One of the problems that we are confronted with is, when we decide to buy or build a home, we don't get a clear picture of what closing costs will be of that home.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's easy to underestimate the real cost of home ownership.
What we see out there is an affordable housing crisis, particularly in the rental market in cities big and small, and we don't have the resources necessary to fill that gap.
Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated inner cities. All of these provide information our prices should be giving us but do not.
The most critical factor subduing the demand for housing is that home ownership is no longer seen as the great, long-term buildup in equity value it once was.
A home is a home, and excess supply leads to prices falling.
That is - the reason for that is that home prices are only going to go up. Now, they've never gone down nationwide in our - since we've been keeping track of this.
The key to house prices is the share of foreclosure or short sales in the total housing market. When that share rises, house prices will fall, because distressed properties sell for significantly less - currently around 25 percent below non-distressed houses.
What most Americans don't realize is a lot of the challenges we're struggling with today are the result of conscious housing policies.
Ask anybody who has ever remodeled their house. There's always problems. They open up walls, they find this, they find that. There is always something. I'm in a business where you have to control those variables.
You don't make houses cheaper by making them more expensive to build.