What’s Happening In This Market? A Liberal Dose Of Mixed Metaphors To Help Us Understand It

September 18, 2008

Movies.  Shoes.  Phases.  What do they have in common?  All have been recently used as metaphors describing the economy or predictions of where the economy is going.

On the day that the Fannie and Freddie s$#@ hit the fan, Sherry Chris of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate quoted Realogy CEO Alex Perriello, “I feel like I am in Imelda Marcos’ closet - the shoes just keep dropping.”  Indeed.

Fast forward a few days and we get the Bawld Guy, America’s foremost maxim-generating machine, reassures us that we ain’t all gonna die.  He’s seen this movie three times before, and the asteroid doesn’t hit earth.

Finally, Nikcolai Kolding, also of Better Homes and Gardens, brings out an interesting diagram explaining the phases of the real estate market:

["Sides", for the uninitiated, refers to each of the two "sides" of a transaction.]

The diagram suggests that transaction volume, not price, is the best leading indicator of a change in the market.  In a future article I’ll see how well our local data fit into this model.

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Written by Kevin · Filed Under Articles, Consumer, Industry 

Comments

One Response to “What’s Happening In This Market? A Liberal Dose Of Mixed Metaphors To Help Us Understand It”

  1. Nicolai Kolding on September 23rd, 2008 10:22 am

    Kevin -
    I may be able to save you some time. I just posted a follow-up to this with some hard data to support the Phases. There’s a link in my post (http://bhgrealestateblog.com/2008/09/23/market-phases-the-data-speaks/ ) to a spreadsheet that anyone can manipulate. For now, it’s loaded with national data and the four regions but if you have month-by-month closings and average price you can override it and let the analysis flow.

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