Published Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

In the last week, there has been some good news and bad news in the housing market, depending on whether you are a buyer or seller. For the seller, the good news comes from the Case-Schiller 20-City home price index: existing housing was up 0.5% in May over April, the first increase since April of last year. This means that housing prices were falling at a slower pace in May than in April. Also, new-home sales spiked 11% in June over May, which is remarkable giving the market’s slump in June, the worst month since 1982. Yet, many are finding that their homes will not sell in such a tough market, which may have contributed to the number of residential renovation permits to jump 10-15% in the last 18 months. For the buyer, the glut in the market, while good for a while, has now begun to impact median prices as demand increases.

Also, overall new commercial and residential construction spending during May 2009 was estimated at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $964 billion, which is 0.9% below the revised April estimate and 11.6% below the May 2008 estimate of $1090.7 billion. Of that number, residential construction was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $240.2 billion in May, 3.4% below the revised April estimate of $248.8 billion, adding to the lower value of newly constructed homes.

Tags: Commercial Construction, Housing, Residential Construction

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Housing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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