I criticized the NAR’s Chief Economist Marketer David Lereah yesterday, and received a polite email (from a reader, not the NAR) asking why I was so disparaging.
Here’s my answer:
Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?
I criticized the NAR’s Chief Economist Marketer David Lereah yesterday, and received a polite email (from a reader, not the NAR) asking why I was so disparaging.
Here’s my answer:
We have a sudden change of tune it seems:
“If we have prices drop for the rest of the year and sales also continue to drop, then we will have a bad situation in housing of balloons popping rather than air coming out,” Lereah said.
David Lereah is a charlatan.
Btw, let’s hope the outcome isn’t as bad as “The Fourth Mega-Market Now Through 2011” by Ralph “I lost my brain in Brooklyn” Acampora.
Yes, with expert analysis such as David Learah’s, teepees (small footprint = low taxes) will no doubt soon be making a big comeback to solve the Hooverville problem yet to come…
Buy it now and put it on your bookshelf next to your copy of “Dow 36,000.” A future collectors item.
Mr. R, you were far too kind. Yesterday he came out and baldly claimed the decline he had been expecting had arrived. “There are no tanks in Bahgdad.”
Just keep in mind that the public is not the NAR constituency.
The NAR interests lie with the large number of Realtors ™ who pay hefy membership fees to the National and Local associations. These fees (when combined with MLS fees) can tally into the thousands. Multiply that by the number of licensed Realtors nationwide. We’re talking real money.
You give David Lereah too much credit, he is nothing more than a marketing puppet.
James
New Jersey Real Estate Report
David Lereah reminds me of the Iraqi Minister of Information. I mean, does this guy have ANY credibility left?
When I see him quoted in the news, it tells me that news outlet is either too lazy or too stupid to do simple research that would uncover his contradictory statements. I’m beginning to wonder if he’ll ever get raked over the coals, as he should.
just read this comment at Blodgett’s blog:
Re: the housing market. I think the threat to the market is quite overblown. Both Australia and England came through with ephemeral periods of flattening (rather than precipitous dips, followed by a collapse in consumer spending), with spending and prices now picking up in both places.
Interesting.
they way this market is rippin this week, dow 36000 may be attainable by the end of this quarter….yahooo!!!!!
While I normally think you are much to bearish and pesimistic, you certainly are correct about home prices.
its all propagnada and spinning.
http://immobilienblasen.blogspot.com/2006/08/bagdad-bob-lebt.html
is that house on the cover of lereah’s book levitating or dropping from the sky?
regarding the blodgett quote: interesting indeed. can anyone speak to the credit and credit market parallels in the two countries cited and the US?
~~~
BR: lol — too funny!
This is all very humorous. Reminds me so much of some of the main voices of the dot com bubble.
It will be even more fun when he becomes the real estate industry scapegoat. (bound to happen). Except of course for the many poor souls that will be living on the street instead of a nice safe home because they followed his advice.
Hey, don’t be too hard on Lereah. He only missed the end of the decade by five years.
Interesting book cover. You see, the clearly over-cautious family waited too long and are now priced out forever because housing is “working off a whole new economic system.”
Maybe markets in other countries never cracked because they could always look at America for RE inspiration. Now that we’re toast lets see what happens to those markets. If this really is a global credit bubble then nobody is safe from the pop.
Oh, and from the Amazon.com book reviews:
Times like this make me wish I believed in hell.
My review currently has 10/10 for helpfulness:
It simply says “Customers who bought this item also bought… “Your Yugo Will Run Forever and How to Set the Land-Speed Record With It.” I’m relieved people find that helpful.
I think they just bought that house and now it is going to fall on them and crush them under the weight of their exotic mortgage.
SiliconValley thinks it’s the last bastion of bullet-proof pirces but we’re seeing negative y-o-y even here.
Santa Clara is (barely) y-o-y positive while San Mateo & Santa Cruz have tipped over.
See the actual numbers in, “The last 30 days” http://www.viewfromsiliconvalley.com/id264.html
For all things there is a season. A time to buy, a time to sell. Just dont be the sucker in any transaction. There is always a sucker. Look around before you act, i.e. did you buy sugar at 19 cents (now 11), gold at 725 (now under 600), silver at 15 (now near 11), lumber at 350 (now 256)… suckers beware. NO MARKET JUST GOES UP. (I will not even bother to mention all the dot com stocks of the 1990’s bubble).
i cant believe we are giving credibility to henry bldogett.
henry blodget is to tech bubble as david lereah is to
housing bubble.
