J.Alan Greenspan has kept the housing bubble going with low interest rates. In addition, Dubya issued an executive order last year ordering Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to finance homes with no money down! This skullduggery enticed renters to buy homes that they couldn't afford. They are going to be the first ones to face foreclosure in the 2006 real estate crash. So much for minority home ownership!

There's far more heat than light on this topic. Prices "stagnating" is hardly an economic emergency. The run-up has been extreme, but the fundamentals are still fairly strong. A respite is hardly a disaster.

Sure, some people overpaid, or more likely overextended. That'll sort itself out.

Well, "irrational exhuberence" would go a long way to explain the rising real estate phenomenon that goes way beyond any rational economics.

Sure, it will be corrected but it will not be pretty for many people. Good-bye middle class, hello stratification.

And now the vultures will swoop in and buy up forclosed homes at a fraction of their real value ( the unpaid mortgage) and make another few billion dollars from the poor suckers who got trapped by Dubya's largess. Buying a home with no money down, as per his directive, is buying a one way ticket to financial ruin. Every effort is being made to start the real estate's bubble to burst so that those vultures can get fatter and the poor working persons expense

Ages has it's benefits - I've seen all this before Three times!!! The crash in real estate prices is inevitable, we all have unreasonable expectations. I'll be real sad when my house is worth 35% less than it is today, but I don't want to sell because I like my home. I'll ride it out - being older also means I have a smaller mortgage than most, so it won't hurt too much - just psychological hurt...

I'm a first-time homeowner and a firm believer in what goes up must come down so I did not buy more house than I could afford, but I still worry about how the market downturn will affect me. I mean, who knew buying a house had all this extra drama attached to it?

IS AUSTRALIAN MARKET OUR WAKE UP CALL???
After reading the above article, it just validates my concerns about the overheated real estate market that it's not just all talk but actually happening in Australia already. And it sounds just like the economists predictions: fleeing investors, negative equity, foreclosures and so forth. I don't know about the rest of you but it makes me very nervous just to think of the outcome in our own backyard if the bubble bursts.
How is it that we live in the country that is considered to be a world power but yet are at complete mercy to such market ups and downs without any control of our own? Whatever happened to "...my home is my castle..." hard to imagine your own castle shrinking to a birdhouse if the bubble bursts. What's a homeowner to do to protect ones castle?

Isabella: It's not "your" castle if your mortgage is close to 100% of the house value. The bank owns the house! Buying a house with 10% (or zero) down, is a gamble. And those who did it late in the game (2003 or later), bought at the peak, and will be burned: soon their houses will be worth less than their mortgages. Unfortunately, being a world superpower does not make you inmune to the laws of economics. But being a well-informed consumer, you can protect yourself. I sold my house due to a corporate relocation in 2005. Now I rent a house: It would be nuts to buy at the peak of the boom. (If I had small children, and if I were sure that I would keep the house for 10 yrs or longer, then perhaps I would buy).

I've sold real estate since early 90's in one of the hottest and overinflated markets in the country. Helped clients from all over the country and Europe. What I hear from them is a major concern about our real estate market and where it's heading. There's nothing like being in the frontlines of this battle where you try to convince your buyers who are looking at the current real estate market as a 'get rich quick' scheme and stretching themselves beyond the extremes to afford the maluscule downpayment (if any at all) thinking, without a doubt, that it will be worth 150 times more in 3 months time. You try to explain to them that the condo they are planning to put a deposit on, hoping to flip in a year to make huge profits, they won't even be able to close on, let alone carry if not sold right away... It's an epidemic where developers of the new best thing on the block supposedly are trying to control the speculators, but when everything is said and done, their entire complex is sold to speculators. 95% of those buyers are looking to cash out at completion of the project. How do they do that? They put their property on the market right away and try to get the most money for it. Well, if 95% of a just finished building goes on the market right away, who do you think starts coming down in price first? Individuals that are not able to financially carry that unit without selling it and cashing out. They try to lower the price of a unit first to attract the buyer, then they lower it some more, then they come to the point when they can't pay the next months mortgage and they stat 'giving the unit away' just to get some money out of it before it forclouses. And there will be at least a few who'll let it go into forclosure since they have no money down on the place to begin with. What do you suppose happens to the rest of the complex as far as values?
There will be close to 80,000 units closing within the next year or so in just one market that I'm working at, and that market is used to absorb about 5,000 a year but fueled mostly by speculators.
I don't even want to start with creative financing options that are available to the public so we can have an option of buying so much more of a house we cannot afford. But at least the banks are starting to wake up from this nightmare and starting to think that it may not be that healthy after all.
If any of you keep track of stock market, you may have heard that a lot of major real estate executives cashed out their stocks in the past few months. Why would that do that if the market and economy is so strong? I always believed that it's better to learn from someone else's mistakes. Hey, maybe they learned from the stock bubble...

