All the speculation about when will be the best time and how low it will go is really just a tangent to the real question a would-be buyer faces today:
Is now a good time to buy?
Virtually everyone who has been actively watching the market knows that now is a horrible time to buy from an economic standpoint. There are other reasons to buy a home and for a few people those reasons may outweigh their tolerance for losses, but they are a small minority.
Contrary to what a few of you are saying you don’t need to be a genius to recognize when inventory is vastly exceeding effective demand – you just need to be actively watching those numbers. The only reason many people don’t look for buy vs. sell periods is because they don’t understand the RE market runs in cycles and they don’t recognize the fact that behind every peak is a trough and beyond that there will always be another cycle.
$100,000 saved is about $200,000 earned. And vice versa. Losing $200k on a house is a loss that most people can never economically recover from without bankruptcy. That makes this decision a really big deal for most people.
I have no doubt that those people who are spending the time and effort to follow the RE markets will be in a position to recognize the right time for them to buy. Whether they’ll be in a position to do so at that time is a different story.
Between now and then, we Piggs are mainly just entertaining ourselves with the idle speculation about when and how much. Having answered the big question that now is not the time to buy, we’re just passing time.
We don’t have to be right for the next 20 years, we just have to be right for the next 30 days; and when that’s over, the next 30 days after that, and so on.
