by patience » Fri 27 Mar 2009, 09:42:27
AAA,
I have a daughter in Chula Vista, CA. I'm familiar with the outrageously inflated housing prices in CA, (now crashing) but here in the midwest, it still sounds like fantasy, which in reality, it is. Housing is worth what the market will pay for it, in any case. Not so much now in CA, IF you can find a buyer at all Daughter's gated community is not gated now--the homeowner's assoc. is broke, the rules of minimum size home/one family per home, etc., are gone, since there is no one to enforce those. Result is, with 3 out of 5 homes foreclosed on, REIT's made up of a few wealthy investors have bought the neighboring homes out of foreclosure and turned them into 4 and 5 unit apartments, rented to whomever. You can Google Earth the area and see brown yards everywhere, = empty homes where nobody waters the grass. I see southern CA going back to the desert it was before the Colorado River was diverted to support it, and the home values following that. (Can't convince my daughter though, she is infected with whatever is in the water out there that convinces people it is heaven on earth.)
This reality does not fit in my mind with $1,000,000+ home values, so any reference to such a market immediately makes me think these purported values are from a dinosaur market that doesn't know yet that it is dead. With the ongoing economic problems in the US, whatever happens in CA may just as well be on another planet, from the view in the midwest. For reference, my one acre lot with a 30 year old 1,500 sq. ft. ranch on it is supposed to be worth about $130,000, but nobody has sold a home here for the past year, so who knows?
Home prices = pie-in-the-sky, IMHO.
Local fix-it guy..