"Home Prices Seesawing." Bulletin, 9/15/11.
Check out that graph; up one month, down the next, up the next, down the next.
A "Bumpy Road" graph is what I'd call that. If you could imagine the arc of your tires on a bumpy road, that's how it would look on a graph. Doesn't really tell you if the road is going up or going down.
The very epitome of bumping along the bottom.
Another headline trumpets that foreclosures are falling, but another headline talks about how stricter standards make it difficult to get a mortgage.
Look, I understand the desire to try to see a pattern in all this. As a retailer, I look at my month to month sales and try to get a read on the future.
But, really, I know better. For instance, I'm about to have three months in a row higher than the previous year, but...I'm not reading too much into it. It's mostly about bumping off previous lows.
My best advice to everyone is quit looking for a recovery. I think we're a long ways from that. And --believe me -- you'll know it when it is really happening. It's not really happening.
In the past market slowdowns (admittedly, I'm talking slowdowns in sales of product lines in my store) the sales didn't seem to recover until after I'd given up looking for them to recover.
Because by then, I'd gotten on with things, I'd found other ways to do my business, instead of forlornly waiting for things to change.
Check out that graph; up one month, down the next, up the next, down the next.
A "Bumpy Road" graph is what I'd call that. If you could imagine the arc of your tires on a bumpy road, that's how it would look on a graph. Doesn't really tell you if the road is going up or going down.
The very epitome of bumping along the bottom.
Another headline trumpets that foreclosures are falling, but another headline talks about how stricter standards make it difficult to get a mortgage.
Look, I understand the desire to try to see a pattern in all this. As a retailer, I look at my month to month sales and try to get a read on the future.
But, really, I know better. For instance, I'm about to have three months in a row higher than the previous year, but...I'm not reading too much into it. It's mostly about bumping off previous lows.
My best advice to everyone is quit looking for a recovery. I think we're a long ways from that. And --believe me -- you'll know it when it is really happening. It's not really happening.
In the past market slowdowns (admittedly, I'm talking slowdowns in sales of product lines in my store) the sales didn't seem to recover until after I'd given up looking for them to recover.
Because by then, I'd gotten on with things, I'd found other ways to do my business, instead of forlornly waiting for things to change.