“We’re only halfway through the housing shock”

From Bloomberg:

Housing Crash Deepens in 2008 as U.S. Realtors See Record Drop

For U.S. homeowners, builders, bankers and realtors, the crash of 2007 will only get worse in 2008.

Everyone from mortgage-finance company Fannie Mae to Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. expects declines next year. Existing home sales will drop 12 percent and existing home prices will fall 4.5 percent, Washington-based Fannie Mae says. Lehman analysts estimate almost 1 million mortgage loans will default in 2008, up from about 300,000 this year.

“We’re only halfway through the housing shock,” said Ethan Harris, chief U.S. economist at New York-based Lehman, the fourth-biggest U.S. securities firm by market value. “It’s just a matter of time before the weakness spreads to the rest of the economy.”

The housing market collapse has been anything but the “soft landing” that Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Janet Yellen and David Lereah, former chief economist at the National Association of Realtors in Chicago, predicted for real estate at the start of 2007.

Median home prices declined in the U.S. this year, the first annual drop since the Great Depression, according to forecasts from the National Association of Realtors.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s going to turn real strong next year,” said Jim Gillespie, chief executive officer of Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC, the largest U.S. residential brokerage, according to Franchise Times. “It’s not going to turn real strong next year.”
…
“The whole thing has deteriorated faster and further than we or anyone else had anticipated,” said Ron Muhlenkamp, president of Wexford, Pennsylvania-based Muhlenkamp & Co., which has about $2.5 billion under management and holds shares of mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. and homebuilder Ryland Group Inc.
…
“I know we weren’t predicting things would get this bad,” said Frank Liantonio, executive vice president for global capital markets at New York-based Cushman & Wakefield Inc., the largest closely held real estate services provider. “There were some signs there, but I don’t think anyone anticipated the level of dislocation that was actually created.”