Pending Home Sales No Cause For Celebration, Not Yet

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 3:28AM EDT · Published Feb 3, 10:12AM EST

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Burning_house The December pending home sales data is a bit dated, but there was a surprise gain by +6.3% for the month. The reading for the index was 87.7. What is more interesting than the gain in the index number is the geographic breakdown and the type of sales.

The index was up 2.1% from a the same period the year before, and compares with a reading of 82.5 in November. The affordability rose by 11% to arecord. Here is a breakdown by region:

Northeast decreased 1.7% in December from November; it had gone down 14.5% since December 2007.
The Midwest increased 12.8% in December from November; it had gone down 1.2% since December 2007.
The South increased 13.0% in December from November; it had gone up 1.6% since December 2007.
The West decreased 3.7% in December from November; it had gone up 17.5% since December 2007.

What is a concern is that a separate report from Zillow this morningshowed that more than one-third of house sales were from distressedselling via short sales, drastic cuts, foreclosure, and pre-foreclosurenegotiated sales. Zillow also noted that there was a loss of $1.4trillion in housing values in Q4 and $6.1 trillion in all of 2008.

Jon C. Ogg
February 3, 2009

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.