Is housing fixing itself?
The group of analysts and government officials predicting good things for the U.S. housing market continues to grow. Now, a professor at Columbia Business School says that the housing industry may already be mending itself.
Forbes recently ran an optimistic story quoting Chris Mayer, senior vice dean at Columbia, who says that the country’s foreclosure crisis may be near its high point.
In the Forbes story, Mayer says that bank seizures should begin tapering off this summer. As this happens, housing prices should finally stabilize, Mayer is quoted as saying.
Now, Mayer may be jumping the gun a bit on this, but the Forbes story quotes him as saying that the real estate recovery has been the result of market forces. There is little evidence, he says, that government intervention played much of a role.
I think it’s a bit too early to be analyzing any sort of housing recovery. After all, housing prices are still extremely low when compared to one year ago. Sales are down, too, from one year earlier. To me, this doesn’t exactly look like a recovery.
That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been signs lately that the housing market is stabilizing and, maybe, beginning a slow, steady recovery. And when a recovery begins in earnest, I’m guessing that Mayer will be proven right and that it will be market forces rather than any plan by Barack Obama or any other politician that causes the rebound.
