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This is as far as you have to go in each of those articles.
Well, in addition to Zillow "zestimates" , which mean nothing, they also track every time you do a price reduction in MLS. They keep a history on each property and can look at a street, an entire state or the nation to see where prices are going.
Never said that I personally claimed that homes homes are in foreclousre by 25%. The discussion between Brandon and I started with him believing that homes would rebound to double digit to which I disagreed. I've read articles that stated 25% increase in foreclosure year after year. Brandon also stated that 97% of homes are not in foreclosure to which I disagree hince all the articles I am posting which backs up my point.
Zillow is a joke. Please please please don't EVER use Zillow for any source what so ever. You will be laughed at and mocked by the real estate community.
Secondly 100% of statistics are complete BS. One thing I learned in college is that you can make statistics say whatever you want them to say. For example...did you know that 100% of divorces began with marriage? See what I did there?
Zillow is a joke. Please please please don't EVER use Zillow for any source what so ever. You will be laughed at and mocked by the real estate community.
Secondly 100% of statistics are complete BS. One thing I learned in college is that you can make statistics say whatever you want them to say. For example...did you know that 100% of divorces began with marriage? See what I did there?
Well I am very conflicted. Part of me very much agrees with some of the info in the report linked to above -- the "rate of change" type calculations are in-line with what I see from a variety sources -- not so much that things are really "getting better" but more that it is more likely BROAD market trends will enter a long period of overall "flatness". To many people, epecially the big money center banks and the government / quasi-governmental organizations / boards this will be welcome relief.
I also have long had strong objections to the base methodology of Case-Schiller as I continue to believe that its fundamental "matched pair of sales" model is not really reflective of typical real estate trends. To be blunt it is like the patient-to-patient transmission models that AIDS researchers came up with in the early days of the peak of the AIDS epidemic -- well respected scientists honestly believed that by now every sexually active person on the planet would be infected and likely dying. Well just as Case-Schiller might have made sense when flippers were a huge part of the market and lots of people had no qualms about moving up every few years I think the fundamental data mining needs to be revisited and even more importantly the alogorithms for extrapolation need to be completely overhauled. It is like when the anti-retroviral drug cocktails and widespread condom usage are accepted -- people stop dying. Buyers are no longer "having unprotected sex", they "get tested" and far fewer people move with the intent of making a quick buck. The "bath house" models of Case-Schiller are not reflective of the kinds of desirable homes that people buy for the long haul. They get a deep discount, are wiser about improvements and seek out areas with more stability...
I also do NOT agree that we can simply choose to believe whatever we want about either the overall direction of the real estate market OR the value of properties that we have some financial interest in. There is some bad data out there, and often it is very very very hard to separate that from the much smaller pool of good data -- just because data sets that once had high correlation coefficients were useful does not mean that it is safe to assume the trends will be predicitive.
The most "macro" of economic statistics concerning wages and employment have all sorts of wacky implications -- every new paper on "behavioral finance" basically reinforces the fact that humans ALWAYS rely on incomplete information to make financial decisions and a HUGE pile of those decisions are spectacularly WRONG. Their own desires to "be correct" and "avoid mistakes" are undoubtedly the same sort of genetic disposition that makes most mammals move in "herds" and some (like lemmings...) follow the pack right over a cliff. As new "sub groups" reform the information feedback mechanisms that they rely on undoubtedly bake-in the same things that sow seeds of new bubbles and subsequent collapse.
If I had to make a prediction of the broad curve in real estate values my best estimates is that the majority of US sub markets will waggle around a flattish trend line, with local spikes rarely seeing more than a 10% increase over any one year period, but also relatively few places seeing more than about 5-7% year over year erosion going forward. This is probably more like the later half of the Eisenhower administration and early part of the Kennedy presidency than any other recent period, and with lots of reasons to believe the Fed wants to keep long term interest rates in that sort of range I like the prospects of something similar...
VickiR, that was someone's blog and not article you posted. The blog didn't outline clear reasons to see the housing recover this year or the next. The areas that will rebound are areas that have stable employment and areas that quickly correct the housing prices.
Anyways, at the end of the day this is about common sense. Let's take my great state of CA. Homes here in not so desirable areas had values jump from $75K to $800K for a 2BDRM/1 bath barely 1200 sqft, with 4-6K sqft lot if that, in less than 10 years (a lot of the homes needed work too). This makes no rational sense. The income can not support the purchase. So at the end of the day prices need and will come down to reflect the current market. Not sure why you would see it any differently.
People knew the dotcom bubble would burst and it did. It is the same thing. Homes prices will continue to fall until they reach a realistic value. Then they will stabilize and then again appreciate. But not until the market falls flat on its ars (and there is still a lot of room).
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See what I did there? 
