More on Existing Home Sales

Last week EconomPic detailed the strength in the existing home sales jump wasn't as strong as detailed... namely due to the discounts required to get those homes sold.

Barry at The Big Picture provides additional detail:

Less than 10% of the homes sold in the US were > $500k. We know the high end has collapsed, but we are not discussing multi-million dollar homes, mind you, but over $500k as a mere 8.2% of sales. I was surprised. (I wish we had data going back decades, which we could then normalize for inflation).

In September, 70% of transacted homes were priced under $250,000.

Check out the year-over-year growth rates — also astonishing:

Homes under $100k are up 22.5%
$100-$250 +6%
$250-$500 -5.2%
$500k-$750 +4.0%
$750-$1m -2.6%
$1M up -1.2%

I took that data and crossed it against data from the NAR to get the following:



What we see is that the entire jump is due to increase from the lower-end of the housing market, due in large part due to the fact that those are the houses that have been foreclosed, were purchased the past few years by should have been renters, and the first time homeowner credit.

Not so much strength after all...

Source: Realtor.org