Economists' expectations were probably right on, because without the home buyer tax credit of up to $8,000 and mortgage interest rates' five quarter run on the 5 percent mark, the annual housing sales pace would still be stuck in the middle 300,000s.
Ironically, that's today's going price range for many of those half-million dollar boom-time homes.
Unemployment has surged. Joblessness is cookin'.
Calling the increase to a paltry 411,000 homes sold annually a "surge" is lacing data with morphine -- but not enough to kill the pain.
New home sales were more than 300 times higher at the peak of the market then they are now. Three hundred times. Since the peak, new home sales have crashed 68 percent -- nearly 70 percent of the new home market -- gone.
From December 2001 to December 2004 the annual sales pace hovered around 1 million or more homes and in 2005 the annual sales pace peaked at about 1.28 million, before taking a nose dive, according to new and existing home sales data compiled by the National Association of Home Builders.
From March of 2009 to March of 2010, the annual sales pace of new homes, reported each month, has broken the 400,000 barrier only four times.
For all of 2008, the new home sales pace averaged 485,000 and then tanked at 374,000 in 2009.
The larger 5 million-a-year resale market fell half as far. From 2005 (7 million) to 2009 (5 million), the resale sales market has been slashed by about 27 percent, nearly a third, according to the same data.
Easy mortgage money has gone the way of skyrocketing home sales as the financiers of the greatest recession since the Great Depression cower and ration credit to protect their assets.
You can't buy a home in an economy that's had its legs cut out from under it by the housing market. If the housing market can't get on its feet, well, the economy won't have a leg to stand on.
Even if you have a job and good credit it doesn't mean diddily if the lender had a bad day on Wall Street -- or a good day.
Here's your surge.
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