Bad News and Bad Reporting

LATimes (Feb25, 2008 from AP) – “Sales of existing homes hit a 9-year low nationally.”

This story has both bad news and bad reporting. Nationally, home sales dropped to their lowest levels since 1999, and prices declined for the 5^th month in a row according to the National Association of Realtors. Sales dropped .4% last month (it does not say if that was from the previous month or the previous year), and the median price dropped to $201,100, down 4.6% from a year ago (it does not tell us how much it fell from the previous month or from the peak).

Today’s Wall Street Journal clarifies the LATimes’ sloppy reporting for us. The WSJ tells us:

Home resales fell to a 4.89 million annual rate, a 0.4% decrease from December's revised 4.91 million annual pace, the National Association of Realtors said Monday. Originally, the NAR estimated sales at 4.89 million in December.

and

The median home price was $201,100 in January, down 4.6% from $210,900 in January 2007. The median price in December was $207,000.

That’s better, but we still don’t know how much the price has fallen from the peak or when that peak was – just because the year-over-year price has fallen 5 times doesn’t mean that the peak was 5 months ago. The month to month changes may have been falling for more than 5 months.

One more nugget from the WSJ:

Inventories of homes increased 5.5% at the end of January to 4.19 million available for sale, which represented a 10.3-month supply at the current sales pace. There was a 9.7-month supply at the end of December, revised from a previously estimated 9.6 months.

That means that in one month, the inventory of homes increased by .6 months. At this rate of growth there should be a full year’s supply of homes on the market by the end of April. Mind you, the inventory in California is over 14 months already.

Looking to a third source, we go to Reuters (“U.S. existing home sales slip and prices tumble”) only to fail in our attempt to find the peak, and have another mystery added as follows:

The national median home price fell to $201,100 from $210,900 a year earlier, the NAR said. The price of the median single-family home was $198,700 in January, the lowest since $197,700 reported in January 2005.

OK. What is the difference between a home and a single-family home? We don’t know because they don’t tell us. Let’s keep looking for the peak.

Bloomberg (U.S. Economy: Existing Home Sales Decline to Nine-Year Low) clears up some of the Reuters mystery here:

The median sales price fell 4.6 percent to $201,100 from January 2007. The median cost of a single-family home decreased 5.1 percent to $198,700, while that of condominiums and co-ops fell 1 percent to $220,400.

But still no peak.

Detroit Free Press – no peak;

Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal – no peak;

Chicago Sun-Times – no peak;

People Magazine - George Clooney's Oscar Date Night with Sarah Larson;

Financial Times – no peak;

Money/CNN – no peak;

New York Times – no peak;

The Irish Times – no peak;

Providence Business News (Rhode Island) – no peak;

National Association of Realtors (press release) – no peak!

Now it’s clear. The NAR didn’t spoon feed the info to the reporters so no news source in America bothered to report the full story. Am I the only person on Earth who wants to know how much prices have fallen from their high point?

After checking with 14 sources, I leave to get my son from daycare, without an answer.