On the heels of the rise in consumer confidence comes an uptick in housing prices as well. New-home sales were up 9.6 percent nationally in July. This follows news that sales prices for existing-home sales rose 0.4 percent in the New York area in June, and one economist said that home prices in New Jersey appear to have bottomed out sometime last winter, in December and January.
Like the historically low consumer confidence numbers, though, there are lizards in the basement for these numbers too. Home prices are still down 11.9 percent from a year earlier. Complicating the pictures is the huge number of foreclosures out there. Here in the Northeast region, existing-home sales climbed 13 percent in July, but the median price was down 15 percent from a year ago because so many homes are being sold out of foreclosure. And it still takes an average of more than a year to sell a new house, the highest number on record.
And there's the fact that these numbers aren't really all that reliable. In the name of getting figures before the public while the data is still fresh, the government tends to rush things. It takes a while for the figures to become statistically significant. The standard error in July, for instance, was plus or minus 13.4 percent, so in a sense, we don't know if the housing numbers even went up. It takes as much as five months to recognize a statistically meaningful trend in sales.
So the housing figures for June and July are mostly good news. But let's check back sometime in autumn and see how they look then.
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