Money & The Economy

Home Sales Follow Seasonal Trend, But Remain Higher Than a Year Ago

DENVER, Nov. 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — October home sales were 9.0% above sales in October last year, according to The RE/MAX Monthly Housing Report, a survey of housing data from 53 metropolitan areas. As the market settles in for the winter, an expected monthly decline in home sales from September to October registered 9.8%.  However, October is the fourth consecutive month to show a year-over-year sales increase. With a foreclosure inventory that has been falling for several months, the resulting overall housing inventory dropped for the 16th straight month, according to the survey. Accompanying the ongoing reduction of inventory was a further correction in home prices, down 5.4% from October 2010.

“It appears that home sales are coming more closely in line with the levels we saw last year, which should hold up through the winter months,” said Margaret Kelly, CEO of RE/MAX, LLC.  “While it’s good to see sales still running higher than last year, at some point we would like to see prices rising higher than the previous year, as well.”  

Transactions – Year-Over-Year Change

Closed transactions for October followed an expected seasonal trend and dropped 9.8% from sales in September. However, when compared with October 2010, sales transactions were 9.0% higher this October.  Year-over-year transactions have now risen for five of the ten months in 2011. Of the 53 metro areas included in the survey, 38 experienced a rise in home sales from 2010, including: Albuquerque, NM+36.1%, Minneapolis, MN +34.3, Birmingham, AL +32.9%, Des Moines, IA +32.6%, Chicago, +22.3%,Providence, RI +21.0% and Raleigh-Durham, NC +20.5%.

Median Sales Price

In the 53 metropolitan areas surveyed in The RE/MAX National Housing Report, the Median Sales Price of sold homes was $ 176,770. This is just 2.0% lower than the median price for September, and 5.4% lower than the median price in October 2010.  The 5.4% decline is just below the 5.6% year-to-year average for the ten months of 2011.  Of the total 53 metro areas, 11 saw price increases from last year, including:  Detroit, MI +11.5%, Omaha, NE +10.0%, Orlando, FL +6.7%, Des Moines, IA +3.6%, and Houston, TX+2.0%.

Days on Market – Average of 54 Metro Areas

For the properties sold in the month of October, the average Days on Market was 95, just 2 days higher than the average of 93 seen in September, but 4 days higher than the average seen in October 2010. This past July and September 2010, both had an average Days on Market of 88, which represents the lowest average in the last 12 months. Days on Market is the number of days between first being listed in an MLS and when a sales contract is signed.

Months Supply of Inventory – Average of 54 Metro Areas

The total number of homes for sale, or inventory, has dropped for 16 straight months. The average inventory of homes-for-sale in the 53 metro areas surveyed dropped 7.3% from September and 21.0% fromOctober 2010.  The result is a 7.7 Month Supply of homes for October, the same as September, but down from the 9.7 supply seen in October 2010. Months Supply is the number of months it would take to clear a market’s active inventory at the current rate of sales.  A six-month supply is considered a balanced market between buyers and sellers.

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Rich Mitchell

Rich Mitchell is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Daily News and the president of Bald Eagle Media, LLC. His posts may contain opinions that are his own and are not necessarily shared by Bald Eagle Media, CDN, staff or .. much of anyone else. Find him on twitter, facebook and

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3 Comments

  1. Housing, or the individual owned property is something that American’s have strove towards for generations. The individually owned home, which is sitting on land that is also owned by the home owner is and has been used as the outward example of a person’s level of freedom in our society for generations. American’s are the most exceptional people in that we understood from the beginning that it was our right to work towards being able to own property. Not only was it our God given right, as is expressed in the Bible, “…possess the land.” was something that sets a person apart from everyone else in this country, that it is one of the primary targets of the Communist liberals. Property ownership means freedom, and was one of the first things that fascist governments took away from the people. When a person does not have a place to lay their head at night that does not belong to them and can be taken from them without warning, or they can be ordered to move to another location at any time, causes human beings to be extremely insecure. That’s why renting needs only to be for a very short period of time, and to be used as only a stepping stone to home ownership, not as a permanent means of shelter for ones self and family. It cannot in any way be made permanent and can be taken from you at any time day or night.

