Yesterday, most media sources reported that single family home sales had declined year over year in September. The Boston Globe chose to run this at the top of the business page with the ominous and incorrect title, “Mass. home sales dropped 12.9 percent last month.” The report was on existing single family homes and condominiums, not “homes.” I guess that’s the old-fashioned attention grabber.
The story was not technically incorrect. It was selectively correct. The Globe gave short shrift to pricing, which, if included as I do below, paint a very different picture.
As an example, suppose the lead article of the Globe Sports Section that same day discussed the previous night’s game against the Heat and covered all of the Celtics’ scoring but never mentioned the Heat. The title would read “Celtics Score 88 Points.” I don’t know about anyone else, but I think I might want to also know how many points the Heat scored so I could at least know who won the game. But that’s exactly the way the Globe played the news.
The correct approach would have incorporated both numbers of sales and pricing. Every industry measures its performance by GROSS REVENUE and GROSS PROFIT. Let’s look at the numbers in that light.
Gross home sales revenue in September 2010: 3,285 homes x $287,000 = $940,000 gross sales.
Gross home sales revenue in September 2009: 3,771 homes x $284,000 = $1,070,000 gross sales.
Gross single family home sales, expressed in revenue dollars, decreased by 8.3%, not by 12.9%. The same analysis of existing condominium sales results in a gross revenue decrease of 16.2%, not 21.5%.
Declines of 8% and 13% are certainly not comforting news, but they are a far cry from 13% and 22%. It’s not as bad as you think. When sales are declining while prices are increasing, that is simply the market at work constantly seeking market pricing.
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