I’m one of the biggest bears, but I come by that honestly – I work in the business of RE valuation. It’s literally all I do.
I will confess to a certain amount of frustration, but my furstration is not directed to foolish buyers or the realty agents who encourage foolishness. After all, that’s what buyers and realty agents do – it’s their nature.
My frustration is aimed at the lenders and investors who have ignored the obvious signs that they were participating in a very risky ponzi scheme that was doomed to collapse from the moment we got past +25% of the long term trend. The higher the variance, the greater the collapse. I’m particularly frustrated that these lenders have not only ignored but have marginalized the appraisers and other market watchers who have been telling them this was coming.
Whomever is telling Alex_Angel to hang on one more year is being dumb. Alex should plan on sticking around for at least 3 or 4 more years. This trend isn’t going to be anywhere near done in a year.
BTW, the open houses may look busy, but the volumes are still in decline. That should tell you that any bump in pricing that possibly could occur would do so only on a temporary basis – there is simply nothing in the fundamentals that would support stabilization right now, let alone a trend toward increasing prices. We should anticipate there will be at least 3 mini-rallies during this downswing. It’s happened before during the prior downswing and it happened during the upswing as prices were going up.
We need to watch this from the 20,000 foot elevation and not rely overmuch on the 100 foot view.
