Planner Reads

I spoke with Damon Darlin of the NYT last week about housing and RE agents. He recalled the “It’s a great time to buy a home” nonsense spouted by Real estate agents and the NAR in 2005.

As it turns out, they were half right.

Darlin put together a good discussion on home prices and the cost of mortgages in the Sunday Business section. Here are my contributions:

“What they are really saying is that it is a good time to be involved in a transaction that generates a commission,” says Barry Ritholtz, C.E.O. and director of equity research at FusionIQ, a quantitative research firm. He’s also author of “The Big Picture,” an irreverent blog on markets.

If agents are always motivated to make a deal, buyers are often asking an impossible question: “Will the price of this house go up?”

Although the National Association of Realtors said for many years that home prices historically don’t fall, actually they do, and sometimes quite sharply. The housing market is complicated, and the future unknowable. Still, for clues to the overall direction of prices, Mr. Ritholtz advises buyers to look at three metrics: the ratio of median income to median home prices, which suggests ...