Has renting ever been cheaper than owning in the Bay Area?
Second Life house for sale in Mountain View [Burbed.com]
SiO2 Says:
March 29th, 2008 at 8:23 amVFSW’s website is interesting, but the analysis is a little off. He’s comparing 2008 rent to the cost of owning in 1984. Of course it looks favorable.
FWIW, if you look at monthly cost vs rent, owning has not paid off for many many years in silicon valley. I rented a house for $1800 in 1992. Worth probably $360k at the time. Plus interest rates were higher, let’s say 8.5%. So assuming 20% down, the mortgage was 288k. 24.5K of interest, plus $4k of tax (1.1%) IS 28.5K per year. Plus some maintenance. Plus the foregone interest on the down payment. Rent is $21.6k per year. It’s a no brainer to rent right? Except that in 2008 this house would now sell for around $900k. And if you sell, the gain is tax free. Plus the interest paid over the last 16 years was tax deductible. So it’s not really that clear cut.
It is true that the rent to price ratio is less favorable now, and I personally would not own real estate to rent out. But the rent/own calculation has not penciled out in favor of owning for years. Yet people buy. Some people prefer to own, some prefer to rent. Nothing is wrong with either preference.
That brings up an interesting question - has owning ever been cheaper than owning in the Bay Area? Has it ever even been close to being break even?
What have you seen?
April 5th, 2008 at 7:59 am
The median home prices are out again in the Mercury News. Definitely more zipcodes declining than rising. the only ones rising are:
Cupertino 95014 up 14.7%
Los Altos 94024 up 21%
Mtn view 94040 up 92.6%
Mtn View 94041 up 11%
Mtn view 94043 up 13% - with a 753K median, condos?
Palo Alto 94301 up 5%
Willow glen 95125 up 55%
San Jose/cupertino 95129 up 14%
San Jose 95130,95131 up 4% - somewhere east side?
San Jose 95133 up 17%- east side again
San Jose 95138 up 9%- Santa theresa?
Saratoga 95070 up 124%
Sunnyvale 94085 up 1.9%- this is the bad side of svale
Sunnyvale 94087 up 19%
Sunnyvale 94089 up 14%
http://www.mercurynews.com/realestatenews/ci_8821267
Thats less than 1/3 of the zipcodes going up this time. A few things stand out from this list:
- good zipcodes are still going up.
- SOME of the really cheap east side zipcodes are bouncing off the bottom (95130,95131), while others like 95135 which has a median price of only 400K is still down a huge 41.4% year over year.
The really big spikes up like my area WG up 55% is usually one or a set of huge mansions selling, that skews the median price- same with 95135 down 41.4%, could be that this month some short sales went down. WG has been up about 12% year over year in other reports so this is out of whack.
All the areas that I am looking at buying are down, that would be cambrian, campbell places like that.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:01 am
sorry that Sunnyvale 95070 is up 12.4% thats twelve POINT four not 124%
April 5th, 2008 at 9:06 am
It’s been calculated over and over again, if you rent, and pocket the difference, put it into a savings or investment account, at the end of 20 years you end up with a place to live, plus enough money to more than buy the house you would have bought. And this was being done in the BA newspapers when RE was rising!
Generally owning has been good because it’s a “forced” method of saving, since very very few renters pocket the difference between renting and owning, and save/invest it.
But in a bubble market, you just KNOW will come down, is it really smart to buy a house for $500k that should be around $250k, and gamble your finances on it reacing $750k in 2-3 years? This is what people have been doing recently. And they’re ending up walking away from huge losses.
Buy rather than rent DID make sense, up into the early 70s maybe.
April 5th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Only some bank owned condo provide opportunity of owning cheaper than buying in south bay.
I bought a bank owned condo in San Jose 95123 for $200K recently, and rent it for $1445 per month. With 20% down payment and 5.5% 30 year fix interest rate, I make some money every month from that condo.
April 5th, 2008 at 10:54 am
“Only some bank owned condo provide opportunity of owning cheaper than buying in south bay.”
typo, owning cheaper than renting
April 5th, 2008 at 11:24 am
esr:
“It’s been calculated over and over again, if you rent, and pocket the difference, put it into a savings or investment account, at the end of 20 years…”
Whoa, wait, TWENTY years? So renting pays off–TWENTY years on? I have to live in an apartment for TWENTY YEARS before I can swap to a house?
