Courses

Is the Housing Market About to Hit Bottom?

Lots of news the last couple of days about the housing market, led by today's report that housing prices suffered their biggest quarterly drop, year over year, in the 21-year history of the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index. According to the index, U.S. home prices are at levels similar to the fourth quarter of 2002.

Also today, Bloomberg.com had a comprehensive story on the housing market in which a survey of analysts predicted a bottoming of the housing market in June (good news, sort of) and an unusually slow and sluggish recovery (bad news):

"The slump in the U.S. housing market that caused the median value of homes to decline 24 percent since 2006 may bottom next month without any prospect of a rebound for another year, according to estimates from chief economists at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Mortgage Bankers Association and national realtors and homebuilder groups."

The full text of the story, including a number of golf related anecdotes, is here.

-- G.R.