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. 

Could the disappointing new home sales also mean that home builders just got their strategy wrong? Where is it written in stone that home builders have been building the right products and that the low sales are indicative of the economy and not of the corporations' own poor strategy? I say look to the existing home sale numbers. Look to refi numbers.

Instead, "our contention" is look to business spending (it's increasing) as a forward indicator of increasing confidence and eventually stronger employment. The fundamentals are there. Maybe the home builders got it wrong. Maybe they built the wrong price points. Maybe they built things too expensive, too big, or on home lots ever more ridiculously small for buyers.

But I tell you what we've also seen. We've seen a lot of new home builders who did not adjust their strategies last year when Wall Street fell six feet under. They kept building the same products at the same high prices and it kept buyers out of the market entirely. Last year's $400,000 buyers are this year's $250,000 buyers. I don't think the new home builders woke up to that.

The defining element of the the 2009 Houston housing market, including on the north side of Houston and its neighborhoods where we are, is that sellers have held to the sidelines because buyers have held to the sidelines.  That will change in 2010 and it will change soon, especially now that we're in 4Q and home builders are focusing on selling their existing inventory and not on what they hoped they would be building in the next 60 days. And you can only hold up demand for so long - people need to move and they want to move - we're already seeing the rumblings of change right now.

You don't have to be a fat Wall Street banker to get a sense of what's really happening on "the street" in the United States (which is decidedly not Wall Street, by the way). In fact, I find the fat Wall Street bankers rarely ask the obvious and sometimes most pertinent questions, themselves victims of the "groupthink" that is a byproduct of the phenomenon to which they owe their phat jobs in the first place.

Give me these paved streets of Spring, The Woodlands, Tomball, Magnolia, Champions, Post Oak, Conroe, The Medical Center, The Heights, Montrose, you-name-it... any day, any time. Because this is where we live. This is where Americans live. And this is where the numbers are generated. And this is where the Wall Street bankers can only scratch their heads as they fly over us as they search for something coherent to say to newspapers that will fit their groupthink in the organizations that pay them to toe the line and blame the government and blame us before they blame the corporate management they are supposed to be holding accountable.