That said, half of the “condos” available in Silicon Valley are really just thirty-year-old apartments with Pergransteel installed. If you’re going to live in one of those, then you might as well just rent…
*****
WillowGlenner: 95138 is indeed the Santa Theresa area. That’s where I live! It also includes a southern protrusion of Evergreen–but it’s over the hills from the rest of Evergreen. This is the area south of San Jose where 85 and 101 come together; there is a relatively new (<10 years) townhouse/duplex community on the hills in there (Basking Ridge) and that has a lot of stuff open.
April 5th, 2008 at 11:39 am
There was an article a while back in the Willow Glen resident that said if you bought a WG house in 1991 for 300K ( a high end home, then), that today, you would have made the equivalent of 3500 PER MONTH in “savings” by owning that home for 15 years. Thats about right, because if that house is now worth one million, thats 180 mos over 15 years, at $3800/mo which equals the 700K that you made owning the house.
SO taking that 700K over 15 years, could you have made that just pocketing the extra money you had after rent? I don’t think so, or it wouldn’t have been very easy unless you investehttp://www.burbed.com/2008/04/05/has-renting-ever-been-cheaper-than-owning-in-the-bay-area/#comments
Has renting ever been cheaper than owning in the Bay Area? [Burbed.com]d in msft or something. taking a compounding interest calculator, I can try to come up with that 700K from owning the house:
- Put in $3K per month (way too high, imho and probably not possible for the buyer early on), for 15 years at 10% = 104K only 1/7 of the house.
- 3K per month at 20% for 15 years= $283K
- 3K per month at a whopping 30% for 15 yrs: 863K. (at 25% its only 489K).
So 3K per month, with a monthly compounded interest rate at 30% yields better results than the house, but probably not really because I didn’t account for taxes… and lets be honest, 30% returns consistently are almost impossible to find.
April 5th, 2008 at 11:41 am
It makes me really mad that for some reason my posts have a habit of putting a burbed link in the middle of the text. Nobody else has that problem. Here is the above post again without that strange link in the middle.
There was an article a while back in the Willow Glen resident that said if you bought a WG house in 1991 for 300K ( a high end home, then), that today, you would have made the equivalent of 3500 PER MONTH in “savings” by owning that home for 15 years. Thats about right, because if that house is now worth one million, thats 180 mos over 15 years, at $3800/mo which equals the 700K that you made owning the house.
SO taking that 700K over 15 years, could you have made that just pocketing the extra money you had after rent? I don’t think so, or it wouldn’t have been very easy unless you invested in msft or something. taking a compounding interest calculator, I can try to come up with that 700K from owning the house:
- Put in $3K per month (way too high, imho and probably not possible for the buyer early on), for 15 years at 10% = 104K only 1/7 of the house.
- 3K per month at 20% for 15 years= $283K
- 3K per month at a whopping 30% for 15 yrs: 863K. (at 25% its only 489K).
So 3K per month, with a monthly compounded interest rate at 30% yields better results than the house, but probably not really because I didn’t account for taxes… and lets be honest, 30% returns consistently are almost impossible to find.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I think buying in 1991 in the RBA was a good investment… but for reasons that no one could necessarily have predicted at the time. I don’t expect to see that kind of rise again in my lifetime.
The NYT rent vs. own calculator is interesting for this.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Owning vs renting? Only makes sense if you aren’t going anywhere for a long time. This little toy is lots of fun to play with. Try changing the interest rates, the loan terms, it looks like owning is rarely good unless you can quantify the happiness of watering your own lawn.
So why did I buy? Because in 1991 my landlord gave us an eviction notice 15 days before Christmas. He was overextended in his newer and bigger house and couldn’t afford it anymore, full of the ‘91 equivalent of Pergransteel. Needed to sell it (no doubt at a loss) and move back to the little place we were renting.
We bought so this would never happen to us again. That, more than watering our lawn or painting the rooms any color we want (they’re white! just like every rental I’ve ever lived in!) or even choosing the house paint (we painted it the same color it already was!). I gotta tell you, that really was the biggest factor in our deciding to buy. Maybe that’s what “live cold in winter” really means, the fear of having 30 days to find a new place and move everything when all you want to do is decorate your danged Christmas tree.
