Article #1: Near record home vacancies hit 18.7 million from bank seizures in worst recession in 50 years.
This is an astonishing datapoint:
“There were 18.7 million vacant homes in the U.S. during the second quarter as the steepest recession in 50 years sapped demand for real estate and banks seized properties from delinquent borrowers.
The number of vacant properties, including foreclosures, residences for sale and vacation homes, was little changed from 18.6 million a year earlier, the U.S. Census Bureau said in a report today. Households that own their own residence stood at 67.3 percent, seasonally adjusted.
Home values dropped 33 percent since 2006, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index, and the unemployment rate in June rose to the highest in almost 26 years. Tumbling home prices and rising job losses have thwarted government efforts to reverse the housing decline at the heart of the longest U.S. recession since the 1930s.”
Note that the recent record in April of this year was 19.2 million in April 2009.
As Peter Boockvar points out, Commerce just released Q2 Home Ownership rates. Its now at 67.4%, way off the record high of 69.2% in the last quarter of 2004. For comparison’s sake, in 1965 the rate was 65.3%.
For those people looking for a bounce back, we may still be reverting back towards the long term mean.
With little or no pent up demand for housing, it’s hard to see how vacancies or ownership point are a bottom
More: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/07/near-record-home-vacancies-in-us/
Article #2: More Exhaustees Coming
The details on exhaustees — the people have used up their total Unemployment benefits — are pretty daunting. I mentioned this to Doug Kass last week, who referred to our prior post in one of his recent missives.
Now, the Sunday NYT looks at the same issue prospectively, to guesstimate how many more exhaustees there will be in the next few months.
Short answer: 1.5 million.
Longer answer:
“Over the coming months, as many as 1.5 million jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment insurance benefits, ending what for some has been a last bulwark against foreclosures and destitution.
Because of emergency extensions already enacted by Congress, laid-off workers in nearly half the states can collect benefits for up to 79 weeks, the longest period since the unemployment insurance program was created in the 1930s. But unemployment in this recession has proved to be especially tenacious, and a wave of job-seekers is using up even this prolonged aid.
Tens of thousands of workers have already used up their benefits, and the numbers are expected to soar in the months to come, reaching half a million by the end of September and 1.5 million by the end of the year, according to new projections by the National Employment Law Project, a private research group.”
More: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/08/more-exhaustees-coming/
