Helping Good Investors Make Better Decisions
Ah – one of our favorite days of the month around the office every month – Case-Shiller data day. It’s time once again for the breathless media to crow about what a disaster the nation’s single family market is – once again making the oft-repeated error of assuming that as the CSI data goes, so […]
Yesterday the Census Bureau released their data on new home sales; no doubt you’ve heard the news cycle by now lamenting that new home sales are perhaps the worst since the Census Bureau starting keeping records in this category since 1963.
2008 is certainly turning out to be the worst new home sales year in a […]
The NAR has released today their report on existing homes sales for September 2008; this marks the first year-over-year monthly increase since November 2005. The NAR proffers some of their usual spin, and two points are note-worthy here. First, the credit market’s fall woes won’t have impacted sales closing in September as much as the credit […]
Finally, how one might use the Housing Affordability Index data depends upon a variety of factors.
A multifamily investor would perhaps be most interested in investing in markets that have a very poor (or low) Housing Affordability Index – signifying that single family property prices are too high for many families and first time home buyers […]
What about the usefulness and potential weaknesses in the Housing Affordability data?
The savvy investor understands that Housing Affordability Index values are general indicators of housing prices relative to local incomes; however, the Housing Affordability Index is not as statistically sound as one might be led to believe.
Perhaps the greatest weakness in the Housing Affordability Index […]
While most systems deriving Housing Affordability Index use very similar methodology, let’s look at the National Association of Realtors’ definitions and assumptions utilized in calculation of the Housing Affordability. Why theirs? For better or for worse, the NAR’s data is the HAI information that you’ll see quoted and cited most often.
[Yes, we respect the NAR […]
Here’s the second part in our series on the Housing Affordability Index; and yes, we know (as stated right off the bat yesterday) that while the concept of housing affordability is a good one, the current measures are far from perfect. (Please don’t email and tell us that again today.)
As stated yesterday, the concept of […]
We’ve been saying for some time, and are in the process of becoming much more assertive in our commentary – that focusing primarily on the price of homes is the wrong approach in looking toward recovering in housing (and subsequently in housing induced credit and financial markets).
Barry Ritholtz today comments on another aspect of the “home […]
Today’s Case-Shiller post is the last installment in our brief series on the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.
Finally, one of the most significant errors we see related to the index is an error in interpretation – that being the inference that as the Case-Shiller goes, so goes the nation’s entire housing market. Emerging market investors who […]
Continuing our series on the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, let’s look today at some of the other criticisms that have been levied against the tool.
The next three most common criticisms that we hear of the CSI include the fact that the CSI uses overly broad geographical regions, the focus of the data collection on very […]
One of the other criticisms of the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices that holds water in our estimation has to do with what home sales are included and excluded from the database.
The indices are designed with very tight inclusion criteria – the tool is really designed to look at detached / semi-detached single family, owner occupied […]
There are some rationale criticisms of the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices; in this post we’ll take a look at one of the most legitimate in our opinion.
One of the criticisms that in our opinion carries the most weight is the issue of time lag in reporting. Here’s how the Case-Shiller team describes the time lag […]
For some time we’ve been promising to share some thoughts about the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, and have been distracted by other things happening in the world of real estate and economics. In the September issue of our newsletter – The Emerging Market Report – we wrote an article about the issue, and will share […]
It’s Case-Shiller release day today, and once again the MSM is breathlessly reporting the data as generally offering yet further proof that the real estate related financial world is teetering on the brink of total collapse.
Here’s the take home quote right out of the S&P press release this morning –
During the 1990-92 cycle the record […]
You’ve no doubt heard some type of press/ media commentary today on the NAR’s existing home sales data for August. The fact that August 2008 existing home sales were the lowest since 1998 seems to be the dominant thread of data that we’ve heard shared in the mainstream press today.
The good folks over at Calculated […]
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