I tend to disagree a little. Barring a national calamity I think the slow recovery has begun. 18-24 months ago, every fifth lawn was brown and prices were dropping by the day. Prices went below 50% off peak, it was not uncommon to find three or four houses for sale on a street of 10-15 houses. There were national news stories and videos posted of how frequent the repos were and how many pools were becoming green.

Now it looks pretty normal, maybe one house for sale on most streets, a few brown lawns, but not many. My own tract was featured on a news story with video of the brown lawns two years ago, now there isn’t a single one. It’s not all roses, it hasn’t retuned to 2005, but it’s not 2008 anymore.
I just looked at a house onlne that listed today in my tract which is the same model as mine, it’s 100k more than i paid 15 months ago, and I’ll bet it’s in escrow within a week.

Here’s some stats, In 2008, in 92592, there were more than 500 active (non pending, non shorts) at any one time, you had to zoom in on redfin to get them to appear. Today there is 165, if you include shorts it’s 278. The total pending is 475. There are almost twice as many houses pending as for sale, this was not the case last year. The condos i was looking at as an investment have gone up and rarely are available for sale other than shorts. I’d say the 100k ones I was looking at are 120k, and the 140k ones are 160k or a little more. It’s not crazy, but it’s been steady and inventory has dwindled. Not sure about the bidding because I haven’t bid lately, I kinda feel I missed the boat on buying the rental and need an interest rate shock to get back to late 08/early 09 pricing. I was buying my primary home at the time and didn’t feel I had the time to handle both transactions, but those prices may never come back, they were likely the overcorrection up here.

Houses on land or the high end ranches are in a different boat, they seem to be about a year behind, some deals I’ve seen lately are better than they were a year ago, not sure what the activity is because i hate land.

The real problem is moving forward, we had so many repos that actually went through in the last 24 months that there just isn’t enough left to have tsuinami even if one comes in s.d. A lot of the bubble bought houses have already been churned through, I’d say more than half of the 2005/2006 stock has turned over at half off, so we are almost out of ammo. We are entering a busy season with about a month’s worth of inventory and the vacant unlisteds, while they exist are about 1/10th of what they were. The only disclaimer to this is that I only look at one zip code, your results may vary and scardey is shopping in murrieta, but for the most part, temecula and murrieta go hand in hand, everything else outside of those two towns is a completely different story and always has been.