I certainly do not classify myself as a bull in any way, shape or form. I simply post about the conditions as I see them.
I would characterize the rally we have been in now to be approximately 7 months old. In that time we have seen pricing increases in several regions in the county depending on the type of home and of course the location. We do continue to see high end declines as that is a no brainer. In no way do I disagree that we will see housing take another decline however I have been consistent in saying that we need a catalyst.
Over the past 3 years the catalyst that drove prices down was simple, prices were just to high. Now one may say that the next catalyst is and should be unemployment. However as unemployment has indeed continued to shoot higher, despite our governments claims that the recession is over, AND that the government stimulus has prevented another million jobs lost, the strong real estate market persists.
So one thing that we would all agree on is that effectively the banks are insolvent right? I mean seriously there is not any argument here. Similarly we will see many more banks fail. What hurts even more is that there is no more secondary market for the securitization of loans. Actually this hurts banks more then anything. The CAPACITY of money they have to lend is drastically reduced if they cannot move loans. Okay we agree on that. There is just a small matter of our government. If you can tell me with 100% confidence that the government will sit by and watch it all happen and do nothing, then well… okay yes the whole stack of dominoes will fall. Maybe that will happen… maybe it will not.
I posted my change of heart a few weeks ago. I don’t feel bullish about real estate. I feel like real estate is a carnival now. All glittering on the outside but you go behind the glitter and the inner workings look mighty f’d up. However it has been done the powers that be have been able to keep it afloat and then some.
Also yeah maybe it goes down 25% but in some areas it has already kicked back up over 10%.
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Again, my read is that the next major drop will be induced by interest rates. How that will manifest itself I am not sure. Maybe we get a slew of bank failures, then the govt or fed or treasury sinks a few more trillion into the system and china says screw you and the bond market tanks. Rates go up and boom, we get the market to tank bigtime. Will this happen in 3 months? 6 months? a year? I don’t know but it seems logical to me that it will happen. I don’t see the market up and running away and I think it may actually start to flatten out as there has been alot of sales that need to be digested. I am still kind of leaning to a guesstimate that things will stay in this twilite zone haze for another year or so.