You can even be evicted from an apartment building. I have a friend who rented at some big place in Cupertino for 15 years. They finally decided to fix the whole place up so they could charge more rent and he was one of the few holdouts so they finally told him to move to another unit and oh yes his rent would go up to market. So he moved to another complex entirely. Idiots — a stable tenant is worth a lot.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
From my perspective, renting is better in the Bay Area than owning due to the fact that you can always choose to purchase property outside of the Bay Area after you have set aside more money from your higher salary.
I make approximately 30% more in salary here than I would elsewhere. Yet my rent is not much higher than it would be if I was in a lower cost area.
So one needs to think “outside of the box” with regards to the Bay Area. My philosophy has always been that I am here to work but not to settle down. I can’t bring myself to buy any property here due to the inflated prices but also due to the lower quality. The average home here is upwards of 30-50 years old and in need of major maintenance. Why would I choose to squander my salary on a property that I don’t like when I can rent something much nicer for a lower cost.
And when the time comes, I can choose to leave the area and buy a home with cash elsewhere in the country.
Anyway, that’s just my take.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
WG, thanks for the rundown on the Mercury News numbers and the zip codes.
However, let’s look at the sales volume not just the prices. Several of the bubble sites have talked about the case where the bottom part of price range falls down with the sales, the market isn’t necessarily getting any healthier.
Does anyone know what these changes are relative to? Last week or last year same time?
Pay attention to the last number, it’s the important one: % Change in number of sales.
Data for selected zips:
Cupertino 95014 $962,000 14.7% $718 27 -65.4%
Los Altos 94024 $1,785,000 21.0% $702 15 -40.0%
Los Gatos 95030 $1,615,000 -3.9% $741 15 25.0%
Mtn View 94040 $1,008,000 92.6% $624 19 -17.4%
Mtn View 94041 $933,000 11.0% $653 5 -37.5%
Mtn View 94043 $753,250 13.7% $487 29 -9.4%
Palo Alto 94301 $1,425,000 5.0% $826 11 -47.6%
San Jose 95139 $560,000 -16.3% $369 6 100.0%
Sunnyvale 94087 $988,500 19.1% $614 37 0.0%
Okay, I’m going to cut to the chase here.
Number of zips with an increase in sales: 2. They’re in bold above.
Number of zips with no decrease in sales, other than the 2 above: 1. My zip. 94087.
Every single other zip has sales down, either from last year (the valid comparison) or from last week, which means Spring Bounce has become Spring Dead Cat Bounce.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
That’s the calculator I was thinking of. The thing is, if you set assumptions to
House price: 950k
Rental: 2.8k/mo
Down Payment: 20%
interest: their default, 6 something%
Then if house prices hold steady, renting’s always better over a 30-year period.
But if you set the appreciation rate at only 10% increase, which by RBA standards for the last few years is modest, then it’s the buying that’s better, within a year. You can see why people still want to do it.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I forgot to add two additional thoughts to my above comment:
Another reason for renting in the Bay Area is portability. Let’s face it, traffic is a nightmare around here. If you switch jobs, it is very easy to simply move to a different rental closer to your new job should that be required.
I had a job for two years in San Francisco and that commute would have killed me if I had owned a property where I was living at the time. (In the South Bay) So being able to move to an alternate place just a few blocks from my job was a big time saver.
Finally, it adds a great piece of mind when one doesn’t have a gigantic mortgage hanging over their heads. I have two friends out of work right now who own homes purchased within the past 5 years who are not very keen on their prospects. So that is also a worry.
But I digress. Like WillowGlenner has stated, it depends on the individual. I certainly don’t want to turn this into a war between renters and owners. There are pros and cons to both. So whatever decision one makes is often what is best for them.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Renter, a 10% a year increase cannot sustain itself indefinitely. That’s been the core of the argument between Pralay and RE.
Take a look at some of the other bubble market blogs. One I really like is IrvineHousingBlog. I think IrvineRenter (the blog host) believes a sustainable real estate growth rate is more like 4% and it is the bubbles and collapses that cycle around that, the collapses trend back to the 4% line.
