January 2011 Resale Housing Data Rodeo

Well, it’s 2011, and yet I am still lacking the following:

• laser eyes
• hyper-evolved glasses-wearing chimp assistant
• self-aware email client
• minotaur
• huffable bacon
• tank full of precogs to help me match my outfits

Someone please tell science to get on it.  For now, we’ll have to
make do with the January resale data.

The median price per square foot took a bit of a beating last month:
down 3.0 percent for
detached homes, 7.2 percent for condos, and 4.5 percent in aggregate:

The condo series is often all over the place; I prefer to watch the
detached series.  But even there it was a pretty big drop, atop an
even bigger drop that had taken place in December.  Granted, we
are in the weak season for real estate, but these are some fairly
sizable declines.

With this, the Case-Shiller proxy predicts a 2.2% decline in the
January Case-Shiller index.  That would be a slightly (1.6%)
year-over-year decline, which supports the idea that this is more than
just seasonal weakness.

Speaking of seasonality, you can try to spot the seasonal patterns in
the following crosshatched versions of the above graphs:

The number of closed sales was down for the month (more seasonality)
and down 2.8% from a year ago.  (Look for the black dot as the
2011 “line” only consists of one data point thus far):

Pendings increased (yet more seasonality) and were nearly identical to
both the January 2009 and January 2010 levels:

Inventory declined (something something seasonality) and, while almost
identical to the January 2009 level, was up 21.3% from a year ago.

This left months of inventory also at January 2009 levels but up around
21% from January 2010:

You’ll note that after January 2009, months of inventory dropped hard
and stayed down until the winter slowdown.  After an initial drop
in 2010, though, months of inventory rose for the rest of the
year.  Which one will it be this year?  I don’t know (though
I will note that the tax credit stimulus coincided with the increased
activity).  It does seem that inventory is at a level that’s
putting downward pressure on home prices, so unless sales pick up or
inventory declines, we may be in for further price declines.