The median August sales price was $350,140, down from $588,670 a year ago. CAR chief economist Leslie Appleton-Young said it’s too early to call a bottom for prices, which will “experience additional downward pressure as we move into the off-peak season in the coming months, and will continue to face pressure from distressed sales,” she said.
As a California renter who has been waiting out the bubble for years, I’ve been smiling for the last year. But I’m wondering how much the bailout will prop up the market. I want those foreclosures to happen so the market falls more. I don’t think I should be paying taxes to prop up the values of other peoples houses.
The real losers are those who paid cash for houses in the last few years. If they had only paid little down, they would still have their cash and they could bail on a house that wasn’t worth much. Of course, a foreclosure is bad to have on your credit – but I wonder if the government isn’t going to find a way to make sure all these poor victims who got foreclosed on in this crisis get ‘forgiven’. Do we really think all these people are never again going to get mortgages?
Of course it is headed down. This is precisely where it SHOULD go. Bubbles SHOULD burst.. Larry
The common sense displayed by the good people on this blog is most encouraging. No mortgage over $400K makes economic sense. Home ownership by single mothers who continually have to change jobs does not make economic sense. Townhomes priced in the mid six figures no matter where they are built do not make economic sense.
Let the investment banks fail so that the wage earning class take shelter from relentless inflation in falling prices.
How about the many folks who ‘invested’ in houses so that they could be ‘flipped’ at a profit? Speculation drove up prices in many, many communities. It wasn’t only low-income people, it was also speculators (many out-of-town) whose actions drove prices to unsustainable levels. And, of course, it was Wall St. that ‘sliced and diced and rebundled’ millions of mortgages, then leveraged them through the unregulated ‘credit swaps’ and ‘new products’ called ‘derivatives’, making a tidy profit with each paper transaction….the local homeowner had nothing to do with that major part of the mess!