Monday Morning Real Estate Reading
Housing
Real Estate News: Ultra-Luxury Market Shows Strong Gains – WSJ
Principal writedowns of the day, mortgage edition – Felix Salmon
Pending Home Sales, Permits, Starts & Completions - TBP
I am stumped by the ongoing insistence that a turnaround in Housing is upon us. It simply is not in the data, as we saw sales of new homes fell 1.6%, plus or minus 23.9% (LOL).
Every Single Housing Datapoint From This Week Was A Miss – Business Insider
Let’s run through it all real quick:
- Monday: Homebuilder sentiment missed, coming in at 28 vs. expectations of 30.
- On Tuesday, housing starts came in just below expectations.
- On Wednesday, mortgage applications for teh week fell 7.4%. Also existing home sales came in at an annualized pace of 4.59 million, vs. expectations of 4.61 million.
- On Thursday, the FHFA house price index showed no gain vs. expectations of 0.%. Last month was revised from a 0.7% gain to just 0.1%.
- And then today we got New Homes Sales of just 313K vs. expectations of 325K. Also today, the major homebuilder KB Homes reported a big miss, and the stock is getting crushed.
So yeah… this was not the week for confirmation of your housing recovery thesis.
Economy
How Apple is propping up the stock market – Ezra Klein
Groundhog Day – California budget deficits pop up once again. - Dr. Housing Bubble
The Rich Get Even Richer – NY Times
The Wall Street multibillion scandal no one is talking about – CNN (LIBOR)
Misc.
No Country For Thin Men: 75% Of Americans To Be Obese By 2020 – Zero Hedge
The War Against Youth – Esquire
The recession didn’t gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.