    But if you own your own property you have something that you can defend from invaders, or anyone who thinks that they can come get you at any time. You have a right to defend what belongs to you, and that is also the outward show of freedom of the individual. A tyrannical government would want to take that right away from people as soon as possible, and that is because people will defend what belongs to them, and cannot defend what does not. They might resist invasion sitting in an apartment or rent home, but the owner can order the authority to go in and take you off the property, his property. This is the reason why tyrannical governments wants to try and cause people to not be able to obtain personal private property in any way they can. And this is what we find in the American housing market. It is being manipulated by those in the government to make it harder and harder for people to attain either by continually raising the price, which causes people to worry they will never be able to afford a house, they just don’t have the money, or something.

    People must demand a lowering of the price of houses by putting pressure on our representatives to pass law, or remove law that is enabling the banks, mortage company, investment corporations to make excessive profits off of selling those properties back and forth between each other, and with private investors selling property to banks and investors for high profits. This is not the purpose of home ownership but has become that in the 1980’s. Before that home ownership was between a bank and a individual or a couple. They bought the home from the bank and paid the bank for it for many years. These days whoever you buy your home from will change in a matter of weeks or a couple of months after you purchase it. You never know who owns the title to your home while you are paying the monthly installments. That is bad, and can cause you to loose your home in times of economic downturn like it is now, due to foreclosure. It’s not coming from your local banker who you have a personal relationship with, and probably has made personal loans to you and knows your history, a relationship, not just a number on a piece of paper.

    These big banking concerns and foreign investment corporations don’t care about you, you family, you financial needs or problems, or your history of payments on loans making you a good risk to your local banker, and a good client. NO, they don’t give a damn about you. And that’s why it needs to be stopped. House sales has nothing to do with how much that property is “worth”. When you buy the house you insure it for “replacement costs”, or how much it would cost to rebuild it. The realitor will give you a line of crap about what makes one house worth more than another house in another neighborhood of the same size, but it’s all a bunch of lies when it comes to how much it’s going to cost to rebuild that house.

    If you pay $350,000 for a house that only cost $75,000 to rebuild, how can that property cost so much when it was bought? Realitor’s will tell you things like location, schools, hospitals, fire, police, size, etc. is what adds “value” to a particular home, where as the same size house in another neighborhood will be worth less due to the lack of those factor’s, or less quality in those factor’s which makes a house’s “value” different from another. Some of that may exist, but then how can a house out in the country cost the same amount when it didn’t cost $350,000 to build that house, especially when most of these houses on the market these days were built in the 1940’s and 1950’s. They may have been remodeled once or so, but we’re still talking about so much wood, paint, wiring, plumbing, etc. That still doesn’t explain the price tag of $350,000 for 1200 sq, ft house like I see on HGTV. My wife and I just look at each other and are shocked at how these houses can cost that much, until I got to thinking about it one night and figured out what is going on.

    Home ownership has nothing to do with the actual cost of the house, nor does it have anything to do with how close you are to a hospital or whether or not you have a good school in your neighborhood. The “value” of your house, or how much you pay for a home has more to do with how much profit was made off of it by the last banking concern, mortage conglomerate, or international investment corporation. When banks buy houses, like they’ve got severl hundred depending on the size of the bank, or several banks will go in and buy a bunch of houses, they look at houses as profit making commodities these days, rather than what property used to considered. A house is probably the most expensive thing that people will purchase in their lifetime. Some people who have more expendable income can own more than one house, but either way it’s the individual who should be determining the cost of a house and not how much money was made the last time that house was sold for. Each time a bank sells it’s bunch of houses they want to make as much profit off of them as possible. Then the next time those houses are sold even more profit is added to the cost of them when they are sold, and on and on. At the point you buy one of those houses you pay whatever the spread of profit is over the number of houses the bank has on hand. In other words when the bank sells their houses the amount of profit is figured by how many houses the bank had, like if you have a hundred houses and you got so much of them all, if you want to see how much it added to each house you divide your profit into how many houses you have and that’s how much each house is now worth.

