14 replies to this topic

[calmcookie]

Hi Don, Home prices here in Austin, Tx are also not showing any sign of weakness. The sky line is literally crowded with giant cranes (so much building going on). A real estate friend told me that it looked the same way just before the big bubble burst, several years ago (not sure exactly what year it was ... he said, but don't recall - I was in Australia at the time). It will be interesting to watch what happens over the next 5-10 years. Happy 4th and best wishes, Cookie

[arbman]

PS -Another Seven Sentinels Buy Signal today, btw.

Don, I don't know how it gave a buy signal today, but this is the thinnest market I've seen since the 2006 major low.

While the speculation is rapidly shifting to Nasdaq 100 and a few other stocks on Nasdaq, most of the NYSE stocks are trying to hang in there. The rally on Nasdaq Composite is not a broad based rally, although the issues that appear to be breaking out marginally increased since the Feb highs, the number has actually shrank at every high since June 4th.

The percent of issues above 50, 150, 200 dmas have steadily declined on Nasdaq for the past 3 months (since mid April), but they appear to be coming back at the moment a bit over 50%, however they are still at the lowest high of the said time period.

If you think the consolidation is complete and now the breath will expand, this will be a rare case since the price is way out there, so the price is leading the internals here by a large margin, imho. That's why I think it is a thin market and if it turns south around here, it will be nasty. Without the real sellers, these don't matter for now...

These kind of explain why the dealers are borrowing in record amounts unseen for the past 4 years, if it tanks, it will break down really hard in a matter of days, imho. Yet they won't let it happen primarily due to the record public short selling, it seems or they will hold it up as far as and as long as they can...

I said this before, the public short selling is the synthetic collateral the commercial banks need to print more money against them. The dollar is again sinking, I don't know the real reason yet, but it seems like the market might be responding to the dollar and whatever the dealers doing behind the public short interest...

Anyway, good luck...
- kisa

[pdx5]

Real Estate here in Portland/Seattle is holding up very well also. As the well known saying goes...ALL REAL-ESTATE IS LOCAL. National averages don't lie however, that 2007 will be the worst year for RE in many moons. As for the stock market, I have no clue WHEN we will see a 10% correction. My guess is it will be more like 20 to 25%. Could be this fall or could be sometime in 2008. Not much later than Fall 2008.

[SemiBizz]

You may get a slight pullback, we did after making a new high here...

Marin home prices slip below $1 million threshold
After breaking through the $1 million barrier in April, Marin's median home price fluttered back to earth in May.
The median price for a detached home in Marin was $925,000 last month, DataQuick Information Systems, an industry research firm, reported Thursday. The median was down from a record $1,010,000 in April - the first time any California county passed the $1 million mark - but still up 2.8 percent from May 2006.
The median price for a Marin condo or townhouse was $592,000 last month, up 8.2 percent from the previous May.
Sales of detached homes rose 10.4 percent year-over-year, while condo sales fell 10.4 percent.
Valerie Castellana, a Green-brae broker and president of the Marin Association of Realtors, said April's median price was exaggerated by an unusual amount of activity at the highest end of the market. Sixteen homes above $3 million sold in April - up from nine in April 2006 - and sales of homes of more than $1.5 million increased as well year-over-year, she said.
"I don't think any of us expect that area of the market to go on and on and on," she said. John Karevoll, a DataQuick analyst, said he expects Marin real estate will eventually return to the $1 million threshold.
The numbers always bounce around," he said. "I think it just has to do with mix. The overall trend in Marin is prices are going to go up."
Marin's median price continued to lead the state. Market observers said it was unlikely that the recent surge in Treasury yields - which has made home mortgages more expensive - will have a significant overall impact on Marin. "The further up the totem pole on the price, the less decisions are influenced by that," Karevoll said. "But Marin is probably the county that's going to be least affected by that."
"Where the interest rates are right now, I don't think it's going to slow anything down on the purchase end," said Don Maxon, a mortgage loan officer at Bank of America in Larkspur. "They've ticked up a bit, but they're still very good rates."
Across the Bay Area, the median price of detached homes and condos combined was $660,000 last month, up 3.4 percent over May 2006. Sales declined nearly 19 percent throughout the nine-county region.
May's sales count was the lowest for the month since 1995, when 6,615 homes were sold. Sales throughout the region have declined on an annual basis since February 2005, DataQuick said.
Napa County saw the biggest median home price increase - a 13.1 percent hike to $627,500. Sonoma County had the biggest drop, a 5.4 percent decline to $519,500. In Southern California, the overall median price of homes sold last month increased 4.9 percent to $505,000, compared to $481,500 in May 2006. Sales slowed to a 12-year low

Edited by SemiBizz, 04 July 2007 - 10:09 AM.

[TechSkeptic]

Just to point out, the median price going up does not necessarily mean that the value of any individual house is going up. It can also mean that there are fewer sales of low end homes compared to high end, which mathematically pushes up the median. The way I see it, this is exactly what the sub-prime crisis has done, i.e softened the low end of the market while the high end is relatively untouched by credit tightening and other sub-prime concerns.