This news raised a few eyebrows...
The number of vacant homes waiting to be sold surged 34% to 2.1 million at the end of 2006 compared with the end of 2005, by far the fastest increase ever recorded, the Census Bureau reported Monday.
... at Angry Bear, at Beat the Press, at Calculated Risk, just to cover the ABC's down my blogroll. And indeed, the jump looks pretty impressive:
I can't think of any particularly positive spin to put on that, but I did notice that there seems to have been a compositional change underneath that number: The share of for-sale vacant housing units accounted for by multi-unit properties rose by about 3 percentage points:
I don't know what that means -- if anything -- but if anyone follows Dean Baker's advice and gives the vacancy report the coverage he thinks it it deserves, maybe they will explain it.