Another in a continuing series of misleading headlines, this courtesy of the Wall Street Journal. Note that I said misleading, not false. Here’s a chart of the data:
If you look carefully you’ll see the last data point did, in fact, climb. Just a tad. The average price fell again. It looks to me like sales volumes have stopped declining because sellers are accepting the new reality: they have to accept lower prices to move their homes. The median price was level, even though the average price declined, which suggests that upper end homes had the greatest price decline.
Business Strategy Implications: For those of you in the housing sector, it may not get too much worse than it is now, but don’t expect business to get any better in the coming year.
Other bloggers posting on this news: The Big Picture, with sharp comments about the Reators’ economist, and Calculated Risk with more charts.