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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Johnston who wrote (80082)	6/25/2007 1:48:13 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Respond to of 306849

The New York Times. “The American housing market, as measured by home-building activity, is falling at the most rapid rate in decades, underscoring the pain felt by builders who were far too optimistic about the state of the market.” “Even with the plunge, however, starts have been very high relative to the number of homes that builders are trying to sell, a fact that could indicate the weakness will last while builders seek to sell homes they have already built.” “The rapid fall clearly caught builders by surprise, in part because many of them had never seen anything like it. During the period covered by the charts, going back to 1990, the fastest fall had been in 1991, when the pace fell 18 percent during a recession.” “There have been such rapid declines before, but not in the memory of most current builders. In 1975, amid the most severe recession since the Great Depression, the decline was 37 percent, the highest recorded since the government started collecting the statistics in 1963. There was also a large drop in 1982, during a recession that came when interest rates were extraordinarily high.” “The inventory of new homes for sale rose to the highest level ever last summer, at 573,000 homes in July, and has since begun to fall, going down to 538,000 in April.” “But that figure was equal to 40 percent of the home starts in the previous year, the highest level ever.”