Your agent says the market has dropped 8-9% since January and you are mad that she didn’t know this before…nobody knows trends until after they happen. In the spring, did any of you know that the lending crisis would hit during the last week of August and the jumbo loans would become impossible without 10% down and 100% financing would be extinct?
Two things – our OP posted before the effects of the stock market failures started manifesting themselves in the pricing. Up until that time the pricing declines were due to the internal problems of the regional RE market.
The second thing I’d like to point out that at the end of 2006 a number of our regulars figured out that the 3rd quarter of this year would be when things would get interesting. This was based on a number of factors that would come together at the same time. Those factors included, but were not limited to: consideration of what would happen when it became common knowledge than the Spring/Summer selling season had gone bust, the inevitable increase in foreclosure activity, and of course the inability to recast an 80/20 ARM in a declining market. Obviously nobody predicted the apparent trigger event of the stock failures that led to the clampdown on financing, but some of us would argue that at most that event merely hastened the inevitable a little.
Your problem as a realty agent right now isn’t that lax lending has gone away – but rather that lax lending from 2000-2006 led to the excesses that must now be corrected. Exactly what event triggers the correction is but a footnote. The roots of this correction lie within the excesses that preceded it.
BTW, the realty agents who participate on this site all knew this would happen long before it did and they knew that chasing the market down with a too-high list price would only result in problems. Had our OP gone with one of them instead of the idiot they went with that condo would have been sold by now.
