Posted on 01/18/2008 5:08:33 PM PST by Lorianne
Think the current housing downturn and the subprime mortgage mess is the worst of the housing market’s problems? Not so, according to a report published this month in the Journal of the American Planning Association.
About to wreak havoc on the housing market are the 78 million American baby boomers who will “retire, relocate, and eventually withdraw from the housing market,” according to report authors Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography in the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California, and SungHo Ryu, an associate planner with the Southern California Association of Governments.
Using demographic data to show that individuals in their mid-60s tend to sell more often than buy, the authors contend that when boomers — a “dominant force in the housing market” — start reaching the age of 65 in the year 2011, a market shift will occur. Some retirees will be looking to downsize, others will relocate to warmer climes, while others will move to nursing homes, says Mr. Myers. As they transition out of the housing market or look to sell their homes, in some states there will be “more homes available for sale than there are buyers for them.” Home prices will soften.
The “sell-off” will create a sizeable hurdle for the housing market, because as Mr. Myers puts it, “It isn’t money that buys property, it’s warm bodies. If you don’t have enough warm bodies to fill up the space, the space stays empty.”
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
OK, if its too late to stop them, send them on, they’ll be welcome.
Aw, thanks! Are there any liberals around? My dad has no one to argue with since he retired. Now he just rants and raves and gets aggravated because my mom and I agree with him.
Yeah, libs are most everywhere, but East Tennessee is pretty heavily conservative. Now if they’re headed to west Tennessee, that’s like a whole other state with libs all over the place.
A lot of them have already bailed from my hood. In truth, not many of the seem to have ever arrived in the first place. It sort of went straight from Greatest Generation and Silent Generation to Xers. I think most of the boomers in this metro area tended to go more for the larger McMansion type homes from the get go, the hood where I live is a hodge podge from early 1900s to preset, mostly so called “mid 20th century.”
This is what I’ve been saying all along. During the last great housing recession in the early 1980’s, the boomers were still raising families, and needed those three, four, and five bedroom homes. Now, they can get by with one or two bedrooms quite comfortably, as long as there’s a family room, or den. They’re not going to be shoring up the prices of the McMansions like they used to.
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