volume of housing transactions. Now, a lot of people jump in right there and they say, but prices are still going up. If we think about where inflation is in the economic sequence, inflation comes at the end. It's a lagging economic indicator. Inflation often peaks in the middle of a recession. And when we talk about the housing sector, we have to separate volume versus price. Volume leads price. So we're always going to see a significant decline in the volume of the housing sector before we see a decline in prices. When you say the volume of the housing sector, what do you mean? Volume of transactions. So we see new home sales, for example, down 30% from peak. We see existing home sales down 25, 30% from peak. And the reason that's important, it's actually kind of funny. Existing home sales, by that I mean a home that's already been built that someone is living in, the transactions in the existing home sale market only make up about 90% of the total housing volume. But it really (34/57)
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