Here are the pre- and post-1990s correction rents, prices, and monthly payments as requested by a couple of commenters:
Due to falling rates, the correction was more dramatic from a cashflow perspective. While a typical single family home fell 16% from peak to trough, the monthly payment on that home fell by 31% during the same period. (Incidentally, these are not median prices, but aggregate home price changes as measured by the Case-Shiller index, which measures same-home sales).
While bubble bursts do sometimes have triggers (I always harbored a suspicion that tax-time selling to cover the IRS bill kicked off the big NASDAQ decline), what really kills them is exhaustion. At a certain point, there just aren’t any more buyers — at least, not at the bubble-peak prices, anyway. In the case of the NASDAQ bubble, there were many mini-selloffs along the way, but none of them turned into the correction until exhaustion was achieved. A commenter suggested that the move up to 10.5% mortgage rates in 1990 triggered the downturn, but rates were above that level for most of the 1986-1989 period, and it didn’t matter. Same story.
Similarly, people will probably try to blame interest rates for the housing-bust-in-progress. But rates have been rising since 2003 and that didn’t start to matter until exhaustion set in.
Exhaustion, I tell you!
I suspect that payment chart
I suspect that payment chart is scarily similar to our current chart.
Prices ran up with fallen rates making the payment run up slower however, they still exhausted their ability to pay.
When it turned, the payments corrected at about 15% a year to return below where it started.
Rich, did you happen to pull the data for 1980-1985?
Rich,
Great post, I’ve been
Rich,
Great post, I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time (too lazy to do it myself). My request would be to extend the time scale to the right up to today (keeping the same underlying indexes, i.e. Case-Shiller, BLS rent CPI, FM 30-year fixed). One comment regarding the rent CPI: is this San Diego-specific or national? A local one would be vastly superior, as San Diego rents have outpaced the national averages for a long time now. I suspect that if you plot these graphs up to today, it will reveal that:
1. Mid-90s prices were incredibly cheap when measured by payment/rent ratios.
2. The current bubble is not as large as commonly thought, when measured by this metric. I would venture to guess that it is about the same size as the 1990 bubble.
3. A lot of the current run-up has to do with the recovery from the mid-90s depression. I suspect that payment/rent ratios weren’t particularly high in 2001 or 2002, maybe even 2003.
5. Adding median incomes into the mix (as you have done in the price/income graph on the main page), one would probably see both payments and rents rise as a percentage of median income. Rent increases as a percentage of median income aren’t what we want to see, but unfortunately I think they are happening.
Since I offered all these prediction without actually doing the math, I opened myself to the possibility of being way off-base. Should that be the case, I’m sure you’ll graciously correct me.
Today’s report on
Today’s report on Sacramento has been released!
Daily Home Price Analysis
Today’s report on
Today’s report on Sacramento has been released!
Daily Home Price Analysis
Rich,
This is your coolest
Rich,
This is your coolest graph yet!
I also would like to see this graph extended to current conditions, if it’s not too much trouble for you, to see where we are at in the current cycle. My guess is that we are currently at the equivalent of late 1990.
Interesting to see that rents didn’t move much from 1992 to 1996. I believe we saw lots of job loss and people leaving the area during those years, which would have had an impact on the demand for rentals. Rents don’t seem to stray too much from the fundamentals, do they? Absent artificial rent control, rents are a very accurate reflection of the market forces at work in a given area.
Kevin
Why was my post removed?
Why was my post removed?
What the hell is going on with these Blogs? Do you guys want to make an impact or not? If so, stop removing posts that show-up con-artists.
No posts were removed. If a
No posts were removed. If a post has truly gone missing then there must be a technical problem. Instead of ranting about “these blogs” perhaps you could provide useful information to help us track down the problem, such as the time and date of the missing post.
Thanks!
Thanks!
Do you remember when you
Do you remember when you posted the comment? A specific time or range would be very helpful.
There is a preview feature, which allows you to preview the post before submitting it… is it possible that you hit preview, but forgot to actually do the final submission?
Just trying to narrow down the possibilities…
I posted right after this
I posted right after this guy:
analysisguy on November 28, 2006 – 9:25pm.
No I remember my post being there for sure.
Thanks again!
Nozferat – I’ve looked
Nozferat – I’ve looked through the server logs and there is no record of a comment submitted by you at the time — ie there is no comment, no record of a comment submission, and no record of the subscription notification that would take place when a comment was made. That last one is important because if the comment were created then deleted, there would still be a record of the subscription notifications that happened when it was created.
That would mean that there must have been a database problem (which would explain why the comnment and all records of the comment were wiped out). But I talked to the hosting provider and they show no problems with the database or server at that time. Also, there are other records in the database that happened at that same time, so I don’t see a problem either.
So at this point I don’t know what happened. Is it possible that the comment was in another post or at another time? I don’t know what else it could be… it could be a bug with the content management system, but after 20,000 comments and a year and a half, this has never happened til now, to my knowledge. Or maybe it was a database glitch that only lasted a minute and didn’t register with the hosting provider, or something.
So in short, I’ve tried everything and i have no idea what could have happened. If it did get deleted I am really sorry… all i can do is keep my eyes open to see if anything else weird happens.
Rich,
This is your coolest
Rich,
This is your coolest graph yet!
I also would like to see this graph extended to current conditions, if it’s not too much trouble for you, to see where we are at in the current cycle. My guess is that we are currently at the equivalent of late 1990.
Interesting to see that rents didn’t move much from 1992 to 1996. I believe we saw lots of job loss and people leaving the area during those years, which would have had an impact on the demand for rentals. Rents don’t seem to stray too much from the fundamentals, do they? Absent artificial rent control, rents are a very accurate reflection of the market forces at work in a given area.
Kevin