It’s late here, but speaking of silliness I need to share this one before I pack it in.

“Housing bubble had a slow leak in 2006″, interview (audio & transcript), Bob Moon with Tess Vigeland, Marketplace (American Public Media), December 27, 2006.

MOON: Not a good year to be selling your house. Was that the sound of a big bubble I heard popping?

VIGELAND: Well, you know, if you look at the national housing market from the beginning of the year to now the end of it, I think you would say, yes, the bubble popped. But let me take that back and say no, it didn’t really pop so much as dissipate. If you think about it like a balloon and you’re kind of squeezing the top of it and letting the air out with a little squeak . . .

MOON: That always makes an interesting noise.

VIGELAND: Yeah, well, that kind of happened all year in the housing market. And right now that balloon is pretty shriveled, especially when we’re talking about home prices and the number of homes that are being sold. So, no, we didn’t have a sudden implosion of this housing market, but it’s been a steady decline over the last several months …

I can take the spin- it’s a tolerance you have to develop if you want to watch Bloomberg or MSNBC very long. I can take the dismal numbers- those just turn into an academic exercise. The toughest thing is dealing with the stories behind the numbers, knowing that they represent real people getting hurt.

The fun part of doing this though, is the emails where people tell me that our info helped them make a wiser financial decision. When I see reports like today’s, I just strap on my rusty armor and charge at the windmill- and hope it makes a difference.

I’m hoping putting up silly articles like the PA will help people see how silly the “too special to fall” argument is. We all live somewhere “special.”

Take a break- but we hope you don’t stay away too long. All your links and comments are appreciated. (And you wouldn’t want to miss an episode of “How the Bubble Turns.” : )

I’m quickly starting to realize, however, that reading all of the linked sidebars and blogs is starting to make me a little crazy. I’m going to scream if I read one more story telling me there’s no bubble — and if there is, it doesn’t apply to City X because of Reasons Y and Z, as in today’s Pennsylvania sidebar.

Perhaps I’ll have to limit my online housing blogging to once a month, because this day-to-day tug and pull between the lying NAR and the real world is so disheartening.

I believe the housing collapse is already in the cards — it’s built right into the system — and there’s no changing that course now. It’s too late. The foreclosures are going to come, and if the ecomony gets even a little worse, or interest rates rise, we’re going to see a serious recession.

But it’s going to take so long to play out, HD will still be around if I take a little break.

Cheers!

On sales:

The not seasonally adjusted monthly rate was 72,000 new homes sold.  There were 86,000 new homes sold in November 2005.

On a year over year NSA basis, November 2006 sales were 16.3% lower than in 2005.  Also November ’06 sales were below November 2004 (84,000) and November 2003 (76,000) sales.

This is the lowest November since 2001 when 67,000 new homes sold.

On prices:

The median and average sale prices were mixed.  Caution should be used when analysing monthly sales price changes since prices are heavily revised.

Calculated Risk goes on in a followup post to discuss how the current sales drop looks rather like the decrease at the stop of the 1990′s housing bust.