Remember when we spent the holidays bragging about housing values?
I’ve written about residential real estate for about 10 years now. During most of those years, housing values were not just rising, they were skyrocketing.
It was fun to cover housing during these years. When I told people that I was a writer, and when I told them what I wrote about, they were always ready to share the stories of how much their own home had risen in value. Perhaps they had used their home’s appreciation to pay for the vacation of their dream. Maybe they made hundreds of thousands of dollars on the sale of their homes.
Whatever, it was a always good news.
Today, of course, that’s not the case. Today, no one really wants to chat about their homes and how much the value of them has fallen in the last year-and-a-half.
My family and I traveled to Michigan last weekend for Easter to visit my in-laws. If you’ve been following the news, you know that Michigan has been hit particularly hard by the recession. Unemployment here stood at 12 percent in February, the highest of any state in the nation. Homes sales are down, too, and housing values have fallen.
So at the dinner table, no one spoke much about their homes. There was some talk about how important it is to hold onto any job these days, especially in a state where it seems that no one is hiring. There was also a bit of talk about the historically low mortgage interest rates. Unfortunately, no one at our table could take advantage of those rates: Everyone’s home value had fallen too far.
I yearn a bit for those old days when everyone looked at their homes as giant piggybanks. Rising home values gave a lot of people in this country artificial wealth. They had money — in the form of home equity — on paper. Too bad, all that money turned out to be fake.
Analysts are still predicting that the housing market will begin a rebound in late 2009, early 2010. Let’s hope that this rebound is a slow, steady one. If housing values rise too quickly, too high once again, we’ll just end up back where we are today, bemoaning the fact that the housing crash sucked away all of our wealth.
