Sales of new homes plunged in March to the lowest level in 16 1/2 years as housing slumped further at the start of the spring sales season.
The median price of a new home in March, compared with a year ago, fell by the largest amount in nearly four decades.
The median price of a new home in March, compared with a year ago, fell by the largest amount in nearly four decades.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that sales of new homes dropped by 8.5 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000 units, the slowest sales pace since October 1991.
I predict that the housing market will continue to be depressed.
Think about it. The oldest baby boomers (born in 1946) will be 62 this year. As more and more of them retire, they will want to sell the family home so that they can pay off their children’s college tuition costs and supplement their own woefully inadequate 401ks/IRAs. The problem will be twofold: (1) so many boomers will be selling at the same time and (2) even with the drop in house prices, said prices will still be far above what the twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, weighed down with student loans and childcare expenses, can afford to pay.
Especially hard hit will be those boomers whose McMansions are in the suburbs away from speedy rail and subway lines. Younger buyers will prefer condos in the city, even if those dwellings are smaller, than several thousand square foot houses that have high heating and cooling bills and require a gallon of gas for the day’s commute. work.
That’s great news! I hope to buy my retirement home for a song [in about 15 years] and have enough left over to install geo-thermal heating/cooling, a solar farm with an efficient inverter and large battery bank, and a windmill or two. Maybe I can buy one of those cheep McMansions built far far from Urbania and highways. Hopefully, it will have enough land for a good sized garden. Sigh.
The baby boomers now reap what they did not sow. It was their choice not to have children. It will be tough to sell their posh homes to an immigrant. Statmann
This “disaster” was necessary. All that is happening is that home prices are being normalized, at last.
Incidentally, as to Baby Boomers and the damage they have done to America, see the most recent Scientific American. I asked Kendall to post this but he wouldn’t for some reason. T his is a study that shows that the Boomers have done the very reverse from letting their passion for illegal drugs go as they aged. The numbers here are dreadful, but then, the Boomers have a lot of damage to answer for, and their overwhelming greed behind the Housing Bubble is only a case in point. Larry
Oh, yeah, it’s ‘all the fault of the Boomer generation’. Right: the generation that put more of their kids through college than any other generation; the ones that paid contractors and laborers to build more homes than ever before; and the one that is keeping more folks in the medical field employed than ever before; the ones that elected and reelected GOP presidents, so dear to conservative hearts.
Wake up! It wasn’t only Boomers who were buying and speculating on homes in the exurbs, plenty of 20 anad 30-year-olds did, too! The causes of the housing bubble have complex, deep roots in the lack of regulation of ‘new’ financial products presented by investment banks, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers. To try to scapegoat any one generation for it is simplistic thinking of the lowest order.
Little Cabbage denieth too much. The boomers merely want the kids that someone else had and supported til adulthood to pay for their pensions, medical care and posh homes. What a sorry bunch of whiners. Please read the demographics! Statmann
I am awake to the Boomers, alas, and have been for years. It is not thaat their behavior is unusually greedy, but that the Boomers have institutionalized it as a worthy social value, and they institutionalized and standardized drug use, and to them we may lay with all justice our contemporary view of sex as a normal acculturated form of relaxation,. the normalization of self-indulgence and exhibitionism. Indeed, without the Boomers, Youtube would never have developed its vision of the two above cited, now-standard, forms of decadence, and to the Boomers we may justly attribute the destruction of a culture of self-discipline with a culture of emotional excess. It is the SELLING of such as these as standard American values for which they are quite rightly condemned. It is worth noting that Schori and the bishops are largely Boomers. Does thzt tell us something? Larry