The Housing Bulls Last Horse Just Died

Those bullish on housing have continually called blogs such as Housing Panic, Housing Doom, Patrick.net and others chicken littles. Their shallow reasoning went something along these lines: “The median housing price is up, meaning that home values continue to increase. Ergo, the blogs calling the market a declining one are insane.”

If you fell for that poorly reasoned argument in the first place I feel sorry for you; but at last, that remaining mirage of hope for the poor folks at the NAR and other disillusioned cheerleaders has evaporated. The New York Times reports that the median home price is expected to drop for the first time since 1950. Try to spin that one Lawrence Yun.

From the Times:

The median price of American homes is expected to fall this year for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950.

…

The reversal is particularly striking because many government officials and housing-industry executives had said that a nationwide decline would never happen, even though prices had fallen in some coastal areas as recently as the early 1990s.

…

On an inflation-adjusted basis, the national median price the level at which half of all homes are more expensive and half are less is not likely to return to its 2007 peak for more than a decade, according to Moodys Economy.com, a research firm.

The entire article is worth the read. It particularly highlights how all of the supposed “experts” (a loosely defined word in the article, as it lumped the NAR in to the group of experts) predicted that price declines could never occur.

Maybe this will finally, once and for all, kill the argument over whether there is truly a housing market downturn or not. While the NAR has been busy dreaming up new ways to show the housing market in a positive light, when even your best friend of a statistic turns against you - there is little left available to prop your lie version of the story up. In other words, Lawrence Yun needs a new alibi.

Some interesting graphs are below, and be sure to check out the interactive home price comparison tool over at the NY Times.

From the Times:

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[Source: Blown Mortgage]