San Jose Mercury News – ‘Betrayed by our builder’.
A homebuilder is marking homes down from $630,000 to $285,000. The front-page story includes a large graphic: “$630,000 – current residents — $285,000 prospective residents”
A San Francisco Bay Area homebuilder can’t sell all the houses it built in a development in Manteca. Current residents paid up to $630,000 for a 3-hour round-trip commute. But now they’re auctioning the remaining homes, starting at a more realistic price of $285,000.
This headline is going to have a huge impact because it means every homeowner in the SF Bay Area who thinks they have a $630,000 property now will begin to realize that in the end, if they want – or need – to sell that house, they are going to be competing with $285,000 prices.
Let that sink in a while…
Seeing the Forest
Who is our economy FOR, anyway?
That’s going to be true soon for every region in the rest of the country where housing prices reached unrealistic levels. At the moment an apartment like mine in my development sells for over a million bucks — for a walkup, no special security, nothing special about it except that it’s in Manhattan and has two bedrooms. Luckily those who bought when it went co-op here paid about 140,000 for an apartment like this one, which is probably about right, and they’re not gonna make the profits they expected to make when they sell. But they probably won’t lose much, either.
I wonder if this housing downturn will ever catch up to New York City? There is almost no evidence of it here, except some–slight–in Queens, Staten Island, and in Harlem. But for the most part, as the local press keeps reminding us, prices for houses here just keep going up, up, and up, with literally no end in sight. And with the dollar so profoundly weak (thanks, G W Bush), foreign residential property buyers are still snapping up residences left and right, keeping demand very high.
Commercial rents are increasing even more steeply. The front page of amNew York today was of yet another famous Harlem small business closing up shop because of the rent hikes, and Crain’s New York Business last week had as its front page story the death of one Upper West Side retail institution–mom & pop store–after another giving way to extremely upscale boutiques, bank branches, and national chains. (I don’t see the blog “Vanishing New York” having to go on hiatus just now.)
I wonder if this housing downturn will ever catch up to New York City? There is almost no evidence of it here, except some–slight–in Queens, Staten Island, and in Harlem. But for the most part, as the local press keeps reminding us, prices for houses here just keep going up, up, and up, with literally no end in sight. And with the dollar so profoundly weak (thanks, G W Bush), foreign residential property buyers are still snapping up residences left and right, keeping demand very high.
Commercial rents are increasing even more steeply. The front page of amNew York today was of yet another famous Harlem small business closing up shop because of the rent hikes, and Crain’s New York Business last week had as its front page story the death of one Upper West Side retail institution–mom & pop store–after another giving way to extremely upscale boutiques, bank branches, and national chains. (I don’t see the blog “Vanishing New York” having to go on hiatus just now.)