“The boom is over.” So says David Lereah, National Association of Realtors’ chief economist, regarding the extraordinary bull market that is, or at least has been the residential housing market. In comments published in today’s Wall Street Journal, he observes, “Investors are pulling out in a lot of the nation’s hot markets, and that’s adding to the cooling.”
Some fresh data updates lend support to Lereah’s analysis. On Monday, the Census Bureau reported that sales of new houses slipped 5% in January from December’s tally, and the fall was evident across the country.
Optimists were quick to counter that new home sales are but a small slice of the total of house transactions. A far larger sample of residential sales trends can be found in the monthly count of existing home sales. But that too showed weakness, when the January update was released yesterday by the National Association of Realtors. Total existing-home sales–including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops–backtracked by 2.8%. What’s more, sales were 5.2% below the 6.92 million-unit level in January 2005, according to NAR.