Patience Alex, this is gonna take time. Also don’t forget that there is still a lot of quasi-legal monkey business going on in the form of seller kickbacks. These kickbacks distort the sales price data, making it appear as though housing prices aren’t falling when in fact they really are. And of course there are still bad loans being made and bad appraisals being done to “make the numbers work” as they say in the biz. Someone much smarter than me once said that “markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”. It’s not going to crash overnight. My prediction is a 2-3% decline YOY for a loooong time, combined with dollar devaluation. People watching nominal values won’t think things have fallen that much but the real dollar figures will be on the order of a 25-30% discount from todays prices.
