4th consecutive monthly us home price rise as $ keeps falling
News Posted On: 28 October 2009
U.S. Home prices rose in August for the fourth consecutive month, surpassing forecasts and adding to the weight of evidence for a stabilizing housing market after 3 years of decline.
This comes on the back of a separate encouraging report released last Friday showing sales of previously owned U.S. homes had surged to their highest level in over two years in September.
Released this Tuesday, Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller composite indices of home prices are quoted separately for 20 and 10 metropolitan areas.
For the group of 20 the month on month increase from August from July came in at 1.3 percent – higher than the 0.7 percent expected in a poll conducted by Reuters poll – but a little down from the 1.6 percent seen in July,.
The group of 10 recorded a rise of 1.3 percent in August after a 1.7 percent rise in July.
Feeding data from the monthly figures into annual statistics shows home price declines slowing to 10.6 percent for the 10-city index and 11.3 percent for the 20-city index.
The smaller index represents the core metropolitan areas – and, since these tend to lead the way, the fact that the annual decline was a shade lower for the more focused group of 10 metropolitan areas is benign.
Obviously annual charts take longer to show market trends – the longer the time-frame the higher the lag – and 4 consecutive monthly rises come as a welcome relief from the doom and gloom prevalent in the housing market at the beginning of the year.
Whether this new up-trend can be sustained depends to a large degree on the strength of the dollar – or lack of it – as US real estate becomes cheaper for foreign buyers. However looking at the macro-economic picture it seems almost inevitable that most countries will eventually also succumb to currency devaluation aka inflation. This will make 'things' in general more expensive, and support house pricing in particular.
This time around, however, the housing bubble may not burst - instead the currency it is priced in could collapse.
View property in the USA
View all overseas property news
Back to news articles for this country
Latest Related News Articles in None