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Spartana
1-7-11, 2:28pm
Up, down, sideways? I sold my house awhile ago and wasn't planning on buying for another 2 to 3 years but am concerned that maybe this is the time to buy in order to take advantage of the super low prices. Plus I'm not making anything in interest on my "house" money (will buy with cash), So where do you see prices heading in the next year or two? In my area (SoCal) they have gone up over 3% this year and predicted to continue rising.:thankyou:

rose
1-7-11, 5:49pm
I follow a blog -- Patrick.net. I don't think they are going up. http://patrick.net/housing/market.html

IshbelRobertson
1-7-11, 6:07pm
House prices here in the UK seem to be stable - not gaining, but not losing value, either.

My house lost about 50K GBP at the beginning of the housing slump, but seems to be creeping up again.

Tenngal
1-8-11, 1:11pm
I don't think they will go any lower in our area. The failed mortgages seemed to hit us later than the rest of the country and now we are seeing some pretty good deals out there for those who buy from the banks.

dado potato
1-8-11, 4:04pm
We sold in 2005 and have been renting ever since. I am looking for "the right house at the right price"... which to me is a price that breaks even with renting (assuming 3% increases in rent per year, which I consider normal) within 5 years. The calculator I use was published in the NY Times and takes lots of variables into account.

The Zillow price trends in the places where I Am looking are still down: as in, "Care to catch a falling knife?"

Anecdotally, on Trulia I am seeing more price reductions each week. I don't know how long prices can keep dropping. In Japan I think it was something like 14 years. Even if that was it for the decline in Japan, it doesn't mean the decline in the USA cannot go on longer than in Japan.

By the way, I just received from the landlord the new rental rate for next year... zero increase.

Bronxboy
1-9-11, 11:09am
In many areas, housing has probably bottomed out. Examples include those that dropped 50% or more in the crash, and those that never went up much in the boom. Areas such as NYC's inner suburbs, which boomed and never fell much, may have further to fall. It's also hard to see how areas with very poor economies can have housing price increases.

One problem is that there is a lot of outright obsolescence in suburbs. Small post-WWII houses with tiny rooms often weren't all that well built to start with, and few people are willing to pay for a gut renovation or tear-down when so many nearby houses are in poor shape.

Further from cities, many newer tract house developments will never grow into being successful communities and will become increasingly uneconomical as the price of fuel increases. Overall, it's a very mixed picture, though urban and inner suburban are probably a better bet than distant exurbs.

sweetana3
1-9-11, 1:41pm
It depends on exactly where you are looking. Here in downtown Indy, they have not bottomed out. Nothing much is selling downtown no matter what you price it at. The issue is the lack of young professionals looking downtown and the amount of down payment they now need. Few foreclosures here. What few sales take place are often full cash sales.

In the suburbs, it depends on the $$ amount of subdivision. Some of the more desireable ones with great schools are pretty stable. We still have a lot of families looking for housing in the great school districts. In some lower income subdivisions or the areas hit hard with foreclosures, bottom has not been hit. Even Habitat for Housing is having issues with finding qualified buyers. Strange but true and they had to repossess some homes last year.

I cannot say what is happening yet in AZ or NV or places like Cleveland. It really matters whether there are families or others with the income to buy and jobs to support them. So look to the unemployment rate in your specific area. If still really high, the demand for housing may still be low and foreclosures continue.

Spartana
1-10-11, 2:31pm
[QUOTE=sweetana3;2627]It depends on exactly where you are looking.
QUOTE]

That's my main problem - have no idea where I want to buy or live yet. Pac NW, New England or SoCal mountains or ???????????! Once I figure that out then I can actually take advantage of the low prices. Glad to hear no one thinks they will have rapid price increases any time soon.

iris lily
1-10-11, 2:36pm
Our downtown was so incredibly overbuilt with loft condos that anyone with half a brain said 12-18 months before the housing crash: this is not sustainable. So our downtown is very hard hit, yes.

And then, banks are not loaning on condo projects that are still in the hands of developers, so it's really really hard to get a loan on some units. That's slowing down sales in a major way.

While I'm no happy about that, I am kinda stoked that the big empty lot across the street from me, seemingly suitable only for condos according to every developer who shows interest, will not be selling any time soon. More iris farming for me. :laff::laff::laff:

For the good of the neighborhood we need single family houses on the lot across the street from me, but no developer is doing that in the city right now.