Note that Lereah came out with a revised edition earlier this year and changed the title from “Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?” to “Why the Real Estate BOOM Will Not Bust”.
Also note that the word “BOOM” was about 4x larger than any other word in the revised title.
Lereah’s job is to be a cheerleader for the RE industry. He is not an economist, he is an eCONomist.
I don’t fault him for cheerleading, that’s his job. I fault the media for giving a paid mouthpiece so many uncritical opportunities to pump his case and for identifying him as some sort of unbiased academic.
But as always, caveat emptor. Do your own “home”-work. Guys like Lereah will always tell you what you what to hear. Falling prey to the siren call will usually land you on the rocks.
Re home prices in Australia, check this out:
“A THREE-BEDROOM brick-veneer house in St Clair sold for just $260,000 at the weekend – down about 42 per cent from its last sale at $450,000 in 2003 in a further sign of the depressed state of the Sydney property market.”
thehousingbubbleblog.com has had a number of links recently about the situation there.
That argument–things look fine in the UK and Oz–reminds me a little of the dot-com era. Excite’s stock would go up 15% for no apparent reason and people would say, “well Lycos is undervalued because it’s only gone up 5% in the same period…” So Lycos’s stock would promptly go up 20% and they would say, “well now Excite’s stock is undervalued…”
How many option ARMs were written in the UK?
But why did the cover have a house in the sky instead of a pie?
In fairness to Lereah 2001-03 he kept on talking about a “overly hot” RE market and it was due correction, then he saw things get even hotter in 2004 and jumped on the bandwagon, but sadly fell and tore his ACL in 2006. Such is life.
Ok, get back in your corners!
This is how it is…
Probably the worst of you doom and gloomers are wrong.
Probably the most exuberant of polyannas are wrong.
This is due to the fact that most things tend to go back to the mean. For a real good example of housing booms look at the housing market over the last 25 years in Toronto, Canada. It looks like a duck. Incredible excesses. The conclusion I came to is that if a person has werewithal to sit for a period of lets say 2 years or so and is earning an ok living they will be okay. They will loose money on their house. But if they are buying up into something larger, that house too will have likley depreciated and there is a balance. The saving grace is the pressure of population and hopefully being in a desirable location. The long only speculators at a top are the ones who take a bath. Of course those who bought at the top are going to be under the gun for a longer period than those who sold at the top.
This is all speculation on a proverbial Rube Goldberg economy where one thing triggers another and we interpet information as being a significent tell for how a group of people might react. A lot of stimulous and muscle twitching going on. The real question is if we look at economies and espeacially sectors within an economy where are we in the the wave of contraction/expansion. Then we have to try to make a call on what time period we are concerned about, what do we have to loose, what can we afford to loose, how often are we right, do we have an edge ( or is it a case of rising tides, and there is nothing wrong with that). Perhaps it is not so much the question of if there will be ramifications to economic excesses but rather what is the likely scope and duration, what position do we want to take in a positively affected market while we watch and wait for a given market to tank , how will we know it when things have started to turn, and how hard can we bet at that point (probably good to have a game plan just for the betting.)
When the tsunmi hit in Asia, those who could get above the wave and the scuba divers who were below it fared relativly well. The poor souls who were in the midst of it and had no options fared badly.
So anyone want to make some suggestions on scenerios and responses. If you do please talk about the timeframe you are concerned with, and how and what you might bet on to take advantage of the situations.
Be well.
Barry, since you are into cycles, what does history show about the 2nd half of a President’s 2nd term? Typically UP or DOWN?
To Jdamon: Don’t bother. He and most people here are still waiting for a market bottom but the fear of a recession is keeping them sidelined. I think it was 2002 when the recession in 2001 was officially announced and it wasn’t until late 2003 when it was pointed out that it was officially over. I expect that when the Dow hits 15000 and the recession of 2006 is announced to be over in late 2007 we will get the all clear to start buying up stocks again.
~~~~
BR Not true at all — I have been long more than I have been short this year, and most of my gains came from the long side (made some short money in May. (#s are even better risk adjusted)
But lets make this interesting — publicly — where do you think the markets are going, and by when? Give us your year end and 6 month targets HERE ,IN PUBLIC.
Its too easy to snipe — I recall you were bearish August 8 when I was Bullish — who missed that rally?
