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Housing Update
Brian Trumbore
President/Editor, StocksandNews.com

Time for my quarterly update of the housing situation in the United States, using the single-best barometer of all, existing home prices as published each month by the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Other measures, such as the S&P/Case-Shiller index, are good but they don’t have the track record the NAR database does.

As you are well aware, home prices rise in the spring as activity picks up after the doldrums of the fall and winter so I thought we’d look at the trends for the past two quarters…using the national median home price.

2011

April…$161,100
May….$169,300
June….$184,300
July…..$171,200
Aug….$171,200 [yes, unchanged]
Sept….$165,400 [preliminary]

2010

April…$172,300
May….$174,600
June….$182,900
July…..$182,100
Aug….$177,300
Sept….$171,400

2009

April…$166,500
May….$174,800
June….$181,800
July…..$181,300
Aug….$177,200
Sept….$175,900

So you can see home prices for a given year peak in the June/July period, then go down, and then go up, and then down…only you hope that each year in total they rise.

Using the NAR’s data, the median average for a full year was as follows.

2004…$185,200
2005…$219,600
2006…$221,900*
2007…$219,000
2008…$198,100
2009…$172,500
2010…$172,900

*Existing home prices peaked in July 2006 at $230,200…according to NAR. You can play around with the numbers any way you want but generally you’re talking of a ‘formal’ decline of 30%, peak to trough. But that’s a national figure. Of course the damage elsewhere has been far worse.

Source: realtor.org.

Wall Street History will return in two weeks.

Brian Trumbore

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