I jumped too soon…it’s the same story that we had online yesterday. It came on their online newspaper at late morning, and then made it to print today.
Here’s the e-mail I sent the writers:
You two did a fabulous job covering a difficult topic. You provided a complete, factual account. Although you will probably get hate mail from real estate bulls, you can rest assured that you covered the facts.
I liked the personal stories of the 3 sellers, which show us the true reality out there today: homes are taking longer to sell, driving down prices. Sellers are getting frustrated.
I would like to see an improvement in the quality of the real estate professionals interviewed. That part of the article was tainted toward the bull case, and those people made many wrong statements.
John Karevoll said that between now and fall, pricing will go up and down. He doesn’t see the drama in the price declines. Ask him to explain how the median is up so much, when individual home prices are down over 10%. I can
give you many examples of people coming to closing, owing money. Most who bought in 2004 and 2005 and are selling, are losing money today. This is not a matter of a few homes going up or down in price. Real estate doesn’t work like that. It’s a slow moving ship, and the ship has reversed course.
Ask Karevoll to dig inside the numbers. Ask him , “Isnt’ it true John that median is up because sales are skewed to the higher end because the first time buyer is priced out due to rising interest rates and high home prices. Isn’t it true that each individual home is worth less today than it was last winter?”
My thought is that Karevoll wants to toe the real estate line, since the NAR is one of his biggest clients. He would be uninterested in providing data to show you the true state of the market.
Steve Doyle, Brookfield Homes’ president, is likewise interested in spinning the facts. He says that ‘When you look at economics, we still have positive job growth”.
He’s right, but it’s a much smaller positive than it was a few years ago. Most employment in the last few years was in construction, real estate, and lending, and in retail and restaurants as people took our the home equity of ever rising home prices to go on shopping sprees. As housing cools, thse industries that have been our major growth, will keep weakening. Our manufacturing sector is shrinking. Nokia is now thinking of leaving. The 44,000 people per year leaving has left many vacancies for doctors, police
officers, engineers, cashiers. I keep seeing Hiring signs at so many stores. I read that high housing prices are making it harder for SD to recruit surgeons! The outlook for the San Diego job market is bleak. My hope is that biotech will some day take off again. Our biotech companies
are small, and my friend who is a manager at one of them, is concerned for her job prospects and is interviewing in the other big biotech cities.
All in all, a good article, although a little slanted toward the idea that real estate might go up again in the fall. This is not a soft landing, but a landslide.
