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The housing market is two-thirds of the way recovered thanks to existing home sale strength and a decrease in foreclosures and delinquencies, prompting Trulia to retire its Housing Barometer.
The recovery is not a straight line, Trulia notes in a blog post, as it moves through different phases, with some measures of housing activity recovering faster than others. However, the Housing Barometer reached 67% just one year after it was less than half of the way back to “normal” or pre-bubble levels.
The housing market has quickly moved back to “normal” since February 2012, according to Trulia’s barometer, based on three key housing market indicators: construction starts, existing home sales, and the delinquency-plus-foreclosure rate. The current month’s data for each indicator is compared to how bad numbers got at their worst, and also their pre-bubble “normal” levels.
August 2013 saw all three measures improve, as construction starts and existing home sales both rose slightly, while the delinquency-plus-foreclosure rate moved “strongly” downward.
Image credit: Trulia, August 2013
“Averaging these three percentages together, the housing market is now 67% back to normal, compared with just 42% one year ago,” says Trulia chief economist Jed Kolko in a blog post that marks the retirement of the Housing Barometer. “…The recovery is now far enough along that the time has come for a new way to track its progress. We’ll be introducing that way soon.”
Written by Alyssa Gerace
