When I saw the headline last week, “Housing Recovery Stalls,” my first reaction was to kick myself for having missed yet another milestone in the U.S. economy’s long rehabilitation process.
Then I came to my senses. What housing recovery? If there is, or was, one, it is nowhere to be found in the data. Homebuilder sentiment, new home sales and single-family housing starts, which, in that order, lead the complex of residential real estate indicators, are bumping along the bottom. There was no recovery to stall.
There was a brief incentive-driven pick-up in sales in 2009 and the first half of 2010 that faded the minute the home purchase tax credit expired.
As it turns out, the “recovery” referred to in the headline was in house prices, which rebounded modestly when sales improved. The “stall” was their renewed slide
.
