A new
Gallup poll indicates that popular confidence in housing is falling precipitously:
The volume of U.S. home sales is near the record high seen in 2005, but Americans are much less confident today than they were a year ago about the advisability of buying real estate. Just 52% of Americans say now is a good time to buy a house, down from 71% last April and 81% in 2003. Residents of the East and West are especially likely to consider it a bad time to purchase a new home.
Housing looked like a good deal in the recent past when single-family homes were experiencing back-to-back years of double-digit appreciation and, in many markets, savvy investors could flip a home in a matter of months for a hefty profit. Now that the increases appear to be slowing, and home values are leveling off at fairly high prices, prospective buyers are naturally more concerned about paying top dollar.
The recent decline in consumer optimism about the housing market is seen with all major income groups and regions of the country.
As a commentor over at the
Bubble Meter blog mentioned, that first graph in the article is misleading because the last few data points are very close together in time as compared to the other data points. It misleadingly gives the impression that the decline in confidence of late has been gradual. Here is the same data but graphed appropriately:
A new Gallup poll indicates that popular confidence in housing is falling precipitously:
2 comments:
Hello Clarice!
Yes, the drawing reminds me of some strange alien cookbook for preparing humans.
Besides that, there's the old "lies, damn lies, and statistics" crap that is a bit overused now but nevertheless true in this case.
I wonder how good the author was at Excel charts. Maybe there weren't enough data points to build a nice one and the editor just wouldn't accept it if the "data points aren't equidistant", duh.....OK.
re that pic:
That's how some university professors are explaining human psychology to students. I especially liked the emotion cloud.
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