National Price Declines Don't Tell the Whole Story

The nationwide numbers out today show that, year over year, home prices continue to decline. That decline was over 18% nationally. Because everyone hears national numbers, rather than local, the tendency is to assume that whatever you're hearing is also the situation locally.

Year over year, our numbers look worse than the national average. The latest numbers available from the local multiple listing service show year over year price declines between 23-32%. But that's only one piece of the picture.

If you're buying a foreclosed home or possibly even a short sale, you may not feel the pricing power you were led to believe you'd have. You see, all the buyers are looking in the same price range. So, even if there are 25% fewer buyers than there were a couple of years ago, if they're all looking at properties, say, on the western end of Prince William County under $350K there is little or no buyer leverage.

So, the pricing picture is considerably more complicated than what you hear in the national press. I'm not blaming them. You can't write a coherent article about prices everywhere! Just be aware that the picture here is a little more nuanced.

The other piece of information in the home price report was that prices nationwide are now at 2002 levels. I suspect we're not quite that low yet. But I haven't yet had an opportunity to do an analysis. I am seeing people who've been in their homes five years or more still under water.

And, if you're wondering when we bounce back up, this Bloomberg article wasn't particularly optimistic:

 “There are very few V-shaped recoveries in the history of real estate, and this one is likely to be even slower because of the size of the bubble,” said Robert Shiller, the Yale University professor who, with economist Karl Case, created home price indexes in the 1980s now used by Standard & Poor’s.

In short, don't expect any rebound in prices soon. I believe from a price perspective we'll bounce along the bottom for quite some time, perhaps a couple of years before we begin very slow appreciation.

If you're looking for a ray of sunshine, one analyst on CNBC suggested yesterday that we could fix the housing problem any time we wanted by increasing the number of immigrants.

RE: National Price Declines Don't Tell the Whole Story

Increasing the number of immigrants will not solve anything! If you have ever rented or sold property to them, they can take the whole neighborhood down!  Prideful homeowners are then forced to sell and it's taken over before you know it!

I have seen the destruction done in Prince William County and feel that was a major cause in the housing market dropping.