Is the market cooling or taking a breather?
The National Association of Realtors recently released their quarterly report which indicates that prices are up 10.3% but that sales are slowing and inventories are growing in many markets. The NAR interpretation of this is as follows:
“The growth in single-family home prices continued to cool in the first quarter, but many metropolitan areas are still showing double-digit annual gains, according to the latest survey by National Association of Realtors®. At the same time, metro area condo price appreciation has generally cooled to normal levels.”
On the other hand the Marginal Utility blog’s analysis of NAR’s raw statistics had this to say:
“The appreciation is highly concentrated in the early part of last year; for most metro areas, prices peaked or plateaued around quarter 2 or quarter 3 of 2005. So while the year-over-year increases appear to be “cooling,” the sequential increases have ground to a halt.”