    Where you catch that house depends on how many times those houses have been sold, each time profit added to them. If the price of the house was $60,000 dollars when the bank decided to sell it, the bank is not going to ask $60,000 for the house, he wants to make some profit off of it so he just adds a certain amount to that house’s price and that will be his profit. It’s just simple economics, but let’s say he added $20,000 to the price of that house for his profit. Now, that house is worth $80,000. The buyer of that house wants to sell it and he wants to make some profit off of it and he adds whatever he thinks he can get for it, and adds $30,000 to the price. Now, that house it worth $110,000. Just for comparison let’s go back to how much would it cost to replace that house if a tornado blew it away. Figuring the cost of wood, wire, plumbing, etc. the house costs $70,000 to replace. There’s still a $30,000 difference between what it cost to replace the house which is the real cost, and how much the “value”, which is a nontangable thing, is.

    Looking at how much the market will bear is the only thing that wil affect how much profit can be made off a house when the bank sells it. We take that same house at the last price with profit added and it’s $110,000 and if the market is real high the bank can ask $50,000 more for the house. Now, it price is up to $160,000, for a house originally costing you $60,000.

    Now, I’m not a banker and one would tell you I’m way off base in my therory, and that’s not how it works at all. But he’s not required to tell you the truth about how he makes profit off of houses and why they cost so damn much that we didn’t see, say, twenty or thirty years ago. Prices in houses didn’t go up that much between buyers whatsoever before the 70’s or 80’s. It was then that by the 90’s we saw house prices take a huge jump in price that no homeowner I ever talked to could understand. All they knew was they had buy up or buy their first one, fast before the price gets any higher. But what was causing the huge jump like they were that had not ever been seen before? So whatever the banker tells you is a lie, because he doesn’t want anyone whose not a banker to know the secret of how to make huge profits off the sale of a portfolio of houses. There are many factor’s is what you will be told. But my idea is probably closer than what you will be told is the reason, and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with whether or not you have a hospital close to your house, or how good a school is in your neighborhood because that could change with legislator’s changing the school districts around. Then your kid might have to go to a school clear across town. So what does that do to you home “value” now? Can you go to whoever it is that is holding your mortage and ask them to reduce the monthly payment since your kid isn’t getting the benefit of having what you were told was part of the reason why you were paying alot for your home instead of a lesser costing house in a neighborhood that didn’t have a good school in your neighborhood your kid could go to? I doubt it. You won’t get the break you deserve in how much you pay every month.

    The other law that I want removed is what banks and mortage companies use to rip off the house buyer, home owner, is the “interest on minimum daily balance”. What they do is add interest to what you have left on how much you paid for your house, that you owe. Your payment doesn’t go onto the ‘principle” which is the price of the house you paid when you bought it, it goes to pay the interest to the bank. And what interest is, is the profit that was allowed to be added onto the cost of the house so the bank can make a profit. Well, we pay that for everything we buy, that’s part of Capitalism, and simple economic’s we all understand that a business makes a profit of what they sell. That’s part of being in business is that you make a profit. Okay. But in order to jack that profit up, which is way more than what is reasonable is the banking law that allows the bank at the end of each day to figure up how much is left on what you owe. And that is part of the problem and that is the bank is allowed to figure that based on each “day” and not after each month when you send them your payment. The bank is allowed by law to add interest to your amount owed each “day”! Many credit card companies get away with doing that to, and you always end up paying back way more than a reasonable profit to the credit card company.

    If our government is lobbied by some bank, and wants to make more profit, faster and that is what the allowance of figuring minimum daily balance interest to be added to what you owe is for, not that what the bank is making off in normal profit isn’t enough, it is. The bank wants to make more money, faster, so that if something happens to the national economy, the bank would have made more than enough off of interest than they would have otherwise. That is what the law was for, but if you thing about it that sort of thing could have only come about when our economy became unpredictable, and that would be by the late 70’s and 80’s through the 90’s and is continuing today but even worse, by far.

    That law needs to be repealed so that when you purchase a house for let’s say, $120,000 dollars, that after 30 years if you stayed there that long, and paid the note out, you would end up paying back $230,000 dollars!!! Well, hell! that’s not fair. That just robs you of your money. Of course what you’ll be told is you can make double payments every month and pay the house off in 15 years instead of 30, and only pay back half the interest. Well, then it goes without saying that if you could afford a house note of twice what you are paying, wouldn’t you have bought a house twice as big as the one you bought? I would have. And if I had that much excess income I would have bought a couple of acres of land and had the house built on that and could sell it for three times what I’ll get for it in the city. What makes sense to me and all other home owners isn’t what you’ll be told by the bank or the realitor, who by the way makes a big commission on a house that has it ‘s price jacked all out of whack than one that is alot cheaper.