Brian
1-10-11, 6:11pm
See where you poke holes in this review for 2011 if you feel.



The Story Of 2011 Will Be The Second US Housing Crash

http://www.businessinsider.com/2011-us-housing-crash-2011-1

Spartana
1-11-11, 1:35pm
See where you poke holes in this review for 2011 if you feel.



The Story Of 2011 Will Be The Second US Housing Crash

http://www.businessinsider.com/2011-us-housing-crash-2011-1

80% drop in prices??!! Scary. Don't agree myself but can see why prices would continue to fall - especially with a new wave of foreclosures. On the local news last night (Orange County, Calif) they said that housing prices in The OC have fallen 3% and sales volume 11% even though the national news said it was an area of price increases earlier in the week. Guess it just depends on what day of the week it is.

razz
1-11-11, 6:34pm
Yikes!!!!!

steve s
1-11-11, 8:51pm
Note the article in the businessinsider is speculcation and opinions. In the author's BIO, she claims to be credible because she has a blog on blogspot and a degree in biology. Lather,rinse,repeat.

One thing you can do to get facts instead of opinions is to use Google Map's real estate. find the area of interest,and click "real estate" under the "more tab. If you select foreclosure listings,you can get a quick idea what kind of what's available in local foreclosures. That might help get an idea of how your hopuse mught do on the market.

BTW, I don't know if the google info is accurate.

jp1
1-11-11, 9:07pm
I believe google takes their listings from a pretty broad range of sites that have real estate listings so I'd assume them to be pretty accurate. Or at least as accurate as the sites they're pulling their info from. Looking at somewhere like Las Vegas is remarkable. Just an absolute BLIZZARD of little red dots denoting houses for sale. And yet I've read that there's still a lot of building going on there because the banks aren't willing to drop the prices on foreclosed houses, so it's just as cheap to buy a newly built one. Why would a buyer go through the headache of buying a used house in a neighborhood full of foreclosures if they can buy brand new for the same price? That's not logical and will eventually have to change. Otherwise vast chunks of las vegas will be deserted, practically new houses that no one wants. The banks probably don't care because they've off-loaded the bad debt onto the federal reserve, and for the moment the city is probably happy to have all the construction jobs. But, soon enough, the city will be in a world of hurt trying to provide services, like policing and trash pickup, to a city with lots of sparsely populated neighborhoods. I'd imagine 10 years from now great chunks of what has been built will start to look and feel like detroit except with dryer, warmer weather.

Spartana
1-12-11, 3:11pm
Did anyone see that TV show about a small town in Calif where almost every single house (very nice McMansion houses) were in foreclosure and vacant? Can't remember the show (20/20, 60 minutes, et al) or the name of the town but it was interesting, and scary, to see a modern day ghost town brought on by the economy.

steve s
1-12-11, 3:41pm
California's Central Valley is full of thes modern ghost developments.

Here's one I stumbled upon near Wasco, CA (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=&mrt=realestate&sll=35.589202,-119.366455&sspn=0.302646,0.529404&attrid=ee6d68e1e5cb9843_&ie=UTF8&rq=1&ev=zi&split=1&radius=17.84&hq=&hnear=&ll=35.642231,-119.345856&spn=0.302445,0.529404&z=11). You can see the clusters of foreclosed places on what I have started calling the Ghost Map.

This (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ytDEsDfSews/SdEZCICQ0hI/AAAAAAAAAPI/D9atwzGqHeA/s1600-h/IMG_1191_1.jpg)is what it looks like when the developer goes bankrupt before the building is completed.

As a potential homeseller,I'd be more concerend about foreclosedplaces that are "OK/normal" more than these white elephants. As an American, I am concerned about these dead zones.

Spartana
1-12-11, 4:17pm
California's Central Valley is full of thes modern ghost developments.

Here's one I stumbled upon near Wasco, CA (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=&mrt=realestate&sll=35.589202,-119.366455&sspn=0.302646,0.529404&attrid=ee6d68e1e5cb9843_&ie=UTF8&rq=1&ev=zi&split=1&radius=17.84&hq=&hnear=&ll=35.642231,-119.345856&spn=0.302445,0.529404&z=11). You can see the clusters of foreclosed places on what I have started calling the Ghost Map.

