The Decline In Housing Is Not Over

The crash in US housing since 2005, while substantial and painful, is not over. Ignore government and third party data and time series. Interpretations from them never supercede the message from the markets.

S&P Homebuilders (HB) to Gold Ratio:


Headline: New Doubts Over Housing Data

How else do buyers, sellers and investors know how to proceed? Unfortunately, the housing crash itself has undermined the veracity of those readings.

With the boom and the bust came the attention. Housing brought our economy down, and in doing so, boosted itself to the headlines. As with any big story, a cottage industry sprang up around it. Data providers came out of the woodwork, and as online sale and foreclosure web sites proliferated, so too did their ability to add to that data pool. The result is double edged: On the downside, some data providers are less-than accurate, but on the upside, their sheer numbers provide a system of checks and balances, tempering the most outrageous assertions.

So it seems sort of appropriate that today, as a new controversy swarms around potential errors in home sales figures from the National Association of Realtors, the exalted and much-contested S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index is released.

Source: finance.yahoo.com