RE’s claim that Bay Area real estate doubles every ten years, regardless of which ten years they are assumes a constant annual price increase of 7.2% which is why it’s an invalid claim.
The end of ninja loans will negatively affect prices in the Bay Area.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Madhaus: 95139 had more sales because there was a very large new development just east of 101 at the 85 merge.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Oh, I agree that even 10% is not sustainable… but there’s a natural tendency to work from the most recent dataset.
April 5th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
sonarrat: See post #6
April 5th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
madhaus, those merc news median prices are for the year, year over year. Which is what they should be. so for my area 95125 which was up 55% this month but only 12% last month I believe, I will expect that next month I will show as up only 12% again, but not DOWN, even though sales prices this coming month will no doubt be lower.
April 5th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Some people prefer to own, some prefer to rent. Nothing is wrong with either preference.
A refusal to make a value judgment is abdicating your role as a moral being.
For instance: some people prefer to rent, some people prefer to set fire to their money in a bonfire. Nothing is wrong with either preference - after all, the bonfire keeps you warm, and it’s pretty.
Still make sense to say that sentence?
It is the stupidest time in over 100 years to buy a house. It’s even arguably more stupid to buy a house now than in 2005. In 2005, it was at least reasonable to think that there’d be 5 more years of increasing prices. Now, it’s pretty obvious that prices are headed down, that was a bubble, and there’s going to be a steep, lasting decline in prices.
That prices aren’t headed down in every neighborhood at the start of the decline shouldn’t be surprising either. That’s how it’s been in every other housing crash so far.
April 5th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Over the long run, renting will prove to be extremely expensive. If you compare the net worth of someone who has been a renter for 20 years to someone who bought his own home, the difference can amount to over a million dollars.
Renting can be a temporary solution, but the objective should be to own.
April 5th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
WG sez: madhaus, those merc news median prices are for the year, year over year. Which is what they should be. so for my area 95125 which was up 55% this month but only 12% last month I believe, I will expect that next month I will show as up only 12% again, but not DOWN, even though sales prices this coming month will no doubt be lower.
Glad to hear that table uses a valid comparison (over last year).
Sales being down from this week last year is even worse than you think, because Easter was earlier this year than last. So the Spring Bounce starts earlier this year, but sales were higher at this time last year.
There are so few sales in some zips that the median price changes are just noise, but look at monthly sales and see if the median price changes are similar. Here is the February Bay Area monthly chart, same source as the Mercury News (Dataquick).
And here is 95125:
San Jose 95125 28 -57.6% $820,000 6.6%
looks like prices aren’t up as much as the 3/17 data suggests. Let’s see what the March chart has to say when it’s out (I checked SF Chron and it’s not there this weekend).
April 5th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Oh oh.
I just looked at the Dataquick table I mentioned in the post above.
Look at the median price for 94087.
$899,000.
Yup. Half the houses in the zip code sold for less than $900K in Feburary.
Half.
April 5th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Over the long run, renting will prove to be extremely expensive. If you compare the net worth of someone who has been a renter for 20 years to someone who bought his own home, the difference can amount to over a million dollars.
With all due respect, that is skewed logic. Do you have factual examples of renters and buyers in side by side comparisons or are you just making that statement arbitrarily?
If someone bought a home 20 years ago and held, they would indeed have done well. If someone had instead rented for 20 years and instead invested their money in the S&P500 for the past 20 years, they would be substantially further ahead than the buyer of the home, assuming using the supposed down payment as investments.
So as I mentioned, you cannot make broad based generalizations indicating that one technique is superior to another in absolute terms. If Warren Buffet had invested in real estate instead of stocks and companies, would he be the richest man on the planet right now?
Food for thought.
April 5th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
In normal market condition, owning is better than renting over the long run, especially given the tax treatment.
But the run up of housing price between 1997 and 2006 was caused by unprecedented events. Between 1997 and 2000, it was the hi-tech bubble; a lot of people moved to bay area for the hi-tech jobs and many of them cashed out their otherwise worthless stock options to buy a home. Between 2003 and 2006, it was the credit bubble; a lot of people bought a house with very little down payment and artificially low interest rate.
Those 2 events will not happen again in the future. Investment is all about looking forward, but a lot of people make investment decision by looking at the rear mirror and extrapolate the recent past into the future.
