March 2018 Housing Data

Apologies for the delay in updating the data… let’s dive right in!

Home prices have been very strong so far this year, with the median
price per square foot showing a big jump in February. Bear in mind that
this is a noisy figure, but the fact that the single family median held
firm in March strengthens the case that the price increase is “for
real”:

We’ll know for sure when the Case-Shiller index is released. In the
meantime, my proxy which uses the single-family median pr/sqft for the
most recent 2 months is looking… robust:

Speaking of C-S, here’s a thing… last month’s figure was just shy of equalling the (nominal)
bubble peak. I imagine the peak will be surpassed at the next release.

Closed sales were typical but pendings have been slightly weak:

And active inventory is higher than last year:

So months of inventory are higher than last year at this time, but
right in line with the prior couple years:

…and quite low in the grand scheme of things:

Here’s months of inventory overlaid with price changes… this shows
both how scarce invetory is (the blue inventory line is inverted), and
the fact that price changes track inventory reasonably well. The price
surge in these past few months simply reflects the ongoing scarcity of
supply vs. demand, if you believe this relationship still holds sway.

One thing worth watching will be interest rates. Between January and
March, mortgage rates rose quite rapidly,  from about 4% to 4.5%.
The March price stats above are from homes that probably went into
contract a couple months ago at this point. It will be interesting to
see how that impacts things… perhaps it’s responsible for the slight
weakness in pending sales.

But it seems like it would take a pretty big change in supply, demand,
or both to cause the trend to change.

Some more graphs below.