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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: russwinter who wrote (44645)	11/2/2005 8:47:03 AM
From: Ramsey Su	Respond to of 110194

OK, we finally have one data point that is somewhat consistent with logic. Historically, as rates start to go up, real estate activities pick up as the procrastinators finally took action. Once that is done, business settles down. We will soon see what is the new level of real estate. Refi is still over 40% of all apps. I think it needs to go down to the 20-30% range for it to be consider normal. In the mean time, BZH reports another confirmation of the trends. biz.yahoo.com Just look at the number of homes vs revenue in each of the categories. You can extrapolate the profit that came from price appreciation. Their gross margins, however, only went up 350 basis points.

To: russwinter who wrote (44645)	11/2/2005 9:44:33 AM
From: Ramsey Su	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

I am going to cut off the SD numbers now and consider it official for the month of Oct. Total closings were 2562, compared to 3486 for sequential Sept 05 of 3486 (down 26% or 893 sales), compared to 3356 for yty Oct 04 of 3356 (down 23.6% or 794 sales). Avg asking price was $662,884 while avg selling price was $629,388. That means selling price is 94.9% of asking price, which is the low of Jan 04 thru now, the period that I am tracking. The avg selling price is about $2k higher than Sept but lower than the peak of $641,151 set during Aug 2005. Days on market was 57. Avg DOM was 33 for 2004 and 51 for Jan-Sept 05. Oct 05 had 2844 pendings with avg asking price of $647,459. If we use 95% as the expected sales price, these sales would close at $615,086, probably later this month and next month. Total pendings (including escrows opened before Oct) is now standing at only 5200, a far cry from 6900 back in June when I first started this exercise. Nov and Dec 04 were relatively strong for that time of the year, with sales at 3133 and 3300 respectively. There is almost no chance that we can match the Nov figure now, nor Dec unless sales activity picks up substantially right now.