Getting home sales back up

After some good months home sales seem to have slipped again. Nationally sales are still off by double-digit rates compared to before the recession. What’s it going to take to get home sales back up? Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds.

“Well … the current level of home sales during this recession have actually not been that different than home sales during previous recessions: That is, the lows — if you will — in home sales are about like the lows we have seen in previous recessions.

“What is unusual, however, about the level of home sales now is how far they have come down from the highs set previous to the recession. And that is because we had never seen such highs in home sales. That is to say, we’ve never had — never did have 00 a housing boom like we had in the early part of the 2000s.

“So the drop that we’ve had, even though we are down to a level that is very consistent to previous recessions, the drop has been much bigger because we fell from such a high level.

“What this means is when the home market bounces back, it is not going to where is was in the early part of the 2000s. We are not going to that housing boom. In fact we are going to go back to something much more modest. And so that has big implications for everyone working in the home market.”