The market seems to think housing has hit bottom. Yahoo! Finance says “Stocks Higher on Hope for Housing Bottom”:
Wall Street Moves Higher As Investors Hope Housing Slump Might Be Nearing Bottom
NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street advanced Monday on hopes that the worst housing slump in a quarter century might be nearing a bottom, a trend that could be the catalyst needed to revive the badly beaten financial sector.
I do think the worst part of the mortgage mess is behind us. However, is this the bottom? I don’t know.
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Is the housing crunch over?
December Existing Home Sales
Current State of Housing Market
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on Feb 25th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
I hate to say it, but I am not sure we are quite there…yet.
on Feb 25th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Ginger,
I think you’re probably right. However, the local markets may be in differing states of bottoming out. Overall, I think we may just be nearing the bottom. We’re not going to a upswing like we did in the recent past, but we may flaten out for a while. Still better than what we’ve been through this past year or so.
on Feb 26th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Hi Shailesh,
The peak of the market was 7/05, give or take. That would make a 1st payment due date of 9/05. That would make a 2-yr ARM adjust upward in 9/07. That would make an upside-down borrower start foreclosure proceedings in 12/07 or 1/08. That would mean we are just now about to hit the Peak of foreclosures.
Good news is we’ve already accounted for the craziness of pre-July 05. Bad news is we still have to account for the winding down in the fall of ‘05.
Hopefully most of the homes that are about to hit us as foreclosres have alreay been sitting on the market - first as overpriced listings and then as underpriced short-sales. So the fact that they’re foreclosing won’t really change our inventory numbers… (said with fingers crossed!)
ps - I like your new site design a lot.
on Feb 27th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Good Morning Shailesh,
I’ve decided to stop being a “serial” blogger and post and read on a more regular basis!
Thanks for your ongoing insights. What we are seeing in Ahwatukee is things bottoming out, but I think we still have some sliding to do. That being said, I looked at numbers from 2000-2007 and we show a 90% increase in prices here - pretty hard to complain about that! There have obviously been some serious problems for a lot of people recently, but the media really plays up the doom and gloom of the market!
I like you new site design as well!
on Feb 27th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Chris,
Very interesting line of thinking. That makes sense. So, we should be in the middle of the worst fallout and it should soon clear up. With lending guidelines much stricter it will be hard for a whole lot of folks to jump back into the market, but we should see a steady improvement over the rest of the year.
Janet,
I saw your report on your blog after I had posted this and was going to comment. You have a point that the media really does play it up when it’s bad and no one talks about it when things are good.
Serial “reading” and leaving comments seems to bring more visitors to your own blog. Strange how that works right?