The Dow has shed thousands of points and the global economy is in crisis.
So who wants to buys a house right now? Not many people, it turns out.
The National Association of Home Builders, for instance, has seen its contract cancellations spike recently to as high as 30%, compared with an average rate of about 20%. During the housing boom, as few as 5% of sales were cancelled.
"The events of the past couple of weeks have people's heads spinning," said Steve Melman, NAHB's director of economic surveys.
The National Association of Realtors estimates that about 25% of the clients its members are working with are staying on the sidelines. They're looking at homes and intend to buy at some point, but right now they're worried about their jobs, their declining investments and falling housing prices.
"You have to have a lot of confidence to make this kind of big-ticket purchase in the current environment," said NAR spokesman Walter Molony.
Monday, October 13, 2008
More home buyers backing out of deals
From CNN Money:
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For most people, the first home that you purchase is your biggest and most important investment. The first place to start is to go ahead and get a professional on your team. You can get still more information about home buyers which I browsed on internet can fetch you help.
ReplyDelete"The National Association of Home Builders, for instance, has seen its contract cancellations spike recently to as high as 30%, compared with an average rate of about 20%."
ReplyDeleteThe above refers to new homes, which necessarily means new construction in outlying areas.
Suburban sprawl is dead. We witnessed the end of it this years. The run-up in gas prices got everyone thinking about their commutes, and the crash of exurban housing values demonstrated the future of such living arrangements. (Not to mention the horrid road congestion that people are now fed up with... what, there is no money for new roads in any budget anywhere? Whoa.)
"For three generations, suburban homesteading has been underwritten by our infrastructure spending, our zoning policies, our banking regulations and our tax code. Easy credit, inexpensive mortgages, cheap gasoline, wide-open highways, the heavy hand of federal regulators on any bank that declined to lend in low-income or minority neighborhoods -- if it made homeownership cheap and suburbia accessible, Americans were for it, never mind what the critics said.
ReplyDelete...
Until 2008, that is, which may be remembered as the year when the American Dream's excesses -- from gas-guzzling SUVs to subprime mortgages -- suddenly threatened to strangle the dream itself. This summer and fall, George Bailey's vision has endured a stunning one-two punch. First, months of skyrocketing gas prices (along with dire forecasts about "peak oil") made suburbia seem unsustainable, conjuring up a future in which Americans huddle together around subway stops and light-rail stations, exchanging the backyard and the garage for townhouses and apartments. And then this autumn came the mortgage-fueled financial sector meltdown, in which Potter's warnings about letting the working poor buy homes on credit seemed to find their vindication in a worldwide economic crisis. "
Washington Post