[784caroline]

BE CAREFUL.......I heard of a story where someone wanting to sell their home buried a St Joseph statue and shortly thereafter the house next door sold......I was told the reason was St Josephs head was pointing in the wrong direction!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[chuckinca]

A house in our neighborhood in California, same model as ours, has just been listed at 30% less than it sold in Dec 2005!

(Maybe I'll work for a few more years)

However, yesterday new buyers were moving into a house across the street that has been vacant for nine months.

[SteveFromNY]

Originally Posted by chuckinca

A house in our neighborhood, same model as ours, has just been listed at 30% less than it sold in Dec 2005!

(Maybe I'll work for a few more years)

However, yesterday new buyers were moving into a house across the street that has been vacant for nine months.

Chuckinca - is the house in TV? Can you quote the actual numbers? A $600K house down $180K sounds worse to me than a $200k house down $60. I know %'s are %'s, but if the house is in TV such a precipitous drop sounds much worse than I'd have expected. If it's something on a golf view site, maybe the demand for that has dropped, while an interior home may track to a lower decline.

[784caroline]

Steve
In my opinion its not that there is a drop in the demand of Golf view lots (which there is because of price) but I believe the real reason is the prices are too high because this is where the developer in 2004-2006 really added on the lot premiuns of $100,000-150,000 per lot. The real cost of building a house does not decline assuming apples to apples..lot premiums are all builder profit. For interior lots their is no or little lot premiums...maybe 50K at most for a corner or end cul-de-sac lot or something like that.....so you would expcet to see greater drops in prices on the golf course premium lots. Everyone today is super "price conscious" regardless of the view.

[chuckinca]

In SF Bay Area.

$925K to $649K

We bought new nine years ago at $425 and I figured in ten years it would double. It more than doubled in 6 years. In 2004 and 2005 it went up about the 30% that it has given back in the past two and a half years. In early 2005 an adjacent new subdivision of 50 homes offered their first 8 houses for sale on a Saturday (they were selling for the high $700's). They pre-qualified nearly 50 buyers on that Saturday and on Sunday pulled 8 names from a hat. A couple years earlier another adjacent subdivision of about 100 homes had 20 or so buyers camped out in their parking lot for over 30 days to be first in line for their first release of homes then selling in the mid $700's (larger homes than the later ones).

[SteveFromNY]

WOW - that's some price drop!

[Muncle]

Which, of course, begs the question, are the prices low today or were they unreasonably high 2 years ago? Not using Chuck's numbers or situation exactly, but say you paid 500K for a house 10 years ago. This was a place to live, not a stock or commodity bought for investment. Three years ago, an identical house sold for 1 Mil. Today, your house is valued at 800K. Did you lose 200K in the last year or did you make 300K in the 10 years you owned and lived in the home? I guess in a way, it goes back to that half full/half empty conundrum, but I tend to think you made a 300K profit. Regardless of the supposed value of something, it ain't worth nothing unless you sell it -- with the exception of the evil tax appraiser and the refi situation, of course.

Now if you paid 1 mil two years ago and must sell today, you did lose. Don't sell now unless you must or you can make a better deal on some other guy's house who's price has bottomed.

[mokey]

Even though you are selling a home for less then you want or the market will take, its probably a trade off. When you get to TV, you have the same buying power the people who bought yours had. We sold our home and bought in TV one year ago, and the deals are even better now. Have seen some terrific buys on resale, and new homes. But remember there are some large bonds on the new homes.