Well that and the fairly large vacancy rate that is somewhat new to my area…

SemperFinance: best user name ever. Hat tip to you, Sir/Ma’am.

http://img389.imageshack.us/img389/3628/renttrendsuk6.png

I’ll have a post on this in the next week or so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_WuwoDYPdQ

Tim… do you know of anywhere to find stats on the average rental price? Is there anyway we could start graphing that?

and that they are more likely to reach year 200 price levels

Thank goodness that was a typo – I don’t have any skins or arrowheads to trade for a house. :-)

All I gotta do now is to find “Island” on a map and make my move!!! Gems Ray, I am telling you, Gems!!!

I hear ya. For the past couple of days, I’ve been looking at Aubrey Cohen’s RE News blog on the Seattle PI, and they seem to have their heads stuck so far in the sand (or elsewhere), I can’t even stand sifting through the willful ignorence of their comments.

I doubt we’ll be seeing many more average 6 percenters over the next few years, since 869 closed sales/month doesn’t really sustain that much of an RE industry.

Leo – regarding Tim’s YOY sales discrepency:

In these stats: King – Price: -9.2% | Listings: +2.2% | Sales: -21.2% | MOS: 8.7, Tim is referring to Pending Sales (sales that are in the pipe and awaiting closing). The -43% YOY Closed Sales is tracking those sales that acutally closed.

The Tim did a piece on the recent wide discrepency between the Pending Sales (which used to predict the next month’s closed sales within a few percentage points, but is now getting further and further off).

Of course this type of statistical analysis is useless to your average 6 percenter.
Most of them have no clue. They don’t understand what happend, what’s happening or what is going to happen.

We have discussed that same issue here in the past. In fact, every month when I post the main NWMLS update the median price has an asterisk next to it linking to this post: Median Price Not Telling the Whole Truth.

Even as prices are falling, we should keep in mind these shortcomings with the median price statistic. That’s why my favorite measure of prices is Case-Shiller. It’s not without its own faults, but it is miles ahead of the raw closed sales median.

Canadians think house prices are tumbling in Canada thanks to Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) reports that say prices have dropped 10% over the year. But it’s generally recognized their methodology is flawed: CREA compares average prices between two periods even though the composition of houses sold in the two periods can be quite different in terms of type, dwelling size, quality, etc

In my book, the bottom will be much like the Great Depression…..when it fully collapses [we have a long way to go yet] it will flatten for a decade or two.

You can’t miss it.

The smartest RE shoppers during the GD didn’t buy until they had to. If the banks doors were closed, the one with the most in his/her cash can bought apartment complexes, farms, companies, etc….