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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (48627)	2/16/2006 8:59:08 PM
From: CalculatedRisk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Is It Crunch Time for Housing? online.barrons.com Excerpts: Bear markets, be they in stocks, housing or commodities, go through certain identifiable phases, like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's famed five stages of dealing with dying -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. "It's a three- to five-year cycle on the downside," says Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley. Rosen calls himself a real-estate bear who endorses the doom-and-gloom scenario of Yale University professor Robert Shiller (see Barron's, "The Bubble's New Home," June 20, 2005)." We've already passed stage one, characterized by "a falloff in new sales and orders," says Rosen, and are just entering stage two, in which unsold inventories build up. That may be where the crunch begins. Prospective sellers, of course, can just take their homes off the market and live in them until they think they can get a better price. But speculators don't have that luxury: At some point they can no longer carry a money-losing investment, so they may throw in the towel and unload their once-promising albatross. That's stage three, says Rosen, and it usually finishes about three years from the beginning of the downturn. The final phase is when we see massive defaults or delinquencies on mortgage loans. That's several years away, he says, and this time the damage could be worse because of the large number of exotic loans giddy lenders extended to desperate home buyers (see Barron's, "Coming Home to Roost," Feb. 13)."

To: bentway who wrote (48627)	2/17/2006 10:24:30 AM
From: Think4Yourself	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

I wouldn't even bother with a bonded electrician. Electrical work is very straightforward and the consequences of a stupid mistake are severe for the electrician. They can almost always do all their work in one trip so that's not an issue either. I have seen guys wire an entire new house in a day. The trades I would want bonded are roofers and plumbers. The roofers are really bad, and that's one of the most important jobs to have done right and completed quickly. I have seen many improperly roofed houses done by licensed roofers, especially missing required ice dam protection or drip edge, and you usually don't find out until after they are paid and gone. Getting licensed for roofing is pathetically easy in most states. Plumbing is risky because if the person doesn't do their joints properly they could start leaking weeks or months later. It happened to me, unfortunately with one of my own joints. Was fine for two months until a very mild case of water hammer opened it up. It's a bummer if you have to tear off an expensive new wall covering to redo the joint, and the source is often not where the water damage starts showing up.