Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Real Estate Bubble: Another Metric

I live in a major Metro area and my favorite Sunday newspaper has the Classified Ads section as a separate insert. This week it came in at a weighty 128 pages (not only did it look like a record, it felt like one, too) of which 115 pages (89.8%) were "Real Estate For Sale" and a mere 7 pages (5.5%) were "Real Estate For Rent".

In gross numbers, around 10,300 ads were "For Sale" and just 630 "For Rent", for a ratio of 16.4-to-1. I don't follow the ratio over time, but it seems to be at a record, too, just by my eye-balling the RE section from week to week.

I don't care what economists, analysts, politicians, bankers (central and otherwise) say: Anyone can see and feel that this market is in deep, deep trouble: all one has to do is buy the Sunday paper. It's not even necessary to read it - in fact, this usually confuses the issue further. Just count the pages...
Posted by at

3 comments:

  1. jburronMay 8, 2007 at 1:35 PM

    Sounds like the start of a brand-new indicator: The Sudden Debt Sunday Paper Real Estate For Sale Or Rent Index (SD SPRESORI, for short).

    ReplyDelete
  2. JamesMay 8, 2007 at 5:13 PM

    I rent in Chicago and have found that craiglist can give you give you a good idea of the housing market. In february of 2006 I was looking for a new place and would see around 17,000 places listed, now I see around 24,000. A pretty big jump, and its not seasonal because I was looking since the middle of march this year. The other thing that I have noticed is that homes for rent are getting much more opulent. I'm starting to see more trophy home entering the rental market.

    ReplyDelete
  3. russell1200May 9, 2007 at 3:42 AM

    Yes, and the comics weren't very funny either. Unusually unfunny I would even say!

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)