romorris

A Sustainable Housing Rebound Is No Slam Dunk

Maybe, but don't make any bets that the tax credit will go away in November. It looks like it will be around quite a bit longer.

Markets Are Working: CA Home Sales Increase +100% as Home Prices Fall

The house CA people buy are a lot cheaper. They are buying the crappy houses [at foreclosure half the time]. It's not the prices of houses that has decreased so much, as the quality of the houses bought.

Prices will appear to go down when the people bottom fish. In actuality, prices have not fallen all that terribly much at all for any given house. Prices of houses sold down 40% - I'll buy it. Price of houses in general - down maybe 20% tops.

Housing Affordability Proves Elusive

There's nothing "lost" here. It's just a transfer of wealth from the foolish or the comfortable to the smart or lucky brave ones who found the courage to bail before the thing blew up (or in the case of realtors, brokers and bankers ... the crooked made $). Dumping my Pasadena, CA house in 2005 turned me into a millionaire (but a million dollars isn't what it used to be).

U.S. Housing: The Big Picture by the Numbers

I like the attempt to quantify the situation, but it seems to me that the relationship between media value and per capita income in the base year would likely throw chart 1 off completely for all years. Doesn't it assume that the relationship was "right" in the base year ? If the assumption isn't true, it would seem to me that the reasoning is flawed. I agree that prices are historically high relative to incomes, but I am far from certain that this reasoning shows that.