Posted on 07/29/2008 7:15:01 AM PDT by decimon
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Prices of U.S. single-family homes plunged at a record pace in May from a year earlier, with each of the 20 regions monitored showing annual declines for a second month, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case Shiller home price indexes reported on Tuesday.
The S&P/Case Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas fell 0.9 percent in May from April, bringing the measure down 15.8 percent from May 2007.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Just kidding. I don't have a fence.
How they report changes in house prices is deceiving. Going down 15% from some high is not equal to up 15% from some low.
Oil next?
All these problems would be gone if only Bush was not in office. /sarc
It’s the msm pounding the Bush administration for all it’s worth. Prices are dropping from super inflated highs in areas where there was lots of speculation and lending to people that weren’t credit worthy. They went up fast and now they’re coming down fast. Now the average buyer will be able to buy a house without mortgaging 2/3 of their income for the rest of their lives.
Using that as a headline wouldn't be as sensational, so they use the year to year comparison, which makes it seem like prices should be zero any time now.
for later
The problems would be gone if the federal government limited its involvement in the mortgage industry to fraudulent practices. It’s the government’s insistence that banks make highly risky loans that led to all this.
This is great news, as maybe now my two kids (as well as millions more like them) can finally afford a house of their own.
Big Mistake is to look at houses as investments. They are a place to live, and the cheaper they are, the more people can afford the American dream.
What a deal.
My guess: some sellers have been thinking they could “wait out” the downturn, and sell at their asking price. It’s not happening, and this is why prices are falling...so they are finally deciding to sell for what their home is now worth.
Far from being bad news this is quite good. When the home owner rids himself of the delusional “my home has gold door knobs” syndrome and realizes it is worth only what someone is willing to pay, the next leg up of this particular segment of the markets will begin.
I think you two have the right attitude. Too many people trying to get rich on the cheap has not been a good thing.
Let a house be a home.
The home architects are saying the new trend is for new homes to be a lot smaller but very high quality with lot's of amnenities. The Mcmansion days are over for most areas.
My neighbor is stuck with a 4800 sq foot home that he is upside down by around 250k and prices are still dropping in our area. Sadly property taxes are not.
Shillings numbers are always much higher than what is reported elsewhere. His numbers are based on 20 large metropolitan area which are heavy on the coasts and in highly depressed areas like Cleveland and Detroit. It does not measure what is going on in fly over country. Yes, if you live in big cities in Calfornia, Florida, Arizona, the East Coast, Detroit, and Cleveland, prices have fallen drastically. Elsewhere prices are mostly down, but only modestly.
Sounds good to me.
Good point but mine was different. Or would have been if I'd spelled it out.
A $200,000 house rising 10% has risen by $20,000. Should that $200,000 house increase in value to $600,000, and then drop by 10%, the drop will be $60,000.
Good.
As someone who works in the real estate industry, I am tired of seeing out-of-control real estate markets like California, the D.C. area, and Florida skew housing markets across the country.
3 bedroom houses should never(except in very unique locations, perhaps) cost $750K and up. That is stupid, and is finally correcting itself.
Some outfit breezed into our little corner of NW Arizona a year or so ago. They bought the last available 65 acres clear up to the BLM fence, bulldozed away most of the Joshua trees and replaced them with lots and paved streets. About 200 or so homes were to be built. To date, there have been four, with no sales.
The prices they were asking were double of what we paid for ours, and the state obligingly raised the taxes accordingly to reflect the new "value".
Those four houses? Oh yeah, they are now being rented.
I think prices will continue to drop for at least the next year. A lot of people are holding off on purchasing until the market bottoms out. With skittish investors in mortgage-backed securities, loans will be tougher to get and that will force prices down further; closer to where they should be based on costs of replacement or actual costs to build.
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