April 5th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Madhaus,
Here’s the comment you posted earlier:
>>She said several clients have decided this is the peak and want to get out of the neighborhood and are selling now
So is the market down, or is it at the peak?
April 5th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
FredinCA:
“If someone bought a home 20 years ago and held, they would indeed have done well. If someone had instead rented for 20 years and instead invested their money in the S&P500 for the past 20 years, they would be substantially further ahead than the buyer of the home, assuming using the supposed down payment as investments.”
Okay, so you dump on RealEstater for not providing numbers, and then you throw out a baseless assertion sans numbers. I think that you need to put your money where your mouth is, as it were.
April 5th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
“Okay, so you dump on RealEstater for not providing numbers, and then you throw out a baseless assertion sans numbers. I think that you need to put your money where your mouth is, as it were.”
Baseless? It is common knowledge.
Here is a link:
http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2002/foth020404.htm
The key statistic is:
1980-2001 Housing S&P 500 (w/o div.)
Total return 185.00% 961.40%
CAGR 5.11% 11.09%
And the stock return does not include dividends.
And I apologize if I was “dumping” on anyone. I am not trying to be argumentative. But statistically, stocks outperform real estate. This was also independently verified by Robert Shiller, the economist from Yale. Over a 100 year history, real estate has actually been the lowest performing asset class, behind stocks and bonds. Which, when you think about it makes perfect sense because homes merely reflect the salaries of the area. They do not “innovate” or create new technologies. They produce nothing and are designed merely to provide shelter.
What I was trying to allude to earlier was that the choice of owning versus renting very much depends on the individual’s personal choice. To state that one is superior to another is akin to trying to state that coke is better than pepsi.
But RealEstater’s statement that buying will create a greater intrinsic net worth over someone who rented is not something that I have seen statistically verified. If he has some info or links demonstrating his assertion, I would be interested in seeing them.
April 6th, 2008 at 12:35 am
True, but merely citing percentage growth since 1981 isn’t the end of the argument. If I bought a house in 1980, that’s the whole thing appreciating 185%. But if I rented and pocketed the difference between purchase and mortgage, I don’t get 961% on every dollar; I’ll be investing a little bit over every month of that 20-year period.
To really get into this would require a lot of math that I don’t feel like doing at 12:30 AM, but I just want to contest the idea that RealEstater is using “skewed logic” when he claims that property is a better investment than stocks.
Also: You, too, are going to the super-long-term twenty-year period. Are you really saying that you’re willing to put up with apartment life for twenty years? You’re willing to be a landless migrant for twenty years? You’re willing to let someone else decide everything about your life for twenty years?
April 6th, 2008 at 1:15 am
Are there any sites with historical price data for Bay Area Cities? People talk about what a great investment Bay Area real estate is, and maybe it is, but I haven’t actually seen any historical data on a city-by-city basis. Anybody know where to find this info?
April 6th, 2008 at 1:46 am
Are there any sites with historical price data for Bay Area Cities?
Indeed. That’s the question I was really trying to ask!
April 6th, 2008 at 8:36 am
FredinCA,
To clarify, I’m talking about real estate in the Bay Area, although this is true in many other parts of California as well.
If you live in other states, you should buy too, since houses are cheap. In this case owning won’t make you rich, but why rent when houses are affordable?
April 6th, 2008 at 9:07 am
The problem with that motley fool article is that it is looking at flat percentages which is not really relevant. Nobody buys real estate with cash and then looks at its relationship to stocks you bought with cash. If you put 10% down on a 350K house in 1980 (not sure what pricing was like then, probably lower) that represents an investment of 35K that eventually nets 997K if that house appreciates 185%, or 28.5 fold increase over 20 years = 2850% return. This isn’t really accurate because you are paying into the house every month with money you could have otherwise invested. On the stock side, you can leverage too, so say with that 35K you bought 70K worth of stocks on margin. to get to that same 997K gain you need a 1427% return over 20 years or 14.27 times your money. That means you would need to invest in a hot stock, not just averages/indexes. Sure it can be done, people who invested in msft did it and Cisco and some others. But it is tough, and it just got a lot tougher in this decade.
April 6th, 2008 at 9:17 am
> If you live in other states, you should buy too, since houses are cheap.
