Housing market crash – why hasn’t it happened yet?

PurpleThrobber said:

YellowSnow said:

RaceBannon said:

Our Seattle home topped out at 525 K in 2004. Bought it for 90

Sold in 2011 or 348K

Paper is paper. It is worth what someone will pay when you want or need to sell

Right now it is positive. Supply is low and people want to flee to the burbs or another state

But you really can't ignore what is out there. People thought it was insane to short the "good" mortgage securities in 07 until it made billionaires out of the guys that did

I'm not rooting for a collapse just learning from history

I think we're in some sort of a bubble nationally. And the potential for foreclosures data is very much concerning.

I placed my bet, personally, on more and more people having some sort of virtual hustle and PDX, SEA, SFO, LAX, etc. continuing to suck ass. My market took a 50% haircut in 2008. One of the worst in the US. Could it happen like that again? Sure, anything is possible. More likely I think is 10% to 20% if things got really bad with the US economy as a whole.

The major markets are going to get whacked. Might be a good tim to pick something up on the cheap before the occupied Chinese state takes over and the new overlords seek housing (Hi OBK).

The second tier cities (in the NW, Spokane/CDA, Bend, Missoula, Tri Cities, a little bit of Boise - though that's getting played out) are blowing up. If you can swing a hammer or do anything related to home construction, you'll have as much work as you'd like. It's essentially name your price if you want to see your home.

Everywhere. I've said it before, but $5600 bid for a plumbing job that took me (a plumbing moron) eight hours and cost $200 in fittings, pipe, tools, and solvent. $29 for a 2x8 that cost $10 four years ago. $30 for a sheet of OSB that cost $12 four years ago. My brother just had his house re-sided, and it cost $80K. That was the lowest of five bids. Some friends of mine had a 600 square foot ground level addition built onto their house, and it cost $275K. Unreal.

What's saddest is that builders are naming their price and doing shitty work, building houses that will rot in under a decade. When I bought my house, it backed up to thousands of acres of woods (Galbraith Mountain mountain biking system, actually), but since then, two different developments have gone up up the hill to either side, eventually connecting together in the middle (the house on 10 acres behind us will eventually sell and get developed, and we'll be completely surrounded by suburbia, which is sad). Anyway, I walk or bike up that hill, looking at these McMansions as they're being built, and I just shake my head. Windows aren't taped and flashed properly, neither are doors, cheap materials, etc. Sign in the front lawn says "sale pending" before they're even built, and they're going for three-quarters of a million. Very few builders actually take the time to keep up with advances in construction techniques and are doing the same shitty stuff that led to houses built in the 90s just falling apart a decade later.