[quote=sdrealtor]CAR
I love when you post statements like this because it speaks to your clear biases:
“People with those higher-end homes were taking HELOCs and cash-out refis with the best of them, and many of them are certainly not able to pay off their debts as agreed.”
You say “many” because you need to beleive that there are “many” of them out there. The reality is that there are “some” of them out there. The problem is that there are more buyers than “some”. That is why any premium property in NCC that ends up truly as a fire sale distressed property always gets bid up to retail if the market has a fair chance to bid on it.
First of all in most parts of the country homes dont even approach the prices you believe they are legislating to. Its as if you beleive they are sitting in DC on Wall St trying to prop up the NCC market.
Fortunately you are in a good place. Enjoy the view from there because that is what you are going to have unless you change your perspective.[/quote]
Forgot to address this point in your previous post.
One of the problems with just focusing on micro-markets (like Nirvana, NCC), is the fact that you don’t see how connected things are. This pattern of the lower-end areas falling first, then the govt intervention, then the upper-mid and higher-end levitating above it all is NOT exclusive to NCC. This pattern has been noted **all across the country** and even in other countries where their governments and central banks intervened in their housing markets when ours did. I guess that’s why I don’t believe “it’s different here.”
Sure, people will pay more to live here than in some other less desirable zips, states, and countries, but the “levitating higher end” is not a NCC thing, it’s happened everywhere, with only a few areas that have had other issues, like Detroit, seeing what appears to be a more muted effect from the bailout measures (they’re still higher than they would be, but they’ve fallen more than the better areas in more healthy states, etc.). The lower end was allowed to fall because some people claimed to believe that everything was “contained,” and because it all happened so quickly, they weren’t able to respond in time. They pooped their britches when they discovered that the defaults and price declines were rolling into “prime” mortgages and prime neighborhoods with as much gusto as they did the “sub-prime” mortgages and neighborhoods. That’s why we’ve seen trillions of dollars being shoved into the mortgage/bond/housing market. It’s not because they didn’t have anything better to do with that money.
