Bloomberg: Existing Home Sales At Slowest Pace in Five Years

The deterioration in the national housing market continues, as reported today by Bloomberg:

Sales of previously owned homes in the U.S. fell in July for a fifth consecutive month, adding to the inventory of unsold properties and showing the housing slump that triggered a collapse in credit markets will drag on…

…slowest pace since November 2002. Sales dropped 9 percent compared with a year earlier…


The median price of an existing home dropped 0.6 percent in July from a year ago to $228,900, the Realtors group said.

The supply of homes for sale at the end of the month climbed 5.1 percent to 4.59 million. At the current sales pace, that represented 9.6 months’ worth, up from 9.1 months’ worth at the end of the prior month…

Delinquencies on loans to subprime borrowers — or people with poor credit histories — hit a five-year high in the first quarter, and builders started work on the fewest homes in a decade in July, recent reports show.

Tighter rules for loans “could further dampen residential investment,” Fed Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker said Aug. 21 in a speech in Charlotte. “Recent data on actual housing market activity have dampened my optimism” about a bottoming-out in the industry, he said…


See also:

Boston Herald, 7/24/07: JUNE’S A BUST ALL OVER
Single-family home sales tumbled last month by 8.3 percent statewide, and prices dropped by 4.57 percent to $334,000 compared to a year ago, according to a report released yesterday by Boston’s Warren Group, the real estate publisher and seller of data.

Condo sales plummetted statewide by 12.28 percent in June, as prices fell by 4.1 percent to $280,000, the biggest decline this year for condos, according to the Warren Group report.

The report also showed that housing market woes are spreading to western parts of the state, where downward sales and price pressures haven’t been as severe…

Existing Homes Sales Drop for Fourth Straight Month
The slumping housing market raises concerns that Kohl Construction’s aggressive bid to build 31 condo units behind North Street is poorly timed. Empty, abandoned, and foreclosed homes can cause major problems for neighborhoods. If speculators buy some of the units and rent them out, financial stress may induce them to turn a blind eye to disruptive or criminal tenants, or tempt them to rent the units to larger groups of people than they would normally be expected to house.