This (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ytDEsDfSews/SdEZCICQ0hI/AAAAAAAAAPI/D9atwzGqHeA/s1600-h/IMG_1191_1.jpg)is what it looks like when the developer goes bankrupt before the building is completed.

As a potential homeseller,I'd be more concerend about foreclosedplaces that are "OK/normal" more than these white elephants. As an American, I am concerned about these dead zones.

Holy crap!!! As a potential home buyer this is really scary stuff. Wouldn't want to be the only homeowner in a vacant town - unless I could be be mayor, sheriff, the entire football team and the Homecoming Queen :laff:! The whole town's infrastructure must be suffering too due to lack of tax revenue from these houses. I guess when I look at housing prices I really need to look closely at the whole town and county and not just the low price for a nice home.

Brian
1-12-11, 5:43pm
steve s ... the article quotes specific sources.... many. That is what you might base your review upon. Author specialty is stats and her opinion is based upon reversion to the mean "theory" that has held true in RE dips since... well always, so far. We have not yet seen the reversion to the mean in this bubble, in most urban areas, it was deflected by bailouts and suspension of the RE salvage system. A correction delayed usually just increases the amplitude of the pop when markets finally get to do what markets will... "this time is is different" theories aside. The authors 80% correction limit from market top was not a base but a bottom call in panic. Consensus was 20-40% bottom, with a sideways recovery in pricing.
None of this is new, but you do need to look back to 80's, or 70's RE cycles to see similar data points, just the magnitude of the $$ totals of this cycle is the eye popping part for me. Besides the real concerns should be less value points and more interest rates to come, specially for the ARM mortgage reset wave this coming May-August. and what happens to property taxes as the Fed/State cutbacks on transfers hits budgets at the local level. IMO

Brian
1-13-11, 2:15pm
Specific issues with housing prices in 2011 discussed out of yesterdays RealtyTrac report.

The Foreclosure Dump


http://www.cnbc.com/id/41059824


...estimates as many as a quarter of a million foreclosures that should have happened in 2010 will now be pushed into the 2011 numbers, and added to an already huge supply of bank owned properties. The four biggest banks already have close to $7 billion worth of foreclosed properties (REO) on their books, and Fannie and Freddie have about $24 billion collectively. While REO sales make up about one third of all sales in the current market, there is an estimated 3 year supply.

Jonathan
1-17-11, 8:08am
Zillow is for entertainment purposes only. It couldn't even *find* the house I just bought or the one I recently sold...

jrb3
1-17-11, 10:56am
It's like politics: it's all local. In my neck of what used to be the woods :) there's so much built but unoccupied, or partially built, or ready to be built, or in some stage of foreclosure, I don't expect prices to rise greatly for some years now. No problem for me -- we bought outright and remain debt-free -- but it might affect the school system in the medium-term.

Brian
1-17-11, 6:07pm
Excerpt from Hoisington Investment Management Company quarterly report - Dr. Lacy Hunt and Van Hoisington

Then again maybe this will be the first market cycle to not revert to the mean as presage to a bottom?


Housing Drag Persists
Housing will remain a drag on economic activity in 2011. Prices have re-accelerated to the downside over the past four months, as mortgage yields have risen and the housing overhang has increased. The housing overhang, as explained by Laurie Goodman writing in the Amherst Mortgage Insight, "is not caused solely by the number of non-performing loans that exist in the market. The problem also includes the high rates at which re-performing loans are re-defaulting, along with the relatively high rates at which deeply underwater loans that have never been delinquent are running two payments behind for the first time."
Another major problem is that home prices are still too high. An excellent and well-researched study by Danielle DiMartino Booth and David Luttrell in the December 2010 Economic Letter from the Dallas Fed, documents this issue very authoritatively. Booth and Luttrell write, "As gauged by an aggregate of housing indexes dating to 1890, real home prices rose 85% to their highest level in August 2006. They have since declined 33 percentÉ In fact, home prices still must fall 23% if they are to revert to their long-term mean."
From the standpoint of most households, the home is the main component of wealth, not stock market investments. The continuing drop in housing prices serves to underscore the ill advised and likely temporary drop in the personal saving rate that was so critical to economic performance late last year.


