Welcome to Thoughts on the Market.

I'm Jay Bakko, co-head of U.S. Securitized Products Research for Morgan Stanley.

And I'm James Egan, the other co-head of U.S. Securit has products research.

And in this edition of the podcast, we'll be talking about the Red Hot U.S. Housing

Market.

It's Tuesday, July 6th, at 10 a.m. in New York.

Now, Jim, wherever I look, I'm getting reports on the housing market and how strong

it's going.

We've seen reports of record, home sale data, home price appreciation.

What's the right report to look at and how strong is the housing market and where do we go

from here?

There are a number of different ways to look at home prices right now.

And no matter how we look at them, we're really seeing record growth.

The case Schiller number that came out in late June, it's a two-month lag number.

So we're talking about April, we're at 14.6% year-over-year growth, non-seasonally adjusted.

That is faster than at any point in the early 2000s.

Our prior peak was low 14s in the 2004, 2005 timeframe.

So that repeat sales index really takes into account the mix of homes that are being

sold and shows us that we've never been growing faster.

Another way to look at this is the median price of existing home sales.

Those are up almost 25% year-over-year as of the most recent print, which is far and

away.

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