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US Housing Has Bottomed
So says Bill McBride, author of Calculated Risk. In my opinion, his blog is the single best source for information on the US housing market. I’ve followed his blog for years, and can’t think of a single time he’s been wrong.
First there are two bottoms for housing. The first is for new home sales, housing starts and residential investment. The second bottom is for prices. Sometimes these bottoms can happen years apart.
For the economy and jobs, the bottom for housing starts and new home sales is more important than the bottom for prices. However individual homeowners and potential home buyers are naturally more interested in prices. So when we discuss a “bottom” for housing, we need to be clear on what we mean.
For new home sales and housing starts, it appears the bottom is in, and I expect an increase in both starts and sales in 2012.
And it now appears we can look for the bottom in prices. My guess is that nominal house prices, using the national repeat sales indexes and not seasonally adjusted, will bottom in March 2012.
There are several reasons I think that house prices are close to a bottom. First prices are close to normal looking at the price-to-rent ratio and real prices. Second the large decline in listed inventory means less downward pressure on house prices, and third, I think that several policy initiatives will lessen the pressure from distressed sales (the probable mortgage settlement, the HARP refinance program, and more).
Of course these are national price indexes and there will be significant variability across the country. Areas with a large backlog of distressed properties – especially some states with a judicial foreclosure process – will probably see further price declines.
And this doesn’t mean prices will increase significantly any time soon. Usually towards the end of a housing bust, nominal prices mostly move sideways for a few years, and real prices (adjusted for inflation) could even decline for another 2 or 3 years.
But most homeowners and home buyers focus on nominal prices and there is reasonable chance that the bottom is here.
Vancouver Housing Valuations
Writing about the San Diego housing market, Rich Toscano at Piggington’s Econo-Almanac has a great explanation of the historical relationships between house prices, incomes and rents.
Longtime readers know that I consider the price ratios to be absolutely fundamental to determining whether housing is fairly valued. It makes intuitive sense that home prices would tend to track incomes and rents: incomes, because they determine how much money people have available to pay for housing; and rents, because rent prices reflect how much San Diegans are willing and able to pay to put roofs over their heads when there is no speculative or investment element involved. The historical record bears out this intuitive logic, as San Diego’s home price-to-income and price-to-rent ratios have tended to be strongly mean-reverting over time.
He includes the following two graphs showing how San Diego’s ratios are now back to normal levels after the bursting of the housing bubble.
Here are the ratios for Vancouver:
The San Diego ratios were calculated with slightly different data, so the absolute numbers aren’t the same as Vancouver’s. However, today’s deviation from historical averages in Vancouver are comparable with the situation in San Diego in 2005.
So what is the likely future for home prices in Vancouver? Unless Vancouver is different, historical price-to-rent and price-to-income ratios will return at some point. Absent a significant jump in incomes and rents, the only way these ratios can get back to normal levels is with a very significant drop in prices. If this was to occur over the next couple of years, it would take a 40-50% fall. Like this:
North American Economics 