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The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
Apr 27 20099:04am EDT -
Sinking Animal Spirits
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Counter-cyclical Urban Policy
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Be Your Own Counterfeiter
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Being Tim Geithner
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Notes From a Press Conference Naif
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What Good is the News?
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Stressful Enough
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Not Regretting the Pound
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Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
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Non-Economic Questions of the Day
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The Stress Test Blind Alley
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Happy Hour
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Recovery Without Rebalancing
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The Shape of Your Recession
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RPX: The Housing Futures Market With a Transaction Count
After posting my entry about house-price futures yesterday, a loyal reader tipped me off to another entity dealing in such things here in the US: Radar Logic's RPX. Again, I have no idea how liquid these things are, but the one thing they do have is a historical data section on their website, where you can chart price per square foot in any of 25 different metropolitan areas from Atlanta to Washington. The price charts tend to be pretty much what you might expect: a long climb for most of the decade, and then a turnaround more recently. But underneath the price chart is something they call the "transaction count", which measures not the price per square foot but the number of transactions taking place in the market at that time. Here's the chart for Miami:
Miami's price per square foot hit a high of $207.94 in June 2006; it's now retreated almost 10% to $187.40, which is the same as its level in October 2005. But back in October 2005, as you can see, the market was booming, with the transaction count up around the 10,000 level; it peaked somewhere over 12,000. Today, the transaction count is closer to 3,000, and falling. They're never going to clear their excess inventory at that rate.
Oh, and in case you find such datapoints useful, the one-year forward average national house price is about 11.25% lower than the current price of $262.86 per square foot.
