The housing market is recovering. At least, 1 million people think so.
That’s the number of people who bought homes in the first three months of 2010. And that’s more people than have bought homes in the first three months of the last two years.
Let’s throw out caveats and the concerns and step back for a moment. It’s easy to point to a lot of different reasons why the home sales figures are inflated, or why home prices continue to have risk.
The two charts below show the sustained trend in recovering home sales over the past two years.
The first chart plots the number of homes sold in the first quarter over the past decade.
The 1 million home buyers in the first quarter don’t measure up to the levels of the real estate boom. But that’s not what a recovery means.
A recovery does mean changes in momentum. The second chart looks at how the market pacing has looked at the start of each of the last four years. This first quarter of this year was up 12% in sales versus the year before, breaking a decline that started in 2006.
The resale market is clouded by a lot of external factors that are driving price and inventory, but the actual number of homes sold show that there is an underlying increase in demand. From it we can infer that consumers feel good about buying homes. And that’s what the recovery will look like.
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