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Showing posts with the label housing collapse

The market has vanished.

An opportunity knocked. We're moving cross country to pursue it. Which means we need to sell a house. The first time we sold a house, many, many years ago, we sold without a broker to friends of friends. That house never went on the MLS at all. And both parties walked away very happy. Last time we sold a house, seven years ago, we sold it by owner for close to the asking price in less than three days. That was then.  This is now. And what we've discovered - the market for homes has vanished completely. There are no buyers at all. We are motivated sellers. We've priced our home competitively. Yet let me repeat: there are no buyers. And if you look at market metrics, for several years now, the supply of homes for sale far exceeds the number of buyers. Within any given month, there are several hundred homes for sale, and just a handful of sales. That's grim news if you've signed the contracts and are moving cross-country in a couple of months. The one bit of gre...

Numbers lie - AKA Why Mike Konczal is wrong about housing lock

Mike Konczal of Rortybomb has a long post with many graphs that he feels prove housing lock is "not a major part of this crisis."  He's wrong. Housing lock exists now; it is a problem; and it will continue to be a problem until people get their heads above water once again. Now how that will happen, I'm not sure at this point. But that millions of people are trapped in houses that cost less today than the value of their loan remains a big issue for many reasons. Though I am not an economist, nor do I have charts to display, I will explain some of the flaws of his argument.