This is the forecast for 2009 by the California Association of Realtors given out at the CAR Expo on October 15th. Note the median price is forecast to be down 6% to $358,000 for 2009. August's median price was reported to be $350,890 and September's median price was reported to be $316,480. Now it is absolutely the case that mix shift makes up a huge part for such declines but at no point do they justify how the mix shift will change or depreciation will stop. In fact their latest Economic Trends article has the following sentence, "The September median price was last in the low $300,000 range in early 2002, and there is no sign that home prices will soon flatten out". So why, when faced by the one crowd whose job it is to educate and prepare for the upcoming season do they sugar coat the price decline issue? It is really unfortunate that they can't bring themselves to be realistic as good information will be one of the things that will help this situation normalize.
4 comments:
Hey Effective,
I have one very minor recommendation for your blog....is it possible to make your font bigger? Stupid request but if it's not a big deal for you to consider, it would be very cool.
Thanks for the info!
CAR seems to have grossly underestimated the collapse of prices...unless they are assuming that cheaper homes will drop out of the equation and artificially allow an increase in Median price.
This was the tactic they used by teh way a few years back to spur on buying....cheaper homes weren't selling and the median price was going up even as prices were coming down.
They are scum.
I changed the font for this post from Times to Arial which has bigger letting. How is that?
Much better!
Thanks.
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