Real Estate Half Full Or Half Empty

TW: The meme factories have moved from 2nd derivative gains, to green shoots to the recession is just about over. Perhaps all of them are true. But I remain skeptical.

This is the Bloomberg headline on June's existing home sales:
"U.S. Economy: New-Home Sales Climb 11%, Most in Eight Years"

This is Floyd Norris' take at NYT:
"Did new home sales really surge in June? No.

...That calculation is based on seasonally adjusted annual rates, which went from a rate of 346,000 in May to 384,000 in June, for the highest rate since November.

A year ago, when there were headlines about how bad sales were, the annual rate for June was 488,000, which was then the lowest for any month since 1991. Somehow a headline that says “sales fall 21 percent from year-ago levels” would not sound the same as the headlines that are now running.

In actual sales, the preliminary estimate is that 36,000 homes were sold, up 3,000 from May but down 9,000 from last June.

To put it another way, this was the second worst June since they began counting new home sales in 1963. It was not quite as bad as June 1982, when the country was mired in a deep recession and interest rates were sky high. Then 34,000 new homes were sold.

There are twice as many households in America as there were then, so relative to population this was the worst June ever, by far..."
http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/homes-sales-up-11-and-down-21/

Then there is this via the Big Picture blog:
“National New Home Sales, on a monthly basis, don’t even add up to half of the total foreclosure activity in California alone in a single month.”
-Mark M Hanson