The impact of the downturn is starting to feel very real. House prices and the housing market have been taking the knock for some time and that's affecting people.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A housing renaissance has begun. This may be hard to believe after the dizzying, six-year-long crash in home sales, construction and house prices. But housing turned the corner last year, and it will take off in 2013.
So much value has been lost in the housing market that people are now buying. If there's any activity in the housing market, it's because values have plummeted to such depths that the 47% can now afford to live in a government-purchased house, or something like that.
In 2007, in the early 2007, everybody saw the housing market was falling, and at any given moment a lot of people thought it was going to fall more, and a lot of people thought it was going to rebound. You just didn't know.
The housing market will get worse before it gets better.
The real story in housing will be a recovery in the economy that will drive a recovery in housing, When people are working, when there are more jobs, more households forming and people go back to buying cars, they're going to want their apartments and homes. And that's when you'll start to see a recovery in home prices.
It is time to move on. House prices won't rise and the economy won't fully engage until more distressed properties are resolved and put back into ordinary use.
Following an extended boom in housing, the demand for homes began to weaken in mid-2005. By the middle of 2006, sales of both new and existing homes had fallen about 15 percent below their peak levels. Homebuilders responded to the fall in demand by sharply curtailing construction.
One reason why upturns follow downturns is that downturns tend to overshoot. People get panicky, they're afraid to stay the course, so they start selling. The other thing is that I think, as entrepreneurs keep on waiting to produce new things, that there's an accumulation of as-yet-unexploited new ideas that keeps mounting up.
It is hard to be enthusiastic about the economy's prospects when house prices are falling: Households spend less, small business owners can't use homes as collateral for loans and local governments are forced to cut jobs and programs as property-tax revenue disappears.
In 2008, when the real estate market blew up, it principally hurt older people who saw the value of their houses go down, along with their pension plans.
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