"Waiting for Home Prices to Bottom Out"
UPDATE: LA Times blogger Peter Viles discusses the Central Valley's "huge housing bubble" on CNN.com.
From ABC 30:
As home values continue to fall many qualified home-buyers in the valley are just sitting on the fence, waiting for home prices to bottom out.From the Redding Record-Searchlight:
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The numbers are very disconcerting to valley homeowners. The median price of a home in Fresno dipped 7.2 % from $305,000 a year ago to $281,000 last month. Clovis saw an 11% drop while Sanger prices plummeted 14%...The median price of a home in Merced dropped from $350,000 a year ago to $275,000 last month. That's a 21% fall. Los Banos homes are down almost 20%.
July home sales in Shasta County reached their lowest level in 12 years. DataQuick Information Systems reported Monday that 169 homes closed escrow last month, the fewest since July 1995, when 165 homes sold, and down from 231 sales a year ago...July was the fifth consecutive month the median sale price for all homes dropped on a year-over-year basis, DataQuick said.
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Greg Lloyd, incoming president of the Shasta Association of Realtors, said borrowers need to bring more income documentation to the table than they did a year ago. During that refi and subprime craze, you could be a dead dog for four days and still get a loan,” Lloyd said. “Now it’s coming back to where lenders want full or partially full documents before they make a loan.”
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Rick Goates, a Redding real estate agent, said sellers need to realize they have competition. “The days are long gone of throwing a high number up on a home and hoping it sells,” he noted.
Meanwhile, buyers can wait for prices to drop, but if they find the home they like, don’t be afraid to make an offer, Goates said. “What have you got to lose?” Goates said. “It would be a shame to miss out . . . just to save a couple of thousand.”
9 comments:
“It would be a shame to miss out . . . just to save a couple of thousand.”
Ahhh, but it wouldn't be a shame to miss out just to save a hundred-thousand.
Ditto Rivercat...that was my exact thought as well!
$50-$75k is a lot of money to regular folks. I think many realtors have lost touch with the reality of their buyers face.
"It would be a shame to miss out . . . just to save a couple of thousand."
Translation: It would be a shame for a REALTOR (tm) to miss out on that commission, just because you want to save thousands of dollars. Don't be greedy.
I get that "why time the market?" comment all the time at open houses.
So if any agents are reading, don't try that crap anymore. It makes you look stupid. All it accomplishes is making me want to force you to present my 60% of list offer to your client.
I get the feeling that in about a year or two, most on this blog, that end up buying, will be bragging about how much money they saved off peak prices. 40% savings certainly isn't beyond possible, maybe even 50-60% under the perfect storm scenario.
There's virtually nothing on the horizon that would bottom this market out and turn prices around anytime soon.
One thing's for certain, all those "in the know" have had their heads handed to them trying to figure out just how bad this market really is.
Gotta love that line from the movie Wall Street whrn Bud Fox was trying to dump his luxury NYC apartment. The crabby old realtor says: AINT NOTHIN MOVIN BUT THE COCK-A-ROACHES!
There are times when I feel a sense of urgency because I am closer to retirement. But then, I do the math. By not buying 18 months ago, I have already saved at least 50K. Of the four homes that I'm currently tracking, only one is anywhere close to being affordable for me and I've got a great FICO and a stable job that pays well above average. If a home's price is falling at around 1% per month, which seems to be happening, that means another 30K savings by this time next year, and that is a lot more than I can save any other way over the course of a year right now.
Of course, I have to remind myself of this quite frequently!
My estimate is that in about a year, I will sign up with BuySide and start dragging the Sig Other around to look at the inside of some homes. I don't see it happening faster than that, but that's one of the reasons I read these blogs.
Here's a quote from a local realtor who recently contacted me about buying: "We just had a state economist come to talk to us who predicts the turnaround in Sac will return to a seller’s market 2009 / 2010." I wonder what type of economist she's refering to, a NAR economist or a real one?
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