Agree with Jdamon. I’d like to hear your take on Kondratiev waves. Or just cycles in general. Isn’t it true that they fall apart as soon as the general investing public knows about these cycles? If history is information then waves should vanish over time as we learn human psychology and emotion gets priced in.
I’m not sold on the Kwave theory but I do believe Mises, Hayek, etc. have it right which I think means deflation.
Everyone here is an idiot!!!!! You all are missing a fundamental fact in the housing market that will solve everyone’s problems.
50 year mortgage!!! Now there!!! According to the banking industry this will solve the mortgage payment creep.
Boy you guys are usually very smart.
(the above is satirical and not to be taken a serious commentary even though banks think a 50 yr mortgage is a bright idea.)
KirkH – I suspect deflation is out of the question. Deflation increases the real value of debt, and the incidence of loss in that circumstance will be on politically important voters. The endgame more likely involves the incidence of loss falling on (increasingly foreign) holders of debt. If monetary policy fails to achieve this result, it will be induced by legislative and/or fiscal measures.
Panic selling anyone?
(ABC News Clip)
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/news;_ylt=At25F_mHpawEVeNeWE7UBOXcKs0F;
_ylu=X3oDMTA5dXJmZWdsBHNlYwN2aWRlbw–?ch=61492&cl=894804&lang=en
You go boy!
Not a fan of Kwave at all — the causation aspect of it is unconvincing, and the theory cannot be readily proven.
I take pieces out of each economsit’s contribution: Elements of Keynes, Friedman, Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter (and others) are far more persuasive.
As to the 4 year pres cycle — its been a pretty good statistical bet every post WW2 year except 1986 — and that came home to roost in 1987
still dont understand the DOW and S&P at highs …. shaking head in disgust. i played the puts the puts played me. broke. broke. not a fun game.
Re: Cycles
I think it’s useful to think of cycles is as “a reversion to the mean”. Considered in this light, the idea of cycles doesn’t fall into the “woo-woo” category.
Personally, I pay them great respect.
In this vein, I have an article noting researching showing that there are cycles in real estate. According to the author, RE cycles last considerably longer than typical market cycles (18.3 years) and we’re due for one…NOW. FWIW, the article was written by Paul Farrell in May; I found it on the MarketWatch site.
The “highs” are manipulation by Options as I have said MANY times before. Volume is quite low, which means not much selling is going on as the soft landing fantasy is still believed, but that is about to come to a end: Remember my call:
1.Hit highs end of September
2.October crash, with the possiblity deepening as we go through the month. Data doesn’t indicate a “soft landing” in Q3 2006 and when they FINALLY get that, it crashes. Simple as that. Options then blow it, completely, but they won’t to the suckers start selling. But oh, are they going to start selling.
BTW, you can see the specific buy/sell/hold calls from the premium site here:
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/rra/index.html
Any fool can make a prediction about market targets Barry. Dow 7000? Was that would you said? You flip-flopped sentiment about the markets since June more that Kerry did on issues during his whole election campaign. If you want to day trade or swing a few days here and there because you have no gumption to sit on an position for a macro move that that is your prerogative.
Why not ask what kind of capital preservation do you use. That is where money is made. Not is pulling a number out of the back side that will generate publicity. Your blog is much like any kind of market. Easy to see where it has been, is accurate at telling you where it currently is. But a shot in the dark about knowing where it will be. A week, a month, a year from now. You don’t have a clue where any market will be unless your real last name is McFly, you are friends with a wily mad doctor with a DeLorean.
Predict where a market will be? Come on Barry that stuff is for amateurs.
Anderl:
What you call flip flops, I call changing my views when conditions dictate. What do you do? (to paraphrase JMK)
But given your sniping up above, here’s my dare to you: How about adding something of value? I am challenging you to step up to the plate and produce something — in public — that is positive for readers (nothing so crude or amateurish as a prediction).
I don’t care what it is — Risk management, asset allocation, position sizing, stock or sector selection — whatever would be helpful or instructive to readers here.
Its tiresome, dreadfully boring, sifting thru whining comments that do offer little other than bile . . .
(I would have preferred to respond privately via email, but you didn’t use a real address)
In the CNBC special on the housing boom earlier this year, Lereah was very dismissive of what Robert Schiller had to say. He was really dogmatic and struck me as a mouthpiece.
Greg Feirman
CEO/Founder, Top Gun Financial Planning
Anderl, the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful trader or investor is the ability to assess changing conditions and make course corrections.
