john walsh

September U.S. Home Sales UP 9.4%! An East Bay Real Estate False Indicator?

Jim Walberg states that all real estate is local, remember? The Bay Area home sales for September were up 8.4%.  It doesn’t matter what the National averages are, it only matters what the stats are in our local market.  And within our local markets are niche markets.  Do you really care about what the statistics are in Kansas City?  No.  What you care about is what is happening with home sales in the East Bay real estate markets.  But, here is the info from September’s home sales anyway.  Last month was the largest monthly increase in home sales in the U.S. in the last 26 years!  That is great news for our economy.  I believe that the reason why September was so robust in home sales was because of the panic that the Home Buyers Tax Credit was ending on November 30^th.  ( We now know that Senator Harry Reid is authoring a bill to extend it to April 30, 2010.) The September jump in homes sales revised the projected home sales for 2009 to 5.57 million!  “There’s a mini-boom going on in the housing market,” said Thomas Popik, who conducts a monthly survey of real estate agents for Campbell Communications, a research firm. Read more