Just when you think the housing market is rebounding …
I moved with my wife and children to a suburb of Chicago about three years ago. Yes, that means that I had some lousy timing: We bought our current home at the very height of the housing boom. I think I heard housing prices begin to fall about 10 seconds after my wife and I left the closing table.
We’re happy, though. We like our house, mostly. And we love our community.
Still, whenever I read our local papers, I get a bit nervous about the listings of sold residences: No one, it seems, is paying as much for homes of our size and age as we did for ours three-plus years ago.
We’re hearing and reading a lot lately about small signs that the residential real estate market may be at the very early stages of a gradual rebound. But then I see those sales in my local paper and I wonder: Are housing prices ever going to stop falling?
A friend of ours and her family have to move to Texas this summer for job-related reasons. Earlier this month, they sold their nice house for about $25,000 less than what they paid for it four years ago.
They were just happy to have sold it in less than a month’s time. But the transaction made me nervous: Their house is comparable to ours. They paid about the same was we paid for our house.
If we had to sell today, would we have to suck up a $25,000 loss? Probably, if we were lucky.
Maybe I’m reading all this wrong. Maybe these lower prices aren’t signs that the housing market is still in the midst of a terrible slump. Maybe they’re just evidence that housing prices had simply gotten too high during the housing boom. Maybe these lower, more affordable, prices are here to stay.
And maybe that’s not a bad thing at all.