    Besides if those two laws were repealed, three fourth’s of all the realitor’s would go out of business, because all that huge money they’ve been living off of would be gone, but three times more people could afford a house than can buy one now, or could afford to stay in it for to long. The government’s involvement in home ownership is part of the problem. The government making laws that strictly benefit the banks, investors, and not the homebuyer, is all of the other problems with buying a house. In short they don’t want you to buy a house, and they want to remove the right to own property, possess the land, the freedom to own private property. This is partly to our government being run by Communists who want to eliminate property ownership from being an American.

  2. When leftist government gives the bankers the idea that a home is no longer to be considered to be a relationship between the bank and private individuals, but now it’s all about money, and profit, the banks have become dependent on those profits now and how much power in government that money can buy, we end up seeing the huge prices in houses. It is wrong what they have let themselves get into. Sure, everyone wants to make more money. But you don’t sacrifice the security of the people of the nation for the sake of making higher and higher profits that could disappear over night as we saw in October of 2008 with the collapse of AIG, Freddie/Fannie, Goldman Sachs, Leman Brothers, and all the rest. Look at the houses people lost, when they lost their jobs.

    When the government has manipulated what runs the economy to a point where if you loose your job you automatically loose your home, just think how much insecurity that causes with the home owners. And we see Obama using the powers of the office of the President to screw up the economy and his giving power to certain departments which can give life or death to banks and investment corporations, what could give the power back to the people and not the banks and investment corporations? Removing the laws that have tied the banks to being able to make excessive profits as allowed by government, and laws allowing the investment in houses for huge profit instead of banks and private individuals having a relationship, we see one of the main reason’s why a 1200 sq. ft. house going for $350,000 dollars when we know damn well that house isn’t worth that much money when it still has the cloth covered wiring in the walls like was put in there in 1955, and has a hard wood floor, and still has cast iron plumbing under the house, what is making that house worth $350,000 when it has no modern materials in it whatsoever? And don’t give me that crap about schools and hospitals near by.

    What we need to see is for a government to remove itself from controling the housing market, significantly lower the price of these houses, let the mortage companies go out of business, and align the price of a home to what most people’s income has become, not so high of a price that the couple is right away jepardised if something happens to either one of their incomes. The price of a home should not be so high that it would take both incomes to pay the monthly note. The incomes of people these days is more close to minimum wage than what they were making twenty or thirty years ago when people could afford a higher house note. But even then that was no reason for realitor’s to raise the price of the houses so high that the price is guaranteed to absorb all the income of two people that it could. That is wrong, and is putting the whole economic position of the nation into jeaparty, if the slightest thing happens.

    I want to see people who are making less be able to buy a nice house in a decent neighborhood for a price that is more in line with that person’s income, rather than forcing a White couple to buy a house in a crime ridden Black neighborhood because that’s where houses that are more in line with their income are located. That is wrong. I want to see more working people being able to buy a house, a home, at the price that is more in line with what it would cost to replace that structure, and not based on some…..thing….that you can’t even put your hand on. That’s not fair, it benefits someone who is not concerned about the home of these people, and certainly not any relationship that could exist between the source of the money they would be borrowing, and the human beings who need that relationship so that not only they might be able to borrow more money for something in the future, but that the children of that couple may be customers of that bank, especially when the parents can tell that child to use such and such bank because they are good people, not a way where no one knows who has money to borrow and what will they do to you if you have a little trouble later on.

    Somebody who knows you will be more understanding, and more willingness to work things out with you because they know you and your history, than some collection agency demanding you pay what you owe right now, or you’ll loose your home!! This is what we need to see happening, not having houses going up higher and higher in price. Do I want to see houses going up which I’m being told indicates a healthy economy? Or do I want to see my economy going up because I’m able to more easily afford something that will provide me with security and worth in the future?

