Tag Archives: real estate

Business/Economics, International, U.S.

Incompetence & What Economic Recovery? NAR says U.S. housing market is in worse shape, than first thought

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is warning that the U.S. housing market collapse is even worse than first thought.  On December 21, NAR will release new/revised data on the housing collapse going back to 2007.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for NAR, said that real estate analysts have made incorrect assumptions when they counted existing home sales in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS).  The assumptions in counting home sales made things look better than they really are: “For the real estate business, this means the housing market’s downturn was deeper than what was initially thought.”

Yu also said the MLS, and some of the other NAR counts, were done using data from 2000, not up to date data!

Another problem is that some real estate markets overlap in reporting their sales. This means a sale in one market could, on paper, look like two sales in two markets: “Colorado Springs has their own database, but because the Denver market is nearby they may also list that home in the Denver database, so when the home gets sold, both Denver and Colorado Springs will say sales rose, so that’s genuine double counting.”-Lawrence Yu

For some reason it took until a recent meeting of NAR officials, this year, to realize the reporting mistakes.

 

Business/Economics, International

Another reason the housing market bubble in China could burst: New Income Tax Laws

Recently the Chinese government changed income tax laws, to help low income workers keep more of their money.  The new law increased the number of workers who don’t have to file income tax.

The Chinese real estate industry is now warning that could reduce property sales.

In China you must have official papers declaring you a permanent resident of the area you want to buy property in.  If you don’t have such paperwork, you can use your income tax filing to show that you work in that area.  The problem with the new tax law is that it will reduce the number of migrant workers who would’ve had those tax records to use to buy a home with.

A Beijing realtor says the new tax law will reduce the number of qualified migrants, in his area, by more than 90%.

This comes after the Chinese government ordered banks to tighten mortgage lending by either increasing down payments, or increasing mortgage interest rates.