Hot off the AP wire:
U.S. Housing Market Expected to Decline
The U.S. housing market will see a sustained decline next year, causing a drag on the nation’s economy but falling short of triggering a recession, according to a new economic report.
“We expect housing to start slowing the economy this quarter or the next,” Edward Leamer, director of the quarterly University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson Forecast, wrote in the report to be released later Wednesday.
The cooldown in the housing sector is likely to be spread over several years, with as many 500,000 construction jobs and 300,000 financial sector jobs lost, the report said.
…
“On all these grounds, we believe housing is due for a sustained decline,” economist Michael Bazdarich wrote in the Anderson Forecast. “The remaining questions are how hard the fall will be and when it will begin.”
…
“If the housing market slows more than we are expecting, a recession is not out of the question,” Ratcliff wrote.
Economists (real ones, not the NAR clowns) are not holding back anything anymore. It seems that beating around the bush and lightly touching on these issues is long gone. The UCLA Anderson report is scheduled to be released later on in the day, however it is only available for purchase and not a public report. I’m sure once the report is released we’ll get more details on the newswires. From the preliminary reports and press releases, it looks like the economists over at UCLA are taking a more ‘grim’ position on the market, their last report was forcasting a ‘soft landing’, it doesn’t look like that is the case anymore.
Caveat Emptor,
Grim
No! It can’t decline! Home prices never go down!!
I also beleive in the Easter Bunny..
:)
-Richie
Interesting. We seem to be seeing a lot more hard evidence and predictions from economists lately, huh? Suggests more than a seasonal slow down to me. But there are people still in denial…what can you do, right?
So, I suppose some of these fat, lazy pigs are going to have to break out a paint brush and a bottle of house cleaner for the first time in years, right? You can’t expect 600K for a piss smelling dump anymore.
A paid report ?? I am in the wrong business !! How do I get a job like that !
I don’t doubt the fact that housing will decline but the fact is nobody can predict when it will happen. The UCLA economists predict year after year that housing will decline and they have always have been wrong and they come up with another prediction. I should have become an economist. Get paid for predicting and then if it doesn’t happen, just extend the prediction. Throw in a few statistics and a few numbers and it makes front page of the NY times.
You would probably make more money as a stock analyst, the same rules apply there as well..
grim
to bad suckers housing “always goes up”. According to one realtor said this to me and if things ever do drastically slow prices just go flat. hahaha
No different than internet analyst.