  3. Will we see such a thing happen to the banks, and investment in houses that have been the golden goose for those financial entities? It will depend on whether or not we can get a President into office that knows what the problem is with the housing industry, and what needs to be done to shift the benefit from the banks to the home buyers. Yeah, yeah, I know that the banks are the ones who hold the wealth, and they aren’t going to go for anything that is going to take the huge profits they’ve come to enjoy all these years. The banks have gotten to the point where they are milking us dry just so we can get into one house in our lifetime? That doesn’t make any sense. There never has been a time in recent history where people have been able to buy a house and the people be able to easily afford the house note on minimum wage. That is one reason why leftist Democrats, Socialists, Communists insisted that minimum wage be raised from an entry level income that is suited more for a kid in high school, or a college kid who needs some extra money to pay for school. It was never meant to be a wage that a person could live on. If the leftist, Socialists who fantasize on taking over the government and running things from here on out, there is going to have to be a significant reduction in the price of everything. Otherwise we are going to see the end result of Cloward-Piven where there is no Middle Class(yeah, I know that is a Communist term, but it suits my purpose of identifying a certain group of people in a certain income level), and there is a huge gap in income levels, then our society will have the next level which are the technical and professional income level which are your college graduates with more Master’s degree level of people who have their careers pretty well settled and don’t have a risk of unemployment from layoffs or the company going out of business.

    There is no way that anyone in the minimum level income is going to ever be able to buy a house of the kind that I’ve described, one that was about 1200 to 1500 sq. ft. and is priced in the neighborhood of $275,000 to $350,000 dollars. It’s because you know that there is going to be somekind of interest tacked on the end price of the house which will determine how much the person’s house note is per month. I’d have to sit down and figure out what it would be, but then I’d be accused of putting out false and misguided information by not knowing all the little things that are added to the cost of a house when you buy it, like mortage life insurance for the first few years of the mortage, or even for the life of the loan. That raises up the price of the house. Property tax, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Let’s say the person is paying $1200-$1500.00 a month house note. At $ 8.00 an hour, you don’t make enough to pay a house note that high. Now, if you lowered it to about $350.00 to $500.00 a month, then they might be more able to make that. But then your talking about lengthening the note out to 40 years or lower the interest to 2-3 percent or less. And I can tell you right now that in a society like the one that has no Middle Class I described, no Socialist government would be giving people that much of a discount just so they can get into a house probably in a society like the one I’ve described, the government would have everyone in this Class in public housing, projects. Those people will be like the people in China where there is NO PRIVATE PROPERTY OWNERSHIP because the Communist government doesn’t believe the people are smart enough to deserve a privately owned home. Just like they are now. Of course what Bush allowed to happen with Barney Frank and Franklin Raines running Freddie/Fannie and passing law forcing banks to make loans to people who didn’t even have an income I doubt seriously that either Bush or Obama thought that people had the right and more importantly the freedom to get out and work to be able to save up the money so they could buy a house. See, for so-called “poor Blacks” they were given an opportunity they didn’t earn. And that is just as wrong as tearing down the society to the point where there is no longer a Middle Class. The Middle Class has always been where personal wealth was built up to the point where most of all the small businesses came from that later became major corporations worth millions of dollars. Without a Middle Class the wealthy don’t really need to do that because they have all the money they need anyway so long as the government doesn’t pass a law that takes all their money away from them in progressive taxation.

    There is a lot more that will have to change in our society than just lowering prices of houses more in line with most people’s lower incomes, is not going to make everything lower in cost. It’s not just houses that would have to be lower in cost, transportation would have to cost less as well. It’s not that my idea would be putting all these car dealerships out of business, it’s that everyone is going to have to get used to making less profit if the Middle Class is having to take jobs that pay much, much less than they got used to making. Everyone would have to take a lowering on being able to charge more and more for the same product. No, they would have to lower their cost, which would lower their profit, but see they would still be in business, just like the banks would still be in business, they just wouldn’t be making the huge profits they are making now.

    But we all would have to suffer some adjustment in our lifestyles, but after we saw that we would be able to buy everything we needed and we had money left over in our paychecks, we would feel better about it. Oh yeah, the price of gasoline would have to go back down to $.80 cents a gallon to. Cars would be back down to $5,000 instead of $28,000. Everything would have to come down to near the level of what most American’s were making in income. If the Socialist were able to hold the government it would be what they would want to do to eliminate the Middle Class so that the Labor Class would be easier to control because the government would be probably paying for a lot in their lives and since they were, the government would be telling you where you could live and you’d be either taking public transportation or driving some old used car you and a couple of buddies put together. That might be a good idea. Better than taking government transportation.

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