Blog entries tagged Market Indicators

Why Houston is Leading the Recovery

Nick Will — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:33:41 +0100

This chart tells the story of what I'm seeing through other economic indicators being released now and in recent weeks. This is a chart of the past 10 years of Producer Price Indices, the general economic cost index for companies that produce things. If a steel cookware company wants to sell more cookware, it cares a lot for example about the cost of steel. Same for a fast food compRead More...

FHA Delinquencies Drop in February

Nick Will — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:15:10 +0100

From The Washington Post, FHA delinquencies dropped significantly in February after several months of increasing. Definitely good news. Now we need more investors to get back in this market, the good signs keep coming.

The default and claims rate is now the lowest it has been since August, when the rate was 4.8 percent. The number of troubled loans fell from about 166,000 to roughly 162,000.

Brian Chappelle, a banking consultant and former FHA official, attributes thRead More...

New vs Resale Stats: More of My Case

Nick Will — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:18:04 +0100

The inestimable Lucia Mutikani reports for Reuters that existing home sales rose to a 2-year high in September. These numbers are more meaningful than how, in two posts ago as I mentioned, new home builders have just been messing all over themselves. From Mutikani's article:
The National Association of Realtors said sales of existing homes jumped 9.4 percent in September to an annual rate of 5.57 million units, the highest level since July 2007. Financial markets had expected sales to rise to aRead More...

New Home Sales Stats: Some Truth to Power

Nick Will — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:41:56 +0100

Okay so new home sales numbers weren't reported to be up last week. So? First of all, the housing market is local in nature. If all politics is local as Tip O'Neill said, then real estate and housing is darn near skin-tight.

Here's what Deutsche Bank said in the linked article above: "Overall, we think today's weak number supports our contention that based on waning government stimulus the housing recovery could end up being W-shaped..." What blather.

&nbsRead More...

The Recession Has Ended: And So?

Nick Will — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:04:42 +0100

So says GDP stats released this morning, even beating market expectation for value of overall U.S. national economic production in the 3rd quarter, July-September. From Lucia Mutikani of Reuters:
The Commerce Department, in its first estimate of third-quarter gross domestic product on Thursday, said the economy grew at a 3.5 percent annual rate, the fastest pace since the third quarter of 2007...

What can we expect of this? Well we can expect some glad tidings and cheer, and that is most wRead More...

Intel CEO: Higher Corp PC Sales in 2010

Nick Will — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:30:38 +0100

Reuters and their James Pethokoukis reports this morning from New Delhi that the CEO of gigantic PC chip maker Intel is forecasting significantly improved growth in corporate PC spending in 2010, which would be great news for the local north Houston tech market, including huge local PC and tech employer HP.

From the article:

"There is a very good chance corporate spending on PCs will improve significantly in 2010," Otellini told reporters at a news conference in the IndRead More...

Zillow vs. Realtor.com

Nick Will — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:06:11 +0100

In recent years, the real estate website Zillow.com has seen increasing traffic. According to the traffic reporting site Alexa.com, Zillow's traffic is close to reaching, at long last, the venerable and dominant Realtor.com, which in years past we have favored over all other sites, mostly because of its excellent and fair search results (giving users what they need, not what advertisers want), and because of its towering dominance in national listings websites.

Here's a currRead More...

Buyers Gaining Interest: Web Stats

Nick Will — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:58:01 +0100

The website alexa.com tracks various statistics regarding web traffic across the Internet worldwide. Its methods are sometimes questioned - full disclosure - they use a large sample of people who download their "toolbar" is how I understand they get their sample. Nonetheless it's a commonly referenced source for Internet traffic statistics.

So today I pulled the recent traffic for HAR.com, the Houston Association of Realtors's public version of the Multiple Listing Service fRead More...