Well, I know it feels that way, but I don't think there were fewer people complaining about prices going up. It's just that it was more quiet, and it was almost kind of expected, at least at first, because everything goes up in price. Over time, things in general just inflate.
With homes it's more pronounced, because it hurts a lot more to spend $150K more on a house than it does to spend $.20 extra on a loaf of bread. So I'm not making light of it...just saying that's why potential buyers wouldn't have literally freaked out with fear in the very beginning. (Unhappiness and disappointment, yes; outright fear, no.) As I can recall at least things I heard--I wasn't a homeowner at that time--people complained but not in a "we've got to do something about this" sort of way because it's just always expected that, despite dips, real estate over the decades goes on a generally upward trend. And it's also usually anticipated that if real estate
really shoots up, it will eventually go back down at least a bit, and prospective buyers just bide their time.
Now when things topped out people DID start screaming. Also, banks have had to initiate all sorts of "rescue" efforts (really they're just rescuing themselves) due to a sharp rise in foreclosures. I personally feel that *if* the market weren't already starting to schooch down a little, in most areas of the country, there *would* be far more of an outcry about rising prices at about this point (some 6-7-ish years after home prices first began to really rise sharply). But for the past couple of years, economists have been predicting (rightly or wrongly) that home costs would go down, so again, a temporary appeasement there.
Now, lowered prices do (I feel) tend to produce a larger panic because, at the end of the day, you don't
have to buy a house; you can rent. But what if your house is set to depreciate any minute, yet your taxes are still sky-high? Then even if you've been a good payer, but making it sort of paycheck to paycheck as many, many people do, you're dipping down to more dangerous things...like the aforementioned forclosure. Or what if you just took out a second mortgage on your home, are finding it too tight a squeeze but realize you will actually lose money, possibly bring money to the closing table, just to sell it? How, if you already are well beyond budget?
That's why it's more *panicky* to see home prices lower from a homeowner's POV, than it is to see them rise as a non-homeowner who doesn't at the moment have anything to lose; in the second scenario, you just have to bide your time until prices lower, but you aren't forced into a monthly payment or else have dire consequences. Although it seems like an insecure feeling to be a renter (I am, right now, and have been the majority of my adult life and I know), there is *still* less to lose on, say, perhaps having to suddenly move to a different apartment, than it is to have to leave a house, have a foreclosure and have it be on your record and have lost hundreds of thousands of eventual equity dollars.
As for the outcry to get the government to step in, well, you go over a certain percentage in foreclosures, and banks are "losing" money and then who steps in? I'm not an economist (obviously...I'm sure you can tell
) but that just can't be good for the economy. So I think that's why people are shouting for the government to "help".
So that's my theory. I'm not giving a "poor me" scenario for homeowners/people trying to sell. Obviously we as a nation tend to stretch ourselves reeeeeeeeeeeeally thin with our "standard of living", always wanting bigger and better and biting off more than we can chew. So I'm neither giving support nor sympathy, but just stating my theory on why there's more panic now than when the prices were going up.
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