File this under posts I wish I had written. Calculated Risk has a new post that adjusts home sales for population. It is must reading.

A few people have noted that all of the worst since … articles have understated the depth of the problem. The problem in comparing worst, say existing home sales to the number 20 years ago is that it fails to adjust for population growth and hence, since this is a growing country, understates the degree of severity. Calculated Risk makes a calculation that does a good job of accounting for that factor.

I won’t copy and paste their post. They did a great job of analyzing the data and deserve all of the traffic they get.