Anyone? Scotsman? Put those big bad economist credentials to work, baby.

But due to global warming, if you buy a waterfront home, you’ll still be seriously underwater.

The server migration message was placed on the old host to prevent people from leaving comments on the old and new servers simultaneously, which would result in two different versions of comment threads existing.

I highly recommend you call tech support for your service provider. Tell them you’re trying to access a website whose DNS records were updated over a week ago, and are still being sent to the old server. Obviously the first level tech support won’t be able to do jack, but I would hope that someone in the upper levels would be able to put in some sort of work order for their nameservers to be refreshed or something.

Good luck, and sorry!

Very good point that had until now escaped me: in the long run, the houses we buy now will almost certainly be worth more after we are dead.

Getting my checkbook….

While I’m not the bailout type, If there is going to be a bailout, rather than giving the money to lending institutions, principal reductions make more sense than other loan modifications. The goal should be to get prices down to a fundamentally sound level with as little collateral damage as possible, not to support a bubble level. Let’s make sure that those principal reductions are for people who actually live in the home, and is based on the ORIGINAL financing. (I’ve read too many sob stories that when you look further reveal multiple refinancings to take out money to buy cars, vacations, pay down debt etc). Of course then continue with strict lending standards. Those who took money out for toys will need to repay or lose the house.

I’ve been following the Edmonds market for a while now, and this confirms what I’ve been seeing (that prices are dropping a little more slowly there). I’m sure they will catch up, though, b/c they still seem really high.

But maybe the best chart is on the Seattle Times site – “Buyers holding the upper hand”. Clearly shows how declining prices have affected people who bought in 2008,7 and 6.

As the rollback in prices continues, and we continue to get coverage like this, I wonder if more people will start to get nervous and try to jump in the market and sell.

Looking at the charts, if I had bought in 2003-4 or even 2002 I would be starting to get nervous.

Steve’s comment is quite interesting. Homes themselves are becoming toxic, with no way to mark to market, just like the financing that backs them. This turns into a positive feedback loop, since loan availability then goes down, which in turn further retards sales volume.

“Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) — A record 19 million U.S. houses stood empty at the end of 2008 as banks seized homes faster than they could sell them and prices continued to fall.

The fourth quarter’s all-time high was 6.7 percent above a year ago when 17.8 million properties were vacant, the U.S. Census Bureau said in a report today. The vacancy rate, the share of empty homes for sale, rose to 2.9 percent in the last quarter, the most in data that goes back to 1956.”

Can Seattle be far behind this trend?

Rents will be coming down, rent based prices will be coming down, pink ponies will be looking for greener pastures.

But the overall trend info is probably fairly accurate.

And I like the fact that they also back up my previous predictions of home values falling 10-20% by the end of 2008 compared to the 2007 peak values — you know I can’t resist slipping that in every chance I can get. LOL!

Appraisals are becoming a HUGE problem in the mortgage industry because there are so few sales. When the appraisers can’t find comps within the last 6-12 months some lenders simply refuse to make the loan because they have no way of knowing the true value of the home.

“Any argument that prices wouldn’t fall here was absurd,…”

KLK seems to talk out of both sides of his mouth and his opinions are wishy washy….if he blogged here, it would drive us SB bloggers to ask him to clarify his stand and he’d have none of that.

Hades, he should run for office….lol