By Brett Arends, The Wall Street Journal
Last update: 11:07 a.m. EDT April 1, 2009Comments: 4
Homeowners are watching anxiously for any signs of housing market stabilization. So, too, are all those who believe the market may hold the key to the economy.
And yet the most recent data makes for more gloomy reading.
The closely watched Case-Shiller index, which tracks prices across twenty major cities, shows that through January the crash was getting worse, not better.
And yet, even after these declines, homes overall still may not be that cheap relative to wages. More on that later.
The headline numbers are grim enough. January’s Case-Shiller index showed a 19% slump from a year earlier. The usual suspects fared very badly: Phoenix was down a remarkable 35%. Las Vegas fell 32% and Miami 29%.
The crash has really spread, too. Minneapolis is down 20% and Chicago 16%. San Francisco, which had held up pretty well, has now turned in spectacular fashion. Prices there have fallen 32% in the past year, worse even than San Diego or Los Angeles.
San Francisco prices fell 11% in the last three months alone, according to Case-Shiller.
New York is down 10% over the last year, including a 4% decline in the last three months. That is still better than the average. Whether the market can withstand the crisis on Wall Street and widespread layoffs there remains to be seen.
How much further will prices fall across the country? Nobody knows, of course. But history says the bigger the bubble, the bigger the crash.
Those “professionals” in the market continue to be wrong-footed. Early last year I wrote that even though prices in Florida and California had collapsed, those markets were still overvalued. Naturally I was on the receiving end of lots of angry emails from real estate brokers who told me I was an idiot (or worse). Events since then have borne out my analysis.
(Incidentally: During the bubble, did a single broker ever complain to a media outlet that reporters were being “too optimistic” about house prices, or were “talking the market up” during a dangerous mania?)
House prices nationwide have now fallen about 30% from their 2006 peak. At these levels the contrarian, inevitably, starts to wonder if they have fallen far enough.
Certainly there are great deals out there. It is a buyer’s market. The aggressive and opportunistic can probably find the worthwhile bargains.
But for the market overall the picture isn’t as hopeful as you’d like.
Even today, prices overall have only reverted to levels seen in late 2003. Yet by that stage the bubble was already well inflated. You would expect a crash of this scale to retrace its steps much further. To find pre-bubble prices you have to go back to about 2000 – when values overall were about a third lower than they are today.
It’s true that mortgage rates, now at 4.5% to 5%, are currently very low. But relying just on that is far too simplistic. Rates were also low from 2003 through 2005 – as many pointed out, disastrously, at the time.
Is there a bullish scenario for house prices? Sure. If all the government spending to turn around the economy reignites inflation in a year or two—as some predict—house prices could begin climbing again. But if the current price deflation continues, look for house prices to keep dropping.
Over the long term, average home prices have tended to track average earnings. And by this measure the market may have much further to fall.
I looked at Case-Shiller’s index back to 1987 and compared it to federal data on average earnings. The result, rebased to 100 in January 1987, can be seen here. And it’s alarming. By this (admittedly very simple) measure, today’s home prices are actually more expensive, in relation to average earnings, than at the peak of the 1989 property bubble.
Equally noteworthy is that when the last property bubble burst, it took about eight years before the market showed really strong signs of revival. This bubble was far, far bigger.
Write to Brett Arends at [email protected]
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