Housing Market May Take Years to Stabilize
Posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 | In Market CommentaryThere are undoubtedly a bunch of contrarians tying to find a bottom in the housing market, but I don’t see any evidence that a rebound is anywhere in sight. The key metric here is home inventories. Without a drawdown in the inventory of unsold homes, prices will not stabilize, let alone begin rising again.
The July report from the National Association of Realtors shows single family home inventories jumping more than 2% year-over-year to nearly 4 million units. Not surprisingly, sales for the month dipped to a five-year low and prices fell 0.6% from last year.
Including condos, inventories soared 5.1% to a record 4.59 million units, putting total inventory at a 9.6 month supply. It’s going to take a long, long time to work through that much supply, so don’t expect the housing market to stabilize anytime soon.
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 About Chad Brand (http://www.peridotcapitalist.com)
Chad Brand is the Founder and President of Peridot Capital Management LLC, an independent investment advisory firm based in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition to managing investment portfolios for clients, Chad writes "The Peridot Capitalist," an investment blog that has been named one of the best stock market blogs on the web and is regularly quoted on sites such as Forbes.com, TheStreet.com and Yahoo! Finance. Prior to founding Peridot, Brand graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and worked in the corporate finance department at Express Scripts, Inc, an $18 billion per year pharmacy benefits management company. |
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