Numbers don’t do justice to how bad this morning’s Existing Home Sales report was. For some context, let’s look at some graphs…
From Calculated Risk:
This graph shows existing home sales, on a Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR) basis since 1993.
Sales in July 2010 (3.83 million SAAR) were 27.2% lower than last month, and were 25.5% lower than July 2009 (5.14 million SAAR).
Months of supply increased to 12.5 months in July from 8.9 months in June. A normal market has under 6 months of supply, so this is extremely high and suggests prices, as measured by the repeat sales indexes like Case-Shiller and CoreLogic, will start declining.
Yikes.
Yup. That really shows just how bad July was for home sales, and the recession. I’m sure there are a lot of economists out there who are really questioning how effective the home buyer tax credits were after seeing the huge drop at its expiration.