The housing market does seem to be slowly improving both locally and
nationally but I don’t think most people understand the numbers. Homes prices were up this year when compared with the same months of last year. This is because we hit bottom last year here in the Twin Cities and frankly we had no place to go but up.
However, home prices are significantly lower than they were at the peak in 2006 or so and a lot of people lost a lot of money because of it.Foreclosures are down from 2009 and 2010 and even from last year but they are still way too high some 25% of the homes on the market nation wide are in some stage of foreclosure. Personally I find that outrageous and downright scary and I don’t think we can call it a healthy housing market. Foreclosures are helping to keep values down.
The foreclosure process is bizarre. A borrower can’t keep up with payments and so the bank takes the house and spends a lot of money acquiring it and selling it to someone who can afford payments that are much smaller than the prior owner had to make and could have afforded. It makes no sense to me.
Currently there the number of homes on the market is very low and there are many people who would like to sell but who can not because they do not have any equity. There are still folks out there who have equity but will not sell until their home is worth $?? because for what ever reason they feel entitled to $?? and feel very strongly that it should come from the sale of their home.
The housing recovery that experts have been seeing signs of since 2007 seems to be underway and it will be slow. We just need to hope that it will be steady and that our leaders will no throw us into another recession by mishandling the fiscal cliff that they created by mishandling the last budget crisis.
