Real Estate Crisis: Another “Unexpected” Rise in Home Sales price
By J. Christoph Amberger © 2007 found at Taipan Group LLC
| American
Seized Real Estate
commercial
real estate SEIZED
REAL ESTATE |
The National Association of Realtors’ index of signed purchase agreements for home resales rose 0.7% for February, having dropped 4.2% in January.
Surprised? I’m not. House prices have leveled off after years of double-digit growth rates, the cost of borrowing is still within a percentage point of what was considered downright reasonable a decade ago, and, marvel of marvels, people keep moving and buying houses. Not as speculation objects, but to live in. Or as vacation homes. Or has houses their spoiled-rotten kids will occupy during the college years, converting dollars that would have been spent on student housing into equity.
One reason is that household net worth -- the difference between total
assets, such as equity, portfolio holdings, and bank accounts, and liabilities,
including mortgages and credit card debt -- totaled $55.6 trillion in the
October-to-December quarter, marking a 2.5% growth rate from the third quarter,
the previous quarterly record high.
For 2006, household net worth rose by 7.4%, after a 7.9% increase registered in 2005.
Household debt, meanwhile, grew by just 8.6% in 2006, down from an 11.7% increase in the prior year, with mortgage debt growth slowing to 8.9% growth, down from 13.8 percent in 2006. Growth in home mortgage debt was the smallest increase in six years. And if the numbers are any indication, 2007 will mark another decrease.
How else can you tell that America isn’t quite as poorly off as the politicians want you to believe? U.S. retail sales gained 4.9% last week from a year.
According to bearish theory, Americans ought to be drained of spendable cash because they supposedly cannibalized their home equity to buy jelly beans.
Then, of course, most bears tend to be out of touch with life in general
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