The New York Times Editorial Board
The public has every reason to be confused about where the housing market is headed. Even analysts and experts have been backing and forthing about recent housing data, in part because what appears to be good news is, on closer inspection, mixed.
Take home sales. They’ve been rising lately, but some of the gain appears to be from buyers who rushed to buy in the summer because they feared that interest rates would keep rising. If rates decline, as they might, home purchases are likely to level off.
Similarly, home prices have gone up, rising 12.4 percent from July 2012 to July 2013. But month-to-month price gains have slowed considerably the last several months. This suggests that prices have begun to plateau, even as millions of homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth are counting on rising prices to restore their equity.
