Yesterday, the Case-Shiller Index showed another drop. That includes home prices in Vegas; this morning’s Review Journal front page asked “How low can they go?” and pointed out that we’re below 2000 prices! No wonder a record number of people are challenging the Assessor’s office!

Experts are of mixed opinions regarding the future of the housing market. Some say we’ll recover soon, some say it’s time to buy, some say no it will be a mess for years, some say a double dip is coming (if not already here). Frankly there’s something to be said for all these points of view! Last week we saw that sales of existing homes were down almost 10%, yet inventory was also down. On one hand, as much as 13% of U.S. homes may be vacant — including all “second homes” — but on the other hand pending home sales rose. Price-to-Rent figures look good, but first time buyers aren’t biting like they used to. “Shadow Inventory” has been redefined to mean “properties that might be foreclosed upon and may or may not already be for sale,” meaning the experts can no longer scare us with the spectre of unlisted bank-owned properties that might not actually exist.

On top of that, there’s talk of new mortgage risk rules, continuing argument over slapping the banks’ wrists for repeatedly breaking the laws of all 50 states, and no sign that the bankers learned a thing from foreclosuregate — other than they can count on the Feds to save them, most of the time.

Tags: banking reform, Case-Shiller, economy, existing home sales, foreclosure backlog, foreclosure fraud, home prices, shadow inventory

This entry was posted on March 30, 2011 at 5:00 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Posted in General Real Estate Las Vegas Real Estate by Bridget Magnus 1 Comment