available first. Specifically the Chinese who are buying thousands of properties per month.
I bought my house in May and it isn't worth more now. In fact it is probably worth less now since we are past the peak buying season.
9-29-2009 @ 1:21PM
patricia said...
Rising prices are good for some and bad for others. The same can be said for declining prices. A few years ago, all we heard was the panic that nobody would be able to afford a house with the prices were increasing. Now everyone they are all wringing their hands over declining prices.
Folks, you can't have it both ways. This is the way the market works. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.
9-29-2009 @ 1:22PM
patricia said...
Um, sorry about the lack of proofreading on my previous comment, but I think you get my drift.