[quote=sdrealtor]CAR
I am seeing different things than you. I seeing good homes sitting on the market trying to push the price about 5% beyond where they should be. If they would just come to market they would clear but for a variety of reasons they dont.
I also dont see more posers today than in the past. People have lived on credit cards for as long as I can remember. UCG’s story is typical of what I’ve seen people do the last 30+ years of my life. Another thing you never seem to take into consideration is the MASSIVE wealth transfer that is just beginning. The wealth of our parents generation is just beginning to get passed to the boomers. I know what I and each of my 3 siblings are getting and my parents were never big wage earners. Just frugal people who lived within their means and always saved for the future. This whole shabang has much legs then you think.[/quote]
Yes, people have always taken advantage of credit to give them the appearance of a better life, at least until they have to pay off the debt. That being said, we were NEVER able to get hundreds of thousands of dollars before vs. the bubble, when people who wouldn’t normally qualify for $20K credit were able to get $200K in credit. There is a huge difference in the dollar amounts available to anyone who wanted to pretend they were rich. Some were able to carry it off for quite a while, due to the tremendous amount of money they were able to tap, courtesy of a house they never had to make payments on — they could just keep refinancing and pilling on more debt, and they used this new debt to pay off their old debt (as long as the music kept playing).
I’ve most certainly taken the “transfer of wealth” into consideration. That massive transfer of wealth means, in most cases, that wealth is being diluted, not concentrated. It’s going from one parent/couple to two or more kids, plus charities, etc. It’s not “new” wealth (which might have an inflationary effect), but wealth that has been there all along. In many (most?) cases, in order for the heirs to tap that wealth, they need to sell real estate, not buy it. I see this as deflationary, not inflationary.
