Volatile Housing Market

Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock you are well aware that the nation is facing its biggest real estate crisis ever in the history of recorded time. Homes are being foreclosed and the prices are dropping almost daily it seems. The level of unemployment due to the economy is at levels higher than anyone can imagine. This is making more people than ever fail and file bankruptcy and spurs more foreclosures and the cycle starts again.

We find that foreclosed homes are hitting the market so fast that the price of those homes is dropping at a fairly alarming rate. When this happens the prices of those foreclosures for sale actually drop the value of all the property in the market.

That means that the foreclosure market is actually effectively driving the overall price of real estate because it is hard to spend more money on a home just because it is not in foreclosure. This is especially true if the two homes are close to the same.

The common mortgage loan, which was once so easy to obtain is now more allusive than ever and you need to almost jump through hoops in order to qualify for a mortgage these days. Home value has taken a beating and almost no one has any equity in his or her homes unless they were lucky enough to have it nearly paid off when the crisis began.

The market is down but the stimulus package and the tax breaks that the federal government has unveiled and the Making Homes Affordable programs have all had the effect of selling more homes and thus rising the number that have sold and even causing the overall base values to increase somewhat.

The experts are fairly equally divided in the opinions as to whether this is going to be a permanent turn around that is going to start the painfully slow rebuild of the real estate market or if it is just a momentary reprieve from the specter of a dead or dying market.

The truth is that only time will truly tell the story.

Original: Volatile Housing Market