US housing, from Confused of London
Housing stats are a notoriously tedious and difficult to manage bunch of numbers. A brief search reveals that in the UK, and regularly covered in the press, we have the Nationwide stats, the Halifax stats, the Land Registry stats, the Hometrack figures, the Rightmove figures, numbers from the RICS and our own FT house price index. All more or less claiming to cover the same thing.
So imagine our confusion when we turn to where the action is, the US housing market, and try to pick our way through the data flowing forth from their beleaguered property market.
Except on the face of it the US system seems somewhat easier to navigate, at least at a national level.
So there’s the National Association of Realtors who on Monday found that the median sale price of existing homes slipped to $228,900 in July, down 0.6 per cent from a year earlier.
The S&P/Case-Shiller index, created by Robert Shiller, the Yale economist whose book Irrational Exuberance diagnosed the internet bubble immediately before it burst, on Tuesday trumped that with a nationwide fall of 3.2 per cent on average in the second quarter. The index covers 20 big US cities, of which Detroit saw the largest falls.
That prompted (additional) worries because it was, firstly, the biggest such fall yet recorded; secondly, it came in well above competing indices; and thirdly the period, April to June, didn’t extend to cover the onset of difficulties in the credit markets, explains the WSJ.
Plus the NAR data the day before had shown that the stock of unsold homes in the US had reached a 16-year high last month, suggesting downwards pressure on prices is set to intensify.
Next up is the index from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the federal regulator, on Thursday. This tracks homes backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and so excludes many homes in high-price markets.
And this is the one that the New York Times reported over the weekend is set to show a drop in the median price of American homes for the first time since federal agencies started keeping data in 1950.
So it’s bad whichever way you cut it, or whoever’s numbers you use. But in the interests of simplicity we’re going to stop going on about the need for consolidation in German banks or the steel industry. We need consolidation in UK house price data providers.