That was an interesting read. Thanx to Mrs Peel bringing it over to this thread.
My read of the situation is, prices have retreated a bit, less than 5-10% in the SJ/Cupertino/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale area, but they've gone down much more in the more expensive areas like Saratoga, Los Gatos, Palo Alto etc. The simple reason for this being that the average cost of the houses in the SJ area are any thing between 400-800K, and the areas are housed by the people working in middle management layer, which has been affected of course, but not as drastically as the executive management of these dot coms has been affected.
The houses in Palo Alto and Saratoga like neighborhoods start from 1.5 million on the average. They were bought on the promise of stock options. Now with those gone busto, the huge payments are hard to keep up with......and a lot of ex-heroes of these startups have lost their jobs.....
The inventories are higher in the SJ and the neighbourhood areas, but at least the houses sell.... I go to Saratoga very often, and noticed that the inventories are getting higher and higher....in the neighborhood I visited, the houses were just not selling at all....and pressured by the payment schedule, the owners were bringing the prices down by almost 10-15% every time they relisted the house. |
