There’s awesome, and then there’s awesome squared.

Welcome to the latter.

Oh, Akon, you are such a gentleman.

“Nothing you can compare to your neighborhood Ho.”

Oh, stop!  You are too kind.

The story here was that I had agreed to do stand up comedy last weekend, but wasn’t particularly in the mood for joke-telling (especially given that the venue was a standard comedian trap — a privately hosted party). So, instead, I decided to employ the audience as the cast and crew in a YouTube video.

The results were mixed. Obviously I had little control over what we ended up recording, but it was a promising experiment. I sort of like the idea of having strangers collaborate spontaneously on a web project. It’s very internet ethos-y. On the bright side, it may be an entirely new form of performance art. Fun.

This is cross-posted from my blog, but I think it’s relevant since Russ has recently been egging on my naysaying. For the “wispy, ethereal” Mepper, I believe you’ll find a lot of hard numbers in here.

Also, look for more posting from me now that I have no day job weighing me down, a schedule where I am determined to write pretty much 24/7, and a New Jersey to complain about…

Today’s headlines have been overwhelmed with dancing in the streets. No, not the dancing in Libya, though that’s there too, but the dancing over the incredible housing recovery that now has cold, hard data to back it up.

Now, I like data as much as the next person – probably much more, in fact – and I miss aspects of my old job at Glide where I got to play with numbers and charts and such. So let’s look at this alleged data and see what kind of exciting housing recovery is already underway!

First, go here and read the brief article about the July home sales data. Please note the screaming headline about the 7% jump in existing home sales. Also, note that it’s an AP story, so it’s not Boston-centric despite being on boston.com… it was just the first place the story with raw numbers popped up on Google News.

If you’re scoring at home, the key stats therein are that sales totals were up 7.2% and sale prices were down (yes, down) 15.1%. Is this the economic model of recovery? Let’s run some numbers and find out.

But wait! Hold the phone! These numbers are apples and oranges. 7.2% is a month-over-month rate, from June 2009 to July 2009, while -15.1% is a year-over-year rate, from July 2008 to July 2009. So to do a real comparison, we have to find the year-over-year rate (much more stable, accurate, and revealing than monthly fluctuations) for home sales.

Ah, here we go. Hm. Only 5.0% year-over-year. That’s not 7.2%, but it’s still pretty good.

So, back to our experiment. We can run the actual house-price numbers in a minute, but I’m curious to see how it plays out in a simple economic model with nice round numbers:

Lets say you sell widgets. Rather expensive widgets, with a target price of $100. And since they’re expensive, you’re only looking to sell 100 of these a month. Keep in mind that in actual America, instead of our model, you’re actually looking to sell many more widgets and for a much higher price, since 2008 numbers are really depressed in both metrics from where you want to be. But we’re running a simple model to see if the current pace is growth/recovery or not, so let’s leave that on the side for a moment.

2008 – 100 widgets for $100 each

Great. Now, let’s run the sales growth rate of 5.0% units sold and the sales price declination of 15.1% and see what happens over time.

2009 – 105 widgets for $84.90 each
2010 – 110.3 widgets for $72.08 each
2011 – 115.8 widgets for $61.20 each
2012 – 121.6 widgets for $51.96 each
2013 – 127.6 widgets for $44.11 each
2014 – 134 widgets for $37.45 each
2015 – 140.7 widgets for $31.80 each
2016 – 147.7 widgets for $27.00 each
2017 – 155.1 widgets for $22.92 each

Great news! You increased sales by 55% in 10 years. The only trouble is that, over the same time period, your sales price declined by, uh, 77%. So unless you were making an 80%+ margin to begin with (who does this?), this is very bad, because you are now losing money on each widget and thus selling more widgets is actually a bad thing. And even if your margin was 80%, your margin has now shrunk to just under 3%, which means the odds are you aren’t really supporting your business anymore.

But this probably doesn’t make it clear enough. Let’s look at your gross revenue over time:

2008 – $10,000.00
2009 – $8,914.50
2010 – $7,950.42
2011 – $7,086.96
2012 – $6,318.34
2013 – $5,628.44
2014 – $5,018.30
2015 – $4,474.26
2016 – $3,987.90
2017 – $3,554.89

Yeah. That should put it as starkly as it needs to be seen. Gross revenue is down more than 64% in a decade with steady declines throughout. Certainly looks like a winning business model to me. Try walking into a venture capitalist’s office with this ten-year revenue trajectory (even in this economy) and see how quickly you get kicked out the door.

If you’re wondering what this looks like against the actual housing numbers, it’s going into July 2017 with an annual pace of 8.15 million existing home sales at a median price of $40,889 each.

Think about that for a second. That’s not a recovery, that’s a fire sale. A full-fledged housing panic.

How many of you paying $178,000 for houses right now would be heartened to hear that you can flip it in ten years for $41,000 in a market glutted with 55% more homes?

But the numbers are actually even worse than this. Because the July 2009 numbers, by their own admission, have been massively propped up by the $8,000 tax credit that’s set to expire in the fall. Left to their own devices, market forces would have led to far fewer sales and probably at an even lower price, since people don’t negotiate as hard for a deal when they know they’re getting a fat rebate (see also: Cash for Clunkers).

The indicator that this new report isn’t really good news is also buried in the story, that despite the increase in the number of sales, the stockpile of existing homes sitting on the market actually increased 7.9% (more than the 7.2% sales jump!) from 3.8 million to 4.1 million. They cover this by saying it’s a 9.4 month supply at the current sales rates, which is unchanged, but that fact alone should show you that the increase in sales isn’t outpacing the increase in market glut. Which may be part of why prices are down 15%.

But the largest problem of all these is not that the numbers are inflated by the incentive deals like tax rebates or Cash for Clunkers, it’s that such incentive programs actually create unsustainable bubbles which will crash even harder than the market would have by itself. This summer, everyone who was even thinking about buying a house or a new car is doing so, because of all the super-bonus incentives. Once those incentives expire, absolutely no one will buy a house or a car for some time, because it looks like an even worse deal than it would have otherwise, because people have come to expect a super incentive to buy. So the rebound effect of these programs is to create a quick brief spike that falls even further on the back-end.

I know the principle is to fool people into thinking that everything’s better with the spike so that stocks go up and people just start believin’ again and somehow we’re on an upward spiral. But when the super spiked data still has you on a pace to get to a median existing home sale price of $41,000 in ten years, somehow I don’t think the goal has been fulfilled. So go get your party hats and streamers if you want to, but I’m going to pass on this parade just yet.