A collapse in real estate prices is inevitable. Having recently sold my condo, I'm looking forward to picking up a house on the Jersey Shore sometime in the spring of 2007.

www.shorebubble.blogspot.com

According to the article Australian prices fell 10 percent? Hardly a crash.

email: epgroupinc@yahoo.com if you'd like to know how to protect your equity in case of market correction

DJ - 10% in a year or so. That could carry on for another few years if past crashes are anything to go by. So property might end up at 50% of its peak value when the falls finally stop.

The UK is having exactly the same problem. House prices do not need to fall to trigger economic problems if your economy has become reliant on consumer borrowing to prop it up. When prices stall, consumer spending plunges, growth drops and job losses start to rise. If anyone in the US has any doubts about where the property bubble will lead, take a look at the UK. The market has passed the peak and house prices are edging down. But volumes of sales have plunged and consumers are no longer borrowing to buy consumer goods, they are borrowing to pay their bills.

A world recession is inevitable now. Those in the US who think it can be avoided do not realize how much of the economy is propped up by borrowing against rising asset prices. The rises cannot continue at current rates forever, and when they stop, the US economy will go into sharp reverse.

Last month a major publication finally wrote about Harvard's housing study which puts all this housing bubble talk in it's proper perspective. In a Wall Street Journal article entitled, " What's Eating Home-Builder Stocks" by Scott Patterson he states:

In its recent report, "The State of the Nation's Housing: 2005," researchers at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies said new-home construction shows no sign of declining in the near future. Harvard's economists found that the inventory of new homes for sale today, measured against the pace of home sales, is near its lowest level ever.
"Given this small backlog, new-home sales would have to retreat by more than a third (33%) -- and stay there for a year or more -- to create anywhere near a buyer's market," the study said.

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112517651740524788,00-search.html?KEYWORDS=Scott+Patterson&COLLECTION=wsjie/archive

If you want to read the entire Harvard study or the Executive Summary, click:
http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/publications/markets/son2005/index.html

In Aspen, Colo., according to Gary Feldman, a broker for Coates Reid Waldron, a million will get you a two-bedroom condo, if you're lucky. "Aspen has limited real estate that's available, and our political climate since the mid-1970s has been severe anti-growth," he says. "It's turned Aspen real estate into a limited commodity * chased by the world's wealthiest people."

http://www.forbes.com/realestate/2005/04/28/cx_sc_0429home.html?partner=yahoo

All across the United States reporters and publications are trying to figure out what is going on with the housing market. Much of the situation involves too little "supply" being chased by rather unlimited "demand". Over and over in the research literature economists are telling us that housing supply constricting regulations and policy have been hurting housing affordability and yet nobody in the "news" business seems to want to do a competent job of reporting that fact.

Reporters and media people need to start to realize that pumping up this "bubble talk" at this point is rather foolish.

Frank Pecarich
Ventura, California

a real estate property is worth what it can be let out for over it's financing lifetime. any disruptions to this rule will correct itself

I live in the North East and make a better living than most people. I constantly wonder how people are affording houses at these prices. For $200,000 you can buy a house in the slums that needs a total rehab. My friend bought a 5 unit house and lives in the crumiest one room unit in the building and uses the celler for a living room because he can't generate enough income from the rental units to make the mortgage. I am renting a nice place fairly cheap and saveing my money so that when there is blood in the streets I can pick up a very nice house for a good deal. All indicators are pointing down for real estate, don't be a speculator in the market now or you will loose money. I have shorted several home builders stock and feel comfortable watching these stocks go down and my account go up as the balloon starts its deflation. Good luck all, be careful and not blind to the writing on the wall!!

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