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hipmatt
ParticipantDude, Vegas sucks, maybe for a young single guy, OK, but really, there is a reason that they call it SIN CITY. The place is obsesses with greed, sex, and substance abuse. Crime is worse than you think there and climbing, and housing is still in a huge bubble (although it is crashing and SHOULD) so its not cheep by any means.
If you are looking for a nice, single, quality woman, I doubt there are a whole lot in Vegas. If you just want some easy action and you have money, Vegas is for you!
hipmatt
ParticipantI’m glad he said this, but right after this he said he expects sales to take off again in 2008!!! LOL
hipmatt
ParticipantThis isn’t surprising, as so many who can’t afford to sell have turned to renting, only to find out that the rental market is large as well, and prices will be slashed to a degree there as well.
This is the last step for many before walking away from their homes. I would expect the short sales and foreclosures to be in full swing by July!
March 7, 2007 at 12:40 PM in reply to: The Prognostication Station – A Chance to go on the Record! #47087hipmatt
ParticipantI predict that CNBC and the rest of the drive by media will have 24/7 commentary from analyst, after fund manager, after ceo, after journalist, etc about how housing has bottomed, inflation is low, sales will be up in 07, the US economy is fundamentally strong, and we will find out in late 07 or early 08 that none of these is true.
I predict that Americans will still not get the fact that our fragile economic situation has been fueled by cheap and easy credit, the printing of large amounts of money, and huge bubbles in housing that have allowed people to use their home equity as a source of spending funds. These events have made markets look good, but only temporarily, and it will eventually revert to normal if not lower than it should be.
I predict a 40-50% reduction in RE prices in SD and 50-60% in the IE from summer 05 prices in 2010.
hipmatt
ParticipantWhat do you mean? You mean U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is wrong when he called the bottom of the housing market today? The gov. says housing is gonna be fine? I should go buy a place then, right?
hipmatt
ParticipantYeehaw!! This is WHAT must happen to correct the inflated market. When we have people going back to basics and saving up with 20 % downpayment then prices will come back to normal. I cannot wait for the credit bubble to deflate so that I can afford a home with a normal fixed rate loan and at a decent price. To me, San Diego homes should cost no more than 300k in most areas and even ocean front property is not worth 2-5 million either.
If every house sold required a 20% down in cash, homes would be about 60-70% off of their current prices. This would be awesome!, however I don't think we are that smart, patient, or disciplined to behave so responsibly. Personally though, I think we need to completely revamp home loan standards, but that of course would kill the economy, so who's gonna support it?
hipmatt
ParticipantAnd two more cities that have even less to offer…
Hemet: 802/83 %=10
Lake Elsinore: 710/77 %=10.8hipmatt
ParticipantActually I am dividing correctly. For example: if there are 2 actives and 1 pending then you would have 50% ratio. Or for 4 actives and 3 pending, a 75% ratio.
The number you have above, 6.11 is not a percent and means nothing.
hipmatt
ParticipantWe can hear the bombs in Temecula too.!
hipmatt
ParticipantI have some imortant data from the Temecula valley area. Here you go.
Active/Pendings
%of pendings to actives.. lower% = more unsold inventoryvia IMRMLS.com only. @10:50PM 3-4-07
Temecula North :269/44 %=16
Temecula South :332/53 %=16
French Valley :154/19 %=12
Menifee :506/72 %=14
Murrieta West :293/41 %=14
Murrieta East :701/76 %=11I’d say its fair to say that the undesirable areas will be hit the hardest.
On average in this area for every home that is in escrow, there are about 7.7 more homes that are not.
hipmatt
ParticipantThis is just the beginning. Don’t be fooled thinking that the crash is over. There are too many people who have to sell thi s year. Home supply will be high. Sub prime is fading away. Think of all of the RE agents, lenders, construction, landscapers, and related jobs that have or will be lost due to the end of the housing buildup. People are already loosing jobs. Recession possibilities are in the news.