> In this case owning won’t make you rich, but why rent when houses are
> affordable?
So you won’t get stuck with a house when the market in that cheap, small town sours?
I’ve heard the stories of people who went to Pasco, Washington in the 1970’s to work on the nuclear reactors that Washington Public Power Supply System (pronounced “Whoops”) was building for electricity generation. Many of the employees were constantly moving around between construction jobs, and were always renting. When they got to Pasco, they found house prices dirt-cheap, and decided this was a great place to buy something affordable that they could sell when the job ended.
Whoops.
In the early ’80’s, the utility defaulted on billions of dollars in bonds. The construction work died, and the employees all had to move elsewhere to find the next project. Unfortunately, the houses couldn’t be sold; no one was buying in Pasco then. They had to pay someone to watch the houses, make sure the heat was on, pipes hadn’t frozen, etc. I assume in those old-fashioned days, they’d also put down 10-20% down payments so walking away from the house wasn’t an option (unless they wanted no chance at all of recovering their down payment.)
That’s why you rent houses even if they’re cheap. Houses aren’t any fun if you can’t live in them, can’t rent them, and can’t move them somewhere you can.
April 6th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Robert, you just described the situation for most of Texas (not all). Sure, you can buy a house cheap in Texas, sometimes even cheaper than renting. But you can never sell it. Californians go to texas because they are transferred or for some other reason and the first thing they do is buy a house, thinking they can’t go wrong. Wrong, it takes an act of god for real estate to appreciate in Texas. Actually it did happen in the bubble but now that the RE bubble is over, watch texas real estate stay flat or decline for the next 10 years. A totally different market.
April 6th, 2008 at 10:09 am
>>So you won’t get stuck with a house when the market in that cheap, small town sours?
Yes, you’re right in that case. I was following my original example of someone staying for 20 years.
This shows why BA is special. Living in other places may be cheaper, but for a reason.
April 6th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
The market is on its way down. By the time most people figure out it may be hitting its peak, it’s already jumped the shark.
Remember, inventory is up everywhere, including the very special places. Prices aren’t elastic, people are irrational about them and won’t reduce (or they can’t because they bought too high). So you end up with lots of homes for sale, and only the properly priced stuff moves.
But go on, tell us all how great the market is doing when sales volume is down in every zip code in SC county, but for 3.
I’m still waiting to hear from you about the $600K place I found in 94087. No one would have predicted a SFH for that price. More like that is coming.
April 7th, 2008 at 8:53 am
madhaus, this very blog is full of trash properties that will only sell during a speculative boom. The fact that trash has stopped moving is not indicative of a crash.
And let’s be clear about that. You and Pralay haven’t been predicting slowdown. You’ve been predicting crash, with no small measure of self-satisfied glee.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Madhaus,
>>The market is on its way down.
What are you basing this on? Just from seeing higher invenstory in Spring selling season? If inventory is up “everywhere”, how come there aren’t many homes for sale in your neighborhood? Where is the link to the $600K house? If prices are dropping, can I do you a favor and buy your house for $600K?
April 7th, 2008 at 11:44 am
RE,
I’ve already said inventory is up from last year same month, so it has nothing to do with Spring Bounce. But Pralay is right, you have a financial incentive to remain ignorant of this distinction.
I gave the link already to the property. I’m sure you can find it. If not, consider it the cost of your game-playing.
Density Duck, how would you define a crash? I don’t know that I ever used that term, I am thinking more “bust” which is what comes at the end of a boom. Certainly you agree the boom times are over. And why would I be gleeful of a crash? I’ve got a huge amount of equity in this shack, if the price goes down it hurts me way more than the lienholder.
The only thing I’m gleeful about is the end of the liar loans with nothing down and those buying them getting what they deserve. Well, that and popping RE’s balloon.
April 7th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Just from seeing higher invenstory in Spring selling season?
———–
Do you know how high it is? In recent past do you remember the time when it was that high?
———
If inventory is up “everywhere”, how come there aren’t many homes for sale in your neighborhood?
———
I think he already mentioned that the inventory is as high as mid-June level.
http://www.burbed.com/2008/04/03/glut-of-unsold-housing-in-fortress-no-no-no/#comment-15311
(post #33).
April 12th, 2008 at 5:28 am
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