Happy Easter. What's the value of your house?

From the New York Times:

Builders of New Homes Seeing No Sign of Recovery

RICHMOND, Ill. — In this distant Chicago suburb, a builder has finally found a way to persuade people to buy a new house: he throws in a car.

Kim Meier’s spring promotion, which includes a $17,000 credit at a nearby General Motors dealer, has produced seven sales since the beginning of March, a veritable windfall of business for a builder who sold only 20 houses last year. “We needed to do something dramatic,” said Mr. Meier. “The market’s been soft.”

That is one way of putting it. The recession hurt a lot of industries, but it knocked the residential construction market to the mat and has kept it there, even as the broader economy has started to fitfully recover.

Sales of new single-family homes in February were down more than 80 percent from the 2005 peak, far exceeding the 28 percent drop in existing home sales. New single-family sales are now lower than at any point since the data was first collected in 1963, when the nation had 120 million fewer residents...


But in the meantime, sentiment might still be souring. Executives at Equity LifeStyle Properties, a Chicago firm that sells properties in resort communities, said this week they were seeing “a psychological change”: potential customers wanted to preserve their capital rather than risk it in real estate.

Bill McBride, who runs the popular financial blog Calculated Risk, said this might be the moment when people decisively started to turn on home ownership. “I’m starting to feel the hate,” he wrote.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/business/economy/23housing.html?_r=2&hp

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The referenced website:

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

A telling chart follows below.  Sorry for the spill over into the margin - yours truly can't figure out how to fit the chart so it can be clearly read.  When I shrink it, the chart is hard to read. I recommend visiting the Calculated Risk Blog.

NOTE WELL: The RED line represents New Home Sales, which have fallen like a dagger.  I suggest you do this wherever you live: visit a reliable, local real estate website and search for homes.  Look at your neighborhood.  Are homes really selling?  Also, search the more expensive neighborhoods in your area.  I've seen new construction houses in the "best areas" drop prices more than half and yet the things just sit there with no buyers. Sometimes homes are removed from the listings for a short period of time, then are re-listed.  Inform yourself. 

New home construction puts a lot of people to work.  There is a great spillover effect. But, as you can see, new home construction is pitiful.

Existing home sales represent a much narrower set of employment.  Now think about one more thing: of all the homes owned by banks in your area on sale, are they all for sale?  Or instead, are the local banks sitting on inventory that has yet to show up in the For Sale listings?   What do you think is really going on in your neighborhoods?  Look around and do your own digging.