The dollar is loosing value to foreign currencies. Rents are still less than half the cost of buying w/ 20% down and fixed 30year. Home prices are still way above historical relationships with wages. I know a few people who tell me that they need to sell their McMansions this year and that they would be lucky to just break even. There is just not enough people with the adequate incomes to continue to buy homes at these prices. Thats the bottom line. This will take years, not months, but by the holidays, you will see how much hurt many of these home owners are in. Be smart, not emotional.hipmatt
ParticipantThey better get more that a 5-20% discount from their subs to stay profitable in the coming months. I wonder if they are gonna try to renegotiate the recent land purchases too, cause they now realize that they overpaid.
hipmatt
ParticipantA hundred different snapshots could show you the mess we’re in. Soaring personal and government debt. A plunging savings rate. Record-high mortgages as a percentage of GDP. Plunging yields on 10-year Treasuries. Soaring but “hidden” unfunded government liabilities, to the tune of $53 trillion…
But none show it better — and more plainly — than these two I’m showing you right here, above. The first is our skyrocketing money supply. The second is our plummeting purchasing power. That’s about as plain as you need to get.
How so?
Because this is the starkest vision you’ll ever get of the absolute carnage that’s piling up in a “secret war” Washington’s fighting right now… and has fought, unsuccessfully, for the last 20 plus years. No, not the war in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or even some possible future conflict with Iran.
This is another kind of war… right here at home.
The enemy is the dark nemesis of a dead and stagnant economy. And the Fed secretly fights to hold it off desperately every single day. This is a worse enemy than recession. It’s the enemy called deflation, an economy where nothing moves and nobody buys a thing.
The weapon of choice in this ongoing secret war is to flood the market with cash and easy credit. Because regular cash and credit injections make everyone feel rich. The theory goes, when you’ve got cash and low-priced credit, companies borrow and expand. Consumers borrow and spend. Families borrow and buy homes.
Which is why, since 1950, the total amount of money in circulation has soared well over 3,000%! And it’s all good… or seems good… until it goes all wrong.
See, the trouble is, even money can’t escape the natural law of supply and demand. When there’s too much of it floating around, each dollar is worth that much less relative to the whole. Suddenly, you’ve got price inflation.
Suddenly, every dollar you have in the bank is worth less.
Hemingway called it the “first panacea of a mismanaged nation.”
And in our case, it’s helped plummet the purchasing power of our dollars by a mind-blowing 96%. The dollar’s worth today is just pennies compared with what it bought a century ago. In fact, its worth is just a fraction now — as we just demonstrated — compared to the last time gold prices boomed, in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Only now, unlike then, the “wiggle room” we have left now between us and a complete dollar implosion is so thin it’s practically transparent. Could total implosion actually happen? Absolutely.
Take what relatively new Fed Chairman professor Ben Bernanke famously said in a speech at the National Economists Club in Washington, in November 2002…
Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost… We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.
In other words, if you want to juice an economy… turn on the printing presses and make it as easy as all get-out to borrow money at a low, low rate of interest. Bernake and others in the Fed think that’s no problem. They think they can handle it, just so long as short-term interest rates don’t go to zero.
But a brilliant and famous colleague of mine — someone I’ll introduce you to in just a second — completely disagrees. Flooding the market with easy money, he recently told me in private, is more like burning your furniture to keep warm. It cannot last as a stopgap measure. It’s courting disaster.
He and I both like to think an even smarter economist, Ludwig von Mises, got it right instead, when he said…
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of the voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
See, thanks to all that Fed-driven loose credit, consumer debt has soared. It’s never been higher. In 1987, when Alan Greenspan first took his job in Washington, consumers where in the hole by about $10 trillion. Where are they now? An unbelievable $37.3 trillion in the red – or nearly 350% of GDP!
Think about that.
As a whole, Americans owe three and a half times more than the entire U.S. economy — the largest in history — produces in a year. If you or I owed that much on a personal level, we’d be suicidal.
Meanwhile, the government doesn’t seem to worry. They spend money even faster. They borrow even deeper. Even this administration now, with full knowledge of the implications of a credit disaster, has already borrowed more money since 2000 than every White House since the time of Washington!
By 2017 – says the Heritage Foundation – our federal deficits should be soaring by at least $1 trillion per year. After that, it will jump to $2 trillion. That’s not how much we’ll owe. It’s how much we’ll add to what we owe… every 12 months, for as far as the eye can see.
Doesn’t that sound, to you, like we’re at a turning point?
…from an ad I saw promoting gold..
hipmatt
ParticipantI agree that theres gonna be a lot of rvs for sale here soon, and I also agree that there will be much higher unemployment numbers, and many layoffs coming soon. But even IF employment stayed the same, the housing markets will still crash. There are far too many other fundamentals going against housing besides employment to keep prices insane like today.
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