But John McCain thinks there is no problem, just let 200,700.00 drop off the end and it's just something stupid betting Americans should be punished for, BUT not shark loans made feasible by deregulating loan laws by our US government?

Oh and this popular idea: The other "51 million," McCain says, "are doing what is necessary -- working a second job, skipping a vacation, and managing their budgets.

But of course big oil needs more government assisted welfare, and McCain wants to give it them.

McCain also said this: have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers.

Of course McCain was NOT committed to this very same principle when he walked into a banking regulatory office in Arizona and tried to get officials working there to look the other way for big campaign money donating Charles Keating.

we've got 2 within a 1/2 mile of our house

Wow that's cool. Be sure to check out the NYT magazine preview article on the role of the credit rating agencies.

We've got more than a dozen within a mile of my house. The interesting thing is that almost all of them are townhouses as opposed to single family homes. There's a big fat cluster of them all within a couple of blocks of each other.

I'm as down on the housing market as the next guy, but the text copied above is a bit slanted. Used home sales fell 2$ after rising 2.9% a month earlier. In fact, used home sales have been relatively steady for 4 or 5 months. Prices were down from a year ago, but after months and months of decline, that isn't news. What the text fails to note is that prices were up on the month. that is just one data point, but it is a data point conspicuously absent and at odds with the negative tone of the piece.

If you want to stand on the sidelines and cheer or boo, this sort of pablum is fine. If you want to understand, you need to avoid one-sided stuff like this.

Now, just to be fair, Q1 has been the best quarter for home sales in the past couple of years, after seasonal adjustment. In each case, the good news has evaporated either at the end of Q1 or the beginning of Q2. We may be seeing the ame pattern now, but for now, the slide in sales has halted.

But John McCain thinks there is no problem,
Sure he does, but he thinks a gas-tax "holiday" will solve the problem.

Maybe houses are just overpriced. I bought my first house in 1982 in a nice suburb of Seattle at age 29 for roughly 3X my annual salary. We sold that and bought a low-end McMansion a few miles away in 1996 for roughly 3.5X my annual salary. That house currently would list for about 7X my current annual salary; my old house would list for about 4X my current salary. If I was in the same position now as I was then, I couldn't even afford my old house (would likely be 7-8X my likely salary).

Next the oil bubble?????????

What the text fails to note is that prices were up on the month. ... We may be seeing the same pattern now, but for now, the slide in sales has halted.

From the NAR release -

(2) The only valid comparisons for median prices are with the same period a year earlier due to the seasonality in buying patterns. Month-to-month comparisons do not compensate for seasonal changes, especially for the timing of family buying patterns. Changes in the geographic composition of sales can distort median price data. Year-ago median and mean prices sometimes are revised in an automated process if more data is received than was originally reported.

Home sales tend to drop before prices do, because the sellers have no incentive to lower prices if buyers are plentiful. If you troll the charts on Trulia.com, you can find time series of house sales by town and city, I think compiled monthly. In SoCal in Kevin's childhood city Garden Grove CA, the sales rate plummeted by almost 50% in 2006 and has stayed low, and prices are sliding downward in response. In my region in southern CT, home sales remained robust u until the first quarter of 08, and prices stayed elevated. The 50% drop in sales rate in CT seems to have occurred this winter, and the inventory is building. A few new listings are deeply discounted relative to Zillow (10-20%). Its too early to be certain of a trend, but one can project tentatively that a continued low pace of sales in CT will cause prices to slide over the next year.

Whew! I border on Yellow, that should be good news.

Great News! I'm not on the map yet. The rest of you can pound salt. It's not like we're all interconnected or anything...

Things look great in Washington, DC, now the exurbs -- bad land use, no access to transit, divided up for cheaply built tract homes -- is another story entirely.

The story here isn't just about mortgage companies, its about cities and counties rolling over and playing dead to the housing and developer interests. Building on more and more green-zones (unbuilt land) far from existing infrastructure and planned on a model of suburban sprawl -- and that there were going to be endless numbers of buyers for this crap without selling to the completely unqualified.

re: exurbs

It will be interesting to see how all these mini-mansions fare. In the sf east bay area, you've got all these 4000-5000 sqft monsters with wall-to-wall granite and travertine. But they are cheaply built, on zero lot lines, and 15 mins away from the freeway. They sold brand new for $300/sqft at the peak in 2005, to people who couldn't even afford to furnish them. I expect they are worth about half of that in a post-bubble market, and will become very glamourous slums.

Every night during the evening news, there's a commercial running that talks about how NOW is the time to get a home equity loan, or even buy another house as an investment! "Most studies show that the average home doubles in value every 10 years." Um, yeah. Right.

I cringe.

I'm supposedly in an area that has 1 in 20,000 foreclosed homes (well below average). But, there are tons of listings for homes that are already owned by the lender (REO). Try Google Housing:
http://base.google.com/base/s2?a_n0=housing&a_y0=9&hl=en&gl=us

Type in your City, ST or Zipcode, set the price range and set it for "foreclosure" and there seems to be a LOT more.

kis,

Wo we need to compare sales prices to year ago. Fine. In March, used home prices were off 7.3% y/y. In February, they were off 9.1%. So having looked at a y/y comparison, we find that it improved. February's -9.1% wsa not a fluke. In November, the median price was off 9.6%. Just waving around the 7.3% decline without giving any context gives the impression that all is bad news. I repeat. The write-up offered here is slanted. It offers none of the evidence that home sales, and the slide in home prices, have stabilized. Now, history and theory suggest that home prices should continue to fall well after sales have stabilized. I'm fine with that. There is every chance that prices will continue to fall. (OFEHO, by the way, reports that housing prices were up on the month in February and down far less y/y than the NAR data show for either February or March.) But pulling out a single datum that fits the only one version of the story is bad.

My whole zip code is red. Nine within half a mile, 25 within a mile. Eight condos, the rest single family detached homes.

I mis-measured. Make that 52 within a mile.

Doc,

Gee, thanks a bunch. I've got three auctions gonna happen within 1/2 mile. Yikes!