This morning, yours truly joined Jay Butler of ASU Realty Studies and Stan Lund, a mortgage broker and President of the Arizona Mortgage Brokers Assoc., on KPNX. I’m in the middle.
 |
Whether purchasing or refinancing a home, we'll offer you sound and unbiased information.
Get national and regional topics like California's refinance market,
and calculators to evaluate your own mortgage.
|
Tucson: August Housing Market Quite a Disappointment
Last month Tucson Association of Realtor’s [TAR] President Judy Lowe was optimistic when reporting June sales activity. Not only was the median price up to $229,000, Lowe said. In addition:
Quite a month for real estate in Tucson! Our inventory is down, new listings are down and pending contracts are up, all good signs for our market.
Despite the "good signs," July was quite a disappointment. While inventory did decline slightly from last month’s 8725 to 8692, the decline wasn’t due to increased sales. Lowe said of pendings for June:
Pending contacts are also newsworthy,they are up over 2,000 for the first time in 2007, rising to 2,053 last month. This is an increase of 18.92% over June 2006, and the highest number we have seen in over 12 months.
Pendings however, don’t always turn into closings- July home sales were down to 1098- down 10.4% from June 2007, and down 10.5% from July 2006. Given that this is the end of the peak selling season, it is unlikely that we will see sales above this figure for the rest of 2007, and with the tightening in the credit market and a more negative market psychology, steeper declines are possible.
US Debt Selloff Trickle Becomes Bigger Trickle
During all the kerfuffle about the credit crunch Doom has been neglecting its routine monitoring of the Thursday Reuters reports on net central bank buys of US obligations. Yesterday we finally checked in and … Holy Flight to Safety, Batman! [1] Cenbanks like the BoJ have evidently been just pouring US treasuries back over the ocean to slake Wall Street’s insatiable thirst for that good ole risk free paper. Our normally placid Reuters’ copywriter could barely contain herself [2] last Thursday when she departed from her usual boiler-plate to note that "[t]he heavy foreign selling suggests domestic purchases were even stronger than the sharp upward price moves would indicate." And remember, this series only takes us up to last Wednesday, before the flight to safety really began. There’s no way we’re waiting 48 hours before reading the August 23rd report.
UPDATE: Many thanks to twist for being kind enough to share her charting talents. She’s contributed a more professional version of the updated Foreign Banks Net Buy chart (towards the end of this post), and as a bonus has updated her graph showing the (wildly fluctuating) difference between the weekly net agencies buy and the net treasuries buy (immediately following).
