Home Sales Fall

This is the headline from the month of May 2010 housing statistics. Unless you are wearing rose colored glasses it was easy to see why. How can this puzzle the economists that go over the information and decipher all of the bits and pieces?

First we are still dealing with record unemployment and record under employment, and then there is the expiration of the Home Buyer tax credit. When there is a deadline of writing a contract on a very expensive investment such as a house, the timelines for short sales and bank owned homes will not allow the transactions to close in the time period allowed by congress. This makes the end of any housing program hard to get buyers to jump off the fence. The way our congress works by last minute extensions does nothing to help the process. They are just voting to keep the status quo.

In order for the housing market to recover and begin an upward accent, Buyers and Sellers for that matter need jobs. They need jobs that make money and the income needs to be enough to cover every aspect of the American Dream.

So when the Economists of the United States are puzzled at the down turn and cannot figure out why it happened, just remind yourself they haven’t figured anything out since the downturn began.