“I’m hoping for prices to drop,” “A drop of 5% to 10% in California and southern Florida “probably would be enough to bring sales back.”
It is, just like all his other statements, merely a truthless attempt to affect market psychology. He knows prices are going down, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Except, of course, spin it.
Obviously he doesn’t want the impending price drop to further scare the market. When prices drop, he wants people to say, “that’s not the beginning of a crash. If I buy my house after that drop, I’ll be buying when sales are about to come back and things are about to turn around.”
To bad he is not looking at the real data. For the umpteenth time, I will say that in many neighborhoods here in SD pricing has already dropped well below the 5-10% level.
In fact, if we limited the conversations to condos only, I would flip it around and say show me condo complexes that have not dropped by at least 10%. For every one you show me I bet I can show you 3 that have.
I think he’s talking about real estate nationally. And if he thinks it’ll drop at least that much nationally (and he probably does, or he wouldn’t have decided on that type of spin), then it’ll probably drop a lot more in San Diego.
Well, of course, if you take the intersection of the San Diego and condo sets, you are going to look at the very segment that is falling first (and possibly fastest). But if you were to look at the union of the California and Florida sets (both SFH and condos), you’ll probably agree that overall prices still haven’t moved much.
That is the exact reason why the statistics reported by the media are simply not useful. That is why I have to spend a half hour at listing appointments with condo owners explaining the every single stat they have heard over the past 5 years are essentially meaningless.
Try telling the UTC first time homeowner that bought a condo about a national number or an intersection of union of sets. Try telling the guy that bought a 1 bedroom off of Hyde Park for an investment about it, or the couple who bought a condo in Eastlake. In all of these neighborhoods people are looking at 20% in the BEST case.
The ONLY meaningful statistic for homeowners is what references the type of home the live in, in the very local area that they live in. ANYTHING else will mislead them.
The disservice that has been done over the past several years will indeed come back around in the form of people losing the homes. Plain and simple. I am not justifying the bad decisions they made, please know that. However if one good thing could come out of all this it would be for NAR, CAR, AND SDAR to tell people to turn a deaf ear to national stats and focus on local stats.
There are more then enough resources to find out local stats by housing type and zip code.
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