No one knows the future, not even Barry — smart as he is. But his “percentage play” assessments, including his reassessments when called for, are consistently excellent. Indeed, Barry’s altered views, time-frames, recommended allocations, etc., etc., are probably best understood as assessments and reassessments, NOT as flip-flops.
They are hardly that.
per christopherrobin:
“still dont understand the DOW and S&P at highs …. shaking head in disgust. i played the puts the puts played me. broke. broke. not a fun game.”
I do not hold myself out as a ninja master of portfolio management or even options trading, but would offer a few thoughts:
_I think that if you are going to play options based on macro analysis, that suggests using expiry dates well into the future since macro things take time to develop.
_I suspect that LEAPs and the like that are bought OTM or ATM are little more than a lottery ticket, so I prefer deep ITM options if I am guessing where things will be in 6-12 months because they behave more like futures than options (i.e., delta is close to 1.0)
_If you are deep ITM, then you can manage things more like you would the underlying and define your exit point based on price rather than trying to figure out volatility moves since what you paid was mostly for intrinsic value anyway.
_If you guess wrong, I find it much easier to determine when to run up the flag on deep ITM options.
_If you have not already committed all of your macro play money to one side or the other, then when it becomes obvious that you are not a gifted genius after all you can stabilize things by taking the opposite side without liquidating your original position
assuming that you have plenty of time left to go and have not really changed your underlying belief in where things are ultimately going. In other words, Plan B is to buy shorter term calls against longer term puts and vice versa.
_Puts and calls do not behave in the same way over the same time spans. There are risks in puts that do not exist in calls simply because of the market’s bullish bias.
_If you are not using options to hedge a position in the underlying, then you are just speculating (because of the implied leverage) and need to go into with the notion that you could piss every cent away.
_So I think that options trading needs to be offset by putting 80-90% of your portfolio in govt. bonds, 5 star CDs, and/or money market accounts.
_You may well ask “If you are so smart, why are you upside down in high 4 figures now?”
_My answer is that I would be that if I was not so smart, I would be upside down in low-ish 5 figures now :)
But it’s all good, the calls that I bought on the QQQQ/DIA rainbow have pretty much stabilized the SPY put red ink and my expectation is that I will wind up doing much like they used to say of the Vincent Black Lightning motorcycle (paraphrased):
“I will not only throw you off in a corner at speed, I will turn around and run over you”
For you youngsters who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Motorcycles. This is the coolest bike ever built. But I digress, my point is that no whining is necessary if you do not bet too hard on one side or the other (risk mgmt) or bet too large (money mgmt).
per BR:
“But given your sniping up above, here’s my dare to you: How about adding something of value? I am challenging you to step up to the plate and produce something — in public — that is positive for readers (nothing so crude or amateurish as a prediction).”
Interesting, BR, as this clown looked like just another troll to me, yet you continue to challenge him? My assumption is that you know who “Anderl” is and are willing to pursue this for personal reasons.
Given his manner and apparent bent, I am guessing that Anderl is actually Ken Lay anunciar de México :P
think bonds are cooked ???
The long bond future recently traded more than 2.5 standard deviations from its 50-day moving average
Market will crawl its way higher right into Election Day. Then we sell off very hard back to 1240-1250.
BTW, JDamon, you assume that there will be a 2nd half of a second Presidential term. My guess is that our feckless leader will not be seeing his second term to completion. I don’t think he’ll get past Oct 2007.
I’m not above making crude and amateurish predictions about the market. ;-)
Since I’m not as deeply into football as Muckdog, picking market tops and bottoms is my hobby, so I’ll step out on a limb and predict that the current rally will top out between 1347-1360 on the $SPX. I’ll round it to 1350.
My reasoning:
1360 is a 50% Fib retracement from 1522 (all time high) and 1168 (Oct ’05 low).
1347 is a 62.80% Fib retracement from 1552 and 1219 (June low).
1347 is pretty close to 1350, a nice round number that the market vibrated around (acted as support and resistance) back in ’99-’00. People like round numbers.
If you draw a trendline connecting the 08/04 and 07/06 lows on the $SPX, you’ll see that it hasn’t exceeded a 100-120 point extension above the trendline without a correction back to the line since the bull kicked off in ’03. $SPX is 95 points above the trendline now. At 1360 $SPX would be about 120 points above the line. $SPX has risen a long way in a short amount of time (very steep up trendline from the July low) and it’s due for a rest.
