Any real life stories involving the Real Estate Recovery?

[cmist]

Originally Posted by Rich_CD

The real estate market is stabilizing. The drops are smaller and happen more often. That's a normal sign of stabilizing.

From what I can see, the drops seem to be larger, not smaller. But yes, happening more often I agree with. Stabilization would be when prices are going laterally and not downward, so its anybodys guess how long that will be still. Naturally, we are working our way towards stabilization. The market will always be working toward stabilization from the first second its out of whack.

On one hand, the frenzy of bank sales is good news because the banks have finally awakened to the fact that they have to do some serious fire sales to dump their inventory, but on the other hand, its a real eye opener to see the prices it takes to get people excited enough to buy.

When the banks are gone and have cleaned up their mess, which looks like it still could be years, THE BANKS can actually begin a recovery, but as for our local real estate market, we, the homeowners will still be suffering in the aftermath of the mess they created.

We can't really begin to analyze whether or not we are stable, until the banks are gone and we start seeing how well real home sellers can accomplish a home sale, and that seems a pretty long ways away to start cheering about stabilization right now.

Sorry I'm really angry at the banks because I don't think its right that they get bailed out AND get to take the homes back too. They screwed up, but we have to pay the consequences. I don't see how that arrangement helped anyone. It would have been far better to think along the lines of how to keep those people in their homes and paying some kind of payment they could afford, then to kick everyone out just so they could sell homes at a loss and take the whole city down in the process.

[JGatti]

I try to limit my responses in states forums that I don't live, but read the Az forum because if we move from Michigan Az will be where we go.

Anyway I can tell you here in Michigan things have been bad. Really bad as I'm sure you know. My wife and I put our house on the market in July. I had all but given up hope for an offer before the first time tax credit expired but low and behold we were given an offer last week. Our house would have sold for close to 200k a few years back. We sold it for 119k. So it's good and bad in a way I guess. We were fortunate to have enough equity so that when we do buy again we will have a nice down payment already. We took this offer for two reasons.

1- not sure if we're out of the woods on the prices dropping. We decided to take what was offered and make up for it in our next home.

2- with the uncertainty of my job still and my wife being in school we are trying to prepare for the worst and the future.

I do think things are slowly turning around. We looked in our area and there is not much left on the market for cheap housing. They've been scooped up for the most part it seems.

[FunkyPioneer]

My in laws bought our house for 246K last July, our same model on a smaller lots just sold last week for 175K, so I believe that who ever says things are better are lying! We looked at new homes in Queen Creek today, the builder was asking 240k for the house we are looking at and there was a short sale on the same street for 149K. Nothing is getting better and its only getting worse. I posted several years ago that the market was colapsing and that we wouold see 50% drop and no one would believe me, and here we are. I promise you, housing will drop another 50%.