The Daily Feather — Housing’s Hockey Stick Lacking Traction
For more than 25 years, a single piece of sugar maple was hung as a decoration on the wall of a barbershop in the town of North Sydney, Nova Scotia. With the initials “WM,” for William Moffatt, carved into the blade, the “Moffatt Stick” has a fascinating history. The world’s oldest known hockey stick was the possession of George Ferneough. The barber’s customers knew it as nothing more than a conversation piece. One day, though, the old stick caught the eye of a local social worker, Mark Presley. When Ferneough retired in 2008, an intrigued Presley bought it for $1,000 and proceeded to query experts at New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University as to the stick’s age. Applying a variety of scientific processes, they concluded the stick had been carved between 1835 and 1838, four decades before the first recognized game of organized hockey took place -- in Montreal in 1875.When Presley sold the stick in 2015, it commanded $300,000 from the Canadian Museum of History, quite the internal rate of return on Presley’s initial investment.
The hockey-stick slump in U.S. home sales has been anything but hidden from view. In July, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) pending home sales index plumbed to a record low, foreshadowing the 3.86 million below-consensus release for the last week of August Existing Home Sales. While new home sales surprised to the upside, popping to a 739,000 rate in July, this effective recovery returned the level to May’s local high of 741,000. The consensus is anticipating a fall back to 695,000 when August is reported Wednesday.
The Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Applications Survey is one of the best real-time gauges of U.S. housing demand. In the week ended September 13, the volume of would-be buyers applying to buy a home clocked a 5.4% weekly gain, the largest in three months.