September 2014 Housing Data Rodeo

Here’s the big picture — not a lot of movement last month:

Drilling down to some individual graphs, the price per square foot
continued in its meandering ways:

The Case-Shiller proxy turned down as the “noise”spike from 4 months
back fell out of the moving average.  So I don’t make too much
of the fact that it declined a bit… basically, this measure seems
to indicate very little price movement over the past several months:

Home sales were flat to slightly downward for the month. 
Pendings were actually above last year’s level, though closed sales
are still below (albeit to a much smaller degree than a mere month
ago).  I’m not sure why the year-over-year comparison looks so
much better for the pendings than the closed sales. 

Inventory was flat for the month.  Total invesntory is pretty
close to this time last year, but the second graph shows that there
is a lot more active inventory right now than a year ago:

That can be seen even more clearly in this graph showing the
divergent trends of active and contingent inventory:

And here’s a longer term look at total inventory.  Higher than
it’s been for 2 years, but still not very high in the grand scheme
of things:   

Putting it all together — flatt-ish inventory plus a slight decline
in pending sales — the months of inventory rose in line with the
recent trend.  Again, higher than before, but low-to-middling
overall.

All in all, things weren’t a whole lot different than the month
before, as noted at the outset.