[deMolay]

Again the experts say it is over. Get back into the market. Now is the time to buy. You can make a killing. http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/04/15/on-the-front-lines-of-america%E2%80%99s-meltdown/?ref=patrick.net

[patience]

Quote:
"At the peak in 2005 the median house price in Merced was $382,000. Today it’s just $105,500."

Maybe someday the prices will get down to something realistic, like 2x to 2.5x average income. With lots of job losses and incomes dropping, I'd say that home prices have a ways to go yet, particularly in California.

[heroineworshipper]

Cheaper to buy an airplane & fly 80 miles to work than it is to buy a house in Silicon Valley.

[ReverseEngineer]

Quote:
"At the peak in 2005 the median house price in Merced was $382,000. Today it’s just $105,500."

Maybe someday the prices will get down to something realistic, like 2x to 2.5x average income. With lots of job losses and incomes dropping, I'd say that home prices have a ways to go yet, particularly in California.

So with average incomes approaching ZERO, the realistic price of 2.5X ZERO is still ZERO.

Reverse Engineer

[shortonoil]

So with average incomes approaching ZERO, the realistic price of 2.5X ZERO is still ZERO.

You’re better in math than I thought! What was the comment a few days ago? “You may not be as good in math as I thought”. Pay back is a bitch!

Actually, the price of a house will decline to the exchange rate of one small box of nails per structure. Enough to nail up a few doors and windows! Available Energy

[ReverseEngineer]

You’re better in math than I thought! What was the comment a few days ago? “You may not be as good in math as I thought”.

My math skills are rusty, but I still have my trusty Calculator.

Seriously, one real source of entertainment here is watching TPTB try to keep house prices from completely collapsing through the Mark to Make Believe scheme. In many cases the homes have been taken off the market completely because they can't sell them at the make believe prices they have for the asset. Here in the Mat-Su Valley, last year at this time there were just hundreds of For Sale signs all over the place. There are still some up, but not near so many and its not because we had a sudden influx of people buying the properties. The banks holding the mortgages on these places are being bailed out by Obamout Toilet Paper, but of course that scheme eventually fails since they still haven't got a way to filter money out to the population to buy the properties themselves, besides the Dole of course. For some reason Banks are not accepting Unemployment as a steady source of income, though I don't know why not since it keeps getting extended.

Meanwhile, to the best of their ability most people now are deleveraging, either by paying off loans and credit cards if they have the money, or else simply by defaulting on the loans. Either way, the income source for banks is disappearing here. They are making loans more difficult to get by raising the FICO scores to only loan to people who are perfect credit risks, but of course there are fewer of them all the time. Actually, about EVERYBODY is a credit risk at the moment, lol. Anyhow, without the ability to make loans and get people to pay interest on them, banks as a bizness are OUT of bizness. The model of the banking bizness is collapsing because no growth is possible, and they can't even manufacture enough belief in any bubble to make it appear possible anymore. The problem of course is that without a functioning banking system and currency, trade essentially comes to a halt, rather than just shrinking gradually. So to prevent that, you have the Sham Banking system being propped up by funny money. Its still not preventing the collapse of the asset values though, so that money is meaningless. The belief is stil there that it means something though, so you still have the clowns at the G20 meetings proposing all sorts of dumbass ideas to make it function like making SDRs a reserve currency. "Let's exchange one piece of worthless paper for another piece of worthless paper and it will be worth more!"
Astounding how stupid people are in general.

[shortonoil]

The belief is stil there that it means something though, so you still have the clowns at the G20 meetings proposing all sorts of dumbass ideas to make it function like making SDRs a reserve currency. "Let's exchange one piece of worthless paper for another piece of worthless paper and it will be worth more!" Astounding how stupid people are in general.

Just yesterday I made a comment to a woman that things were not in very good shape. Her reply was, “but the economy is improving”, said a little forcibly and indignantly, like I hadn’t yet heard the news! Obviously, she was parroting what she had heard on the idiot tube by some babbling zombie CNBC dead head.

Despite “its contained”, “the housing market has bottomed” (23 times so far), “the economy is fundamentally sound”, “recovering will be in the 2’nd quarter of ‘08”, recovering will be in the 3rd quarter”, ad infinitum, people are still reciting the mantra taught to them each evening between 6:00 and 7:00 pm. on the BlubberVision. Evidentially, they have no more memory retention than a cockroach.

So, it is not really that surprising that they are that stupid. They have been training for it. Most of them - for all of their life. AvailableEnergy

[Roy]

Buyers for expensive homes hard to find

hen people of a certain income level consider moving to the Asheville area, they're drawn to the mountains, the city's cultural amenities — and high-end housing developments.
Advertisement

During the first part of this decade, that segment of the real estate market — typically planned communities where homes start at $500,000 and run into the millions — was white hot.

But the downturn in the economy hit the upper end of the development industry hard last year, although developers say interest is picking back up this spring.

“Last year was a difficult year for master-planned communities and maybe for the real estate market in general,” said Harry Redfearn, founder and president of Asheville-based Private Mountain Communities, which serves as a sort of real estate clearinghouse for people looking for homes or lots in upscale communities.

“Most of our developer clients were off (in sales) 40-60 percent” in 2008 compared with a year earlier, he said.

Speculators have abandoned the market, resulting in an oversupply of product, he added.

“We've got too many of these bigger places competing with each other, which have lots of vacant lots sitting inside of them,” he said. Davies predicted “more Versants,” a reference to a Woodfin development that is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

An analysis by local real estate agent Scott Raines in late March found that if current sales rates continued, it would take more than 10 years for the market to absorb the 272 existing homes priced at $1 million or more on the Multiple Listing Service for the Asheville area.

Front lines ^

The builder I worked as a carpenter for during 2007 built a 'spec' rather than the customs he had been. He told me of the profits he could make. I suggested back then that maybe the market going forward wasn't so great.

Now he is sitting on a house similar to those described in the linked article that isn't selling and has no work. The guy that replaced me got laid off in February.

I feel really bad for him because he is a nice guy that bought the propaganda. Now the pigmen are going to feast on what remains of his assets. Unless something happens right quick.

No schaudenfreude hereabouts.

ETA link to article.. : http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009904190350