The Rest of the Country Seems to be Stabilizing. What About Marin?

The Rest of the Country Seems to be Stabilizing. What About Marin?
Consider this recent news article from CNN.com on Tuesday, March 23rd that reflects US existing home sales activity:

“Sales of existing homes have unexpectedly risen in February, recovering from a sharp drop in the previous month, according to an industry report released Monday. The National Association of Realtors said that existing home sales rose last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.72 million units, up 5.1% from a rate of 4.49 million in January.”

While this news is generally welcome, there is another figure to consider which is price The month to month change in price saw its first increase, albeit very small, since June of 2008 meaning that for the time being at least the steep drops have taken a rest. So while it is impossible to say if these national figures are signaling a definitive turnaround in the overall housing market, it more probably reflects what Alan Greenspan famously referred to a “structured bottom” back in 2002 when describing the lowest point of the last recession

So what about Marin? Are we seeing sales activities increasing and stabilization of home prices here? For starters we have to expect volatility in the Marin trends as a result of the much lower volumes affecting trend movement. January to February existing home sale volumes declined only a mild 4.48% perhaps signaling a similar trend toward stability. In terms of prices we are seeing a lot of volatility with January prices climbing 15.19% and followed in February by a 14.53% decline. We need to see how prices perform going forward, but we expect to see a bumpy road ahead in 2009 as the market figures out what to do. We think that is unlikely, though, that we’ll have another off-the-cliff year as we did in 2008.

So what to make of all this? Are we seeing sales activities increasing and stabilization of home prices here? For starters we have to expect volatility in the Marin trends as a result of the much lower volumes affecting trend movement. January to February existing home sale volumes declined only a mild 4.48% perhaps signaling a similar trend toward stability. In terms of prices we are seeing a lot of volatility with January prices climbing 15.19% and followed in February by a 14.53% decline. We need to see how prices perform going forward, but we expect to see a bumpy road ahead in 2009 as the market figures out what to do. We think that is unlikely, though, that we’ll have another off-the-cliff year as we did in 2008.

Now the Federal Government is aggressively working to re-start the lending market by buying over $1 trillion of bad debt in partnership with private entities. While that is encouraging we are not out of the woods as danger looms in the form of maturing commercial real estate debt that could see large scale default as well later this year. The government’s swift withdrawal of bad residential as well as commercial debt should play an important role in maintaining this nascent real estate recovery.