Hey, if I’m wrong… bitch to Fibonacci.
anderl,
A difference between primates and humans is that the latter have the ability to learn new information and *change their minds*. What you refer to as “flip-flopping” is often a sign of intelligence.
-wunsacon
Vincent Black Lightning. Sounds like a Richard Thompson song. I saw saw one in a motercycle display nice precurser to Harley. But a lot of romance attached to it’s image. I don’t ride ( I know just how coordinated I am) but appreaciate motercycles as a wannabe and somehow a Ducati seems to have more tecno romance to me. Althoguh I would love to own a Vincent too.
Anderl are you a child? Do you believe in the tooth fairy? Santa? If you expect anyone to know the future in detail then the Easter Bunny wants to sell you an investment. We can have an opinion, a thought if you will of where all those patterns might lead us to, or intersect like a ven diagram, but if we are not flexible we depend on luck for our sucess. And we end up like Hitler in the bunker with Eva Braun, burnt to a crisp and despised, dead at our own hands.
Deconstruction is so much easier than building things up. The late sci fi writer Philip K.Dick said that everything goes to kibble. Entropy as a result of randomness. Those guys like Thorp et all who make money with programs that make thousands of trades a day based on patterns that seem to work understand the limitations of regimented forcasting. Extremely short term, other wise you are racing yachts shifting with the wind, relying on team work and perception of the shifts in the environment to win the race.
Just like the co operative people here who seek to add what they can within their own capabilities and limitations.
It’s a lot easier to be a critic than to be the artist. But it is not constructive merely descriptive and only history and circumstance will decide if you are right.
I wish you the best and hope you take this to heart.
The top has been reached. The new housing sales will put a damper on upside through the end of the week. Next week will be the start of a corrective phase. I can’t see the bottom 60 days out
The first stop is 1220 on the S&P by Mid Oct.
per alexd:
“Vincent Black Lightning. Sounds like a Richard Thompson song. I saw saw one in a motercycle display nice precurser to Harley. But a lot of romance attached to it’s image. I don’t ride ( I know just how coordinated I am) but appreaciate motercycles as a wannabe and somehow a Ducati seems to have more tecno romance to me. Althoguh I would love to own a Vincent too.”
Aw man, I don’t ride either. I’ve been married for 32 years now and from day one, my wife forbade guns and bikes- in the former case because I guess it would be too easy for her to kill me and in the latter case because it would be too easy for me to kill me.
Anyway, the Vincents were not a precursor to Harleys or anything else. There were lots of cool bikes up until around 1960 like Indian, Henderson, Excelsior that drifted away along with others that lasted longer like Triumph, BSA and Matchless (the last is my very, very favorite). Harleys have been around forever and should be given their due for that reason. What is for sure is that the Jap bikes suck and always will. But maybe that’s just the David Allen Coe in me talking and, if anyone doesn’t know who that is, then….
Would it be a rhetorical statement to suggest this blog group is obsessed with the housing bubble?
A search on this site on housing bubble commentary vs commodity bubble might be an interesting study. Looking at the charts it’s OBVIOUS which is a bigger bubble….the one no one talks about here.
Compare the (long term) charts of copper/oil to housing, and tell me which looks more hyperbolic. Yes housing is way ahead of itself, but who doesn’t know that? The levered speculation in commodities is a frenzy, and fuel for the equity market.
Meanwhile the rotation is just starting….and the market is the final judge.
As anyone who has actually bothered to study it knows, commodities are the last asset class to drop in a recession. And that cash does not go into equities, it goes into bonds or is set aside into cash equivalents.
There is a cartel floor under oil, but nothing else has that advantage (at least openly). Energy in general appears to be bottoming and I went ahead with some XLE calls today.
My current guesstimate is that Everything Is Great Until It’s Not, so we will continue to see manipulated equities pricing until the headline DOW NEW HIGH! is struck, then it will muddle until after the elections, then everything will crap out for the next two years.
Another coffee table book to set right next to my DOW 36,000 book.
Just a couple of comments.
Firstly, I’m at a loss to understand why some posters are so angry at BR’s various views.
You’ll see from my name that I’m an old buy – and – mostly – hold investor.
So, I don’t agree with some of BR’s views.
Nonetheless, it is a superb financial blog – the often bearish main posts are quoted in full – and it’s really up to those of us who are pie eyed optimists to dissect the argument and not the man. And to do so in a rational manner.
