Posted April 15th, 2008 by Jon
OMFG!!!! The economy is in the dumps, our highly intelligent and impeccably educated President has already said that we are in recession (even though others are still afraid to admit the old R word), and housing is heading back to 1999 prices….
Allright, you can’t exactly believe EVERYTHING you read. Bush is clearly not highly intelligent… And as far as housing heading back to 1999 prices… I’m not biting.
So I decided to take a look at some of the numebrs for Brookline Real Estate data:
Everything is up.
Market volume is up $46,636,400 (up from $15,036,500 the month before)
Average Prices are wayyyyy up $914,439 (up from $556,907 the month before).
Median Prices are slightly up $512,500 (up from $496,000 the month before).
Ok… well not EVERYTHING is up …. average days on market are down to 85 (down from 134 last month).
So things are looking pretty good for Brookline on average. Just to make sure, I thought I’d dig a little deeper and compare granny smith to granny smith, as opposed to granny smith to golden delicious. So I wanted to compare how we’re doing this month to the same time periods of earlier years.
In conclusion… still looking good Brookline, keep up the good work.
Posted April 7th, 2008 by Jon
Uggghhhh …. doomers.
If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s kind of like a modern day bubblehead (bubbleheads are soooooo 2005), with the additional ego derived from the fact that home prices have been falling. Doomers can be easily identified by their lack of reasoning or logic, and endless plastering of “copy and pasted” negative Real Estate propaganda. Granted, if you live in Phoenix, Las Vegas, or California, it’s not negative RE propaganda, it’s completely realistic RE media.
The data above (from S&P CS here) goes through January of 2008. The Case Shiller index is compiled monthly and the data is not made public for another 2 months. I would argue that there is another delay between the time that “the market” occurs (purchase and sale) and when it’s recorded and public information (closing). So arguably, there’s a 4-6 month delay in this graph and where the market is today.
So the good news, is that it’s not so far behind, that it’s failing to account for the credit crunch. For a little tounge in cheek, lets say the credit crunch started July 19 when the fed said the subprime crisis was still contained. The bad news is that doesn’t include the “March Madness” Bear Stearns fiasco we’ve recently seen, as well as the even more recent employment numbers (and employment number negative corrections for January and February …. WOOPS).
I honestly believe that 3 months from now, this same graph (with new data), will look worse than it does now. But I’m willing to put in print that short of some brand new unforseen fiasco, we are currently looking at the worst of the market, the rest of the year will remain slow, and we will see a rebound in Real Estate prices across the board in the spring of ‘09…. or maybe that’s just the cheerleader in me.
