Local vs. state vs. national trends are hard to distinguish.
High-paid workers are doing ok. But there’s a chasm. Uneducated or “manual labor” or “admin” or “clerk” or “apprentice” or “assistant” or whatever you want to call them jobs are evaporating. Blame computers.
I don’t think this is a short-term trend. Like the auto industry, automation and computers and Google Docs and Docusign and Adobe and VMWare and Amazon Cloud and Redfin are going to permanently eliminate jobs. I ran into an ex-employee from an ex-company at Trader Joe’s the other day (an admin assistant) and she’s been out of work over 2 years. She was not that good – nice, a great person, but poor at her job. I doubt she will EVER get another job without significant restraining.
But:
All that said, it’s somewhat irrelevant to CAR’s point. The point was whether enough people would be left to buy real estate at current prices.
No.
Computers can’t buy real estate. And the remaining employed are not at 200% or 300% of previous salaries, which would enable them to buy the houses of those that are now making 0%.
I don’t claim to know the future, but the pool of available buyers seems to continue to shrink.
