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

To: Travis_Bickle who wrote (71916)	2/11/2007 3:52:24 PM
From: saveslivesbyday	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Wall Street knows all this. But it expects the downturn, while severe, to be short. It figures builders will hold a fire sale this year, work off unsold homes, take a big profit hit and get back to business in 2008. ---- Right, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Just close your eyes and repeat "back to 2005 highs, back to 2005 highs..." ---- Seriously, the problems with this simplisticly optimistic view are; How severe a downturn? How short is short? What will a fire sale do to margins? Just how many unsold homes are there? What if the dust doesn't clear until 2009, or later? I did like the article though.

To: Travis_Bickle who wrote (71916)	2/11/2007 11:21:05 PM
From: ChanceIs	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

Speaking of Baltimore...Real Estate Taxes I was watching the Baltimore public television station the other night. They have a "state business" news half hour. The last five minutes were devoted to rising real estate taxes. Now I am not making this up, but the Baltimore area does reassessments every three years. Those being assessed this year will see their property values raised 60% since 2004. That's right, 20% annualized. I did a search on the Baltimore Sun webpage and couldn't find any conforming article. Trust me please, that is what I heard. 60% How much higher can home prices go when taxes are up this much??? If you are a fixed income, then things could become very dicey. One might suppose that after a while the taxes will become a limiting factor in real estate ownership. Any way you slice or dice it, real wages are not up 20% annually over the last three years. Certainly government wages aren't up that much - so what is the state going to do with all the money. Like California, they will have an outflux of population. Its nuts.