Home Sales Soar in July, Says MSNBC

See the article here.  It's good news for the economy - and of course for Realtors! - but the labor market is still down, and people continue to be concerned about their jobs.  Nonetheless, I'll take every little bit of good news I can lay hands on these days. 

Comments

[David Goldstein]

As an owner of a nationwide network of real estate licensing schools I am in a unique position to gauge what I call "the hope index". That's really just my way of saying "consumer confidence" but with a little twist. Here's how it works and it's very simple... When our schools see a decrease in course registrations that tells us that career seekers have declining confidence in what they see happening in the real estate market - the "hope index" drops. When registrations go up it means the opposite. Obviously our students (just like home buyers) are trying anticipate where the market will go and where they want to be in relation to that market. Who wants to be "in" a real estate career when the market is in a free-fall? Career seekers are looking for a growing or at least stable market to work in. The smart ones (and there are a lot of them) have identified the "bottom" of the market early and are preparing to enter that market as it begins to recover. Right now the "hope index" is very high. In fact, it's as high as we've ever seen it. Yes, this means more students are enrolling in pre-license real estate courses than ever before. It means that people seeking new careers are identifying real estate sales as having great potential for them and "hoping" they are right. This hope index recovery started last October and it's consistently improved every month since then. So, for what it's worth, based on this line of thinking... the bottom has or is being established right now.