Talking up the housing market
I'm no economist, but I've been looking at houses continuously since last summer, and this smells like bullshit to me:
There's a lot less building in the single family segment for sure, but there's no land left for that inside route 495 anyway.
My impression of the housing stock within 128 is that you're lucky to find a crapshack in an okay neighborhood that needs a new roof and heating system for under $400k. Think about what that's going to run you a month as a new buyer. How long is that sustainable?
I predict falling prices in the next 30 days. Inventory levels are extremely high now, and spring just started an hour ago.
- Two of the nation's top economists said today that despite a cooling in the housing market, a strong economy and job market are expected to bolster the US and New England markets and prevent house prices from declining in coming months.
At the New England Realtors Conference in downtown Boston, Cathy Minehan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said that strong job growth in the US and New England will continue to fuel demand for housing.
New England "will have negative sales like the rest of the country" in 2006, "but prices will still go up," Lereah said. "There's no bubble bursting," he said. "You can put air in the bubble, and it inflates and now the air is going out of the balloon -- it is not bursting."
[...]
For New England home prices, "the pace of appreciation here has been greater" than the rest of the nation, Minehan said. But "unlike the '80s, residential construction has not boomed, and there has been little speculative building."
There's a lot less building in the single family segment for sure, but there's no land left for that inside route 495 anyway.
My impression of the housing stock within 128 is that you're lucky to find a crapshack in an okay neighborhood that needs a new roof and heating system for under $400k. Think about what that's going to run you a month as a new buyer. How long is that sustainable?
I predict falling prices in the next 30 days. Inventory levels are extremely high now, and spring just started an hour ago.
posted by $!# at 3/20/2006 02:23:00 PM
4 Comments:
And of course it's a little funny to read people claiming that prices "will still go up," when they're in fact going down. I can't count the number of listings I've looked at where the asking has dropped by 5-8% in the past two weeks - many of them, houses that have just hit the market. If that's the rate of decline now, and those houses still aren't getting sold, I don't see how prices can do anything but continue to fall, particularly as we're seeing a glut of new condos on the market, with more still being converted, and when everyone's saying that real changes don't really start until the Spring market gets going.
And of course it's a little funny to read people claiming that prices "will still go up," when they're in fact going down. I can't count the number of listings I've looked at where the asking has dropped by 5-8% in the past two weeks - many of them, houses that have just hit the market. If that's the rate of decline now, and those houses still aren't getting sold, I don't see how prices can do anything but continue to fall, particularly as we're seeing a glut of new condos on the market, with more still being converted, and when everyone's saying that real changes don't really start until the Spring market gets going.
P.S. Blogger's comment system sucks. As does their bandwidth and availability.
it does suck. bloggers like atrios plug in third-party comment systems (haloscan). but still -- not sure how they can deal with the overall system downtime and error rates...
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