Double-Dip Recession Deepens as U.S. Housing Market Collapses

Housing-Market / US Housing
Sep 03, 2010 - 09:07 AM

By: Mike_Larson

The Double-Dip recession I’ve been predicting for some time is deepening. And nowhere is the emergence of this powerful economic force more clear than in the housing market.

All the fresh economic data confirms that home sales are weakening … home inventories are rising … and home price pressure is building.

Meanwhile, we’re seeing a fresh rise in early-stage mortgage delinquencies after a multi-quarter respite. Credit demand is contracting for real estate and other loans. And bank failures are rising fast.

This can’t be prevented. Neither the Obama administration nor Congress nor the Federal Reserve can fire some magic bullet at the problem to kill it. So as an investor, you can only do one thing: Prepare!

Housing Dip Deepens As Artificial Support Wanes

Last week while I was on vacation, we got a rash of fresh data on housing — none of it pretty. Just consider …

New home sales plunged 12 percent in July to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of only 276,000. That’s the lowest level since the Census Bureau began tracking these figures in 1963.



The median price of a new home slumped 4.9 percent from a year ago to $204,000. That’s the lowest level since 2003.

Existing home sales collapsed 27 percent in July to an annual rate of 3.83 million. That was twice as large a decline as economists expected.
Keep in mind that number includes not just single-family home sales, but also sales of condominiums and co-ops. If you use the single-family only figures, which go back decades, you see that sales haven’t been this weak since 1995.

The combination of falling sales and rising for-sale inventory is going to torpedo pricing. Heck, we now have 11.9 months of inventory on the market in single family homes, assuming the current sales pace were to hold constant. That’s the worst reading since 1983.

Worse, more and more supply keeps being dumped on the market by banks and other owners of repossessed homes. The Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, was supposed to prevent that from happening. But it has only provided 340,000 permanent mortgage modifications. That’s far short of the four million modifications the Obama administration laid out as a goal when it rolled the thing out more than a year ago.

At the same time, the Mortgage Bankers Association just said that the 30-day late payment rate rose to 3.51 percent of all home loans in the second quarter. That’s the first gain in early-stage delinquencies in more than a year, and a leading indicator of rising future foreclosures.

Look, we’ve already seen 118 banks fail so far in 2010. Plus, the FDIC just revealed that its “problem listâ€