I’m at a loss to understand why the the most offensive posters are clearly those of a bullish persuasion like myself.
Really gentlemen – you’re giving optimism a very bad name – and it’s very sloppy, when there are quite a few quietly considered optimistic arguments to be made at present.
Just to quickly name two – look at the post 1970 chart of Housing price changes. When it went below zero – was that a good or bad time to buy good companies at fair value?
It was – historically – a very good time to buy decent companies and we are below zero again.
Secondly, the UK and Australian housing burst experiences over the last three years have also coincided ( and this is unusual historically) with good times, low umemployment and 3 years of rising equities prices.
Why not the same outcome for the US?
There – that wasn’t hard – was it?
Finally, BR’s service is free to us all – my view is that he can post whatever he pleases – it’s not like I’m contributing anything.
Permabull = Larry Kudlow?
Who was that masked, errrrr, pseudonymous, man, errrrr poster?
Yes, who was that pseudonymous poster.
Believe it or not, the recession could already be here or very close (starts next quarter). If so, I believe that it is probably time to buy again in 9 – 12 months. My guess is 20% correction before then though.
The rally is quarter end window dressing as Mr Poor Hedge Fund/Mutual Fund manager has lunch and begs to spend the proverbial $25mm.
Masked certainly – but not Mr. Kudlow.
Howver, kenny can be witty – 10 out of 10.
If OPEC enforces prices at $55+ per barrel, then the energy company CEO’s claim they can get find oil in “deep dark places” at those higher prices (that are non OPEC like deep sea). Therefore diluting OPEC’s monoply power.
OPEC is much stronger as a cartel at $25 per barrel than at $75 per barrel. At $150 per barrel you could probably drill for oil in the Long Island Sound. :)
This is what I’m getting from the oil exec’s statements. They know the business better than us. (If they can be taken at their word)
Which brings us to homebuilders and 25% profit margins at CURRENT prices.
Same basic story as oil, homebuilders will continue building until they whittle away their large profit margins. I don’t know what they are historically but I suspect much below 25%.
High prices will serve to flood the inventories of Oil/Housing.
Inventories inversely proportional to prices
anderl: the thoughts and opinions of anyone using (let alone coining) such a simple propaganda slur as “flip-flop” are not worth a $hit.
Troll elsewhere. I hear RedState is hiring wing-nut econ choirboys and they STILL eat that flip-flop up with a spoon over there
So, precisely what is a boom and what is a bust ? I am using the word “precisely” in this incidence to ask for some specific figures that determines when we have one , or the other of the two states mentioned and of course by implication the state inbetween which dominates for the vast majority of the time. Without defining what criteria we use for these terms we’re all just blowing hotair.
For the average punter who’s reasonably well capitalised ,and not overcommitted to property this is all just academic discussion.
The unfortunates who have basically little ,or no equity built up , who may get caught up in a revenue squeeze for whatever reason will as usual be the cannon fodder. I presume we have some number for the cannon fodder that might enable us to recognise a state of “bust” ?
what is so surprising about a guy trying to make $$
by pumping his book ??
whether it be realestate, peak oil, pollution, etc ??
From the inimitable Housing Panic.
http://housingpanic.blogspot.com/2006/09/i-flipping-lost-it-when-i-got-this-one.html
Great interview by Cramer with the CEO of Lennar. Cramer is all “buy the stock, oh, by the way I knew this guy’s dad”. Some nuggets:
“The market is … softer than people even understand or shows up in the national numbers”
“There’s no question that right now the market is soft right now, there is a difference between what people want to pay for homes and what homes are worth.”
“Great interview by Cramer with the CEO of Lennar.”
One of the nuggets I got from listening to the Lennar call was how interested the analysts were in the subject of asset impairment calculation. I guess that’s the next shoe to drop.
Booyah!
http://davidlereahwatch.blogspot.com
This morning I called real estate agent who is a smart, savvy lady and a top-producing broker in her area. “Are you finding that prices coming down?” I asked.
“Not really,” she told me. “It’s just that there are many more houses for sale. Today, buyers have more choices.”
Now that’s spin!
best
http://www.skincareinfo.us/
Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom? 2.0
I stumbled across a fascinating new blog: David Lereah Watch. Here’s the description:David Lereah is the Chief Economist and Senior VP of the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Mr. Lereah regulary makes statements regarding the housing bubble. The…