Avg US home prices are a bit misleading IMO, as regional and individual markets vary so greatly. If I had a home in outer outer Phoenix I would take no comfort from potential 23% fall as my bottom...If I were in a stable small market in the Midwest I might not be alarmed by that number, as unlikely to fully effect that market.

Bronxboy
1-17-11, 10:08pm
Zillow is for entertainment purposes only. It couldn't even *find* the house I just bought or the one I recently sold...
Zillow can find our house in Maryland, but has been consistently too high in its valuation by 10 or 15%.

Worse yet, in the NYC neighborhood I grew up in, I've seen it use comparable sales from an exclusive neighborhood about a mile away where property values are higher by a factor of two or three.

RosieTR
1-23-11, 1:14am
I follow a blog -- Patrick.net. I don't think they are going up. http://patrick.net/housing/market.html

Interesting. When I put in the Zillow numbers for our current house in Phoenix on the calculator it comes out a wash or slightly in favor of buying. Our house in CO is also a wash but slightly in favor of renting. Rent is going up in CO, down in Phx though overall selling prices are going down in both locales. I have a difficult time seeing how the market would correct a further ~25% in Phx when rent v buy is a wash, except for the idea that loans are more difficult to get now. Our house in CO did not drop as precipitously and so I could see it dropping further than the Phx one. Maybe it's foolish but my one hope is that with people being more averse to buying (or unable to due to credit conditions) they will be more willing to rent and rents will go up. An opposing pressure to this would be still-dropping housing prices where owners need to move but aren't going into foreclosure and want to rent out the house. I've definitely seen more rentals than a year ago; for sale houses seem about the same.

Jemima
1-25-11, 9:20pm
This article on the continuing drop in housing prices might be of interest: http://tinyurl.com/6xunpo4

Becky33850
2-2-11, 9:35am
Speaking as a realtor, I can say that Zillow is unreliable at BEST. Trulia is not much better. I've found properties on both that were sold a year prior. Prices are fluctuating here, but not by much. They are staying down. Predictions in our area are that recovery is 10 years away at best -- but no one has a crystal ball.

I live in Central FL and it's bad here. 60% of all the homes in my area are distressed. For instance, homes that listed over $200K three years ago are now going for $75-90K. Our unemployment is over 13%.

I am selling my retirement home in FL to move to Austin. Much better economy and much better market. FL is great if you really are retired and not like me! I retired here at 45 and have since watched my retirement evaporate so I needed to work again.

If you have the means to buy, do so. You'll never see prices this low again in your lifetime.

clear water
2-8-11, 1:03am
for a number of years now people have bought houses with the idea of constantly rising prices and quick profit taking. My husband and I bought our house for shelter, built a nice two bedroom suite for income. Then built 4 covered parking spots (we live in Canada lots of Snow) built raised garden beds and constructed a greenhouse. So for Harmony ,if your main concern about buying in 2009 is that the price did not go up, how about the positive things. Do you like living where you are? Are you happier owning than renting? In Canada we can't write any of our morgage costs off. So people are more concerned with paying it off . My advice don't get too far in debt, pay off your house as soon as possible. Good luck

Spartana
2-14-11, 4:17pm
for a number of years now people have bought houses with the idea of constantly rising prices and quick profit taking. My husband and I bought our house for shelter, built a nice two bedroom suite for income. Then built 4 covered parking spots (we live in Canada lots of Snow) built raised garden beds and constructed a greenhouse. So for Harmony ,if your main concern about buying in 2009 is that the price did not go up, how about the positive things. Do you like living where you are? Are you happier owning than renting? In Canada we can't write any of our morgage costs off. So people are more concerned with paying it off . My advice don't get too far in debt, pay off your house as soon as possible. Good luck

I agree, I never really understood the whole "house as an investment" thing if it's where you are going to live and it's reasonably price for your income. I mean we buy cars (and pretty much everything else) that depreciates and never feel we made "bad" investments because they were something we needed and used. As for me, I'm fortunate that I can buy a small place with cash and if I sell it 2 or 4 or 10 years from now and get "something" for it I'll consider it a good deal. If I break even it'll ber an even better deal. And if I make a profit it'll be a great deal!