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Executive Summary – The foreclosure process in the USA is a 12-18 month process. The most substantial drop in real estate will thus not be expected to be realized until mid 2010. The banks are carrying a lot of inventory in the form of foreclosed properties. They a re also renegotiating loans to avoid foreclosure but the success of these renegotiations has been dismal. The final straw to break the market has been the drop in rental prices. This makes walking away from houses more attractive. You let the house get foreclosed and then rent a similar house down the street for a fraction of what your mortgage payment was.
This drop in rental prices will spur foreclosures on and as foreclosures increase the banks will be forced to rent the foreclosed houses for lower and lower rents and thus the cycle increases and the real estate market gets worse. As rentals drop people will walk away from their rental in favor of another similar house at a cheaper price or else renegotiate with the landlord for lower rent. Soon the landlords have no further incentive to rent the houses out unless they own the house free and clear or have a large amount of positive equity thus preventing them from walking away.
When Will Housing Turnaround – When the economy gets better and people get back to work in productive jobs, not government jobs. This will be years from now. They jobs are still declining at 250,000 per month which is 3 million per year. When you see private sector jobs increasing at say the same 250,000 a month then after about two years of this then a true recovery will be underway. Remember the first year or so of a recovery is just going to be stopping a few million people from becoming homeless. A second year of this will get things back to a place where people may actually want to start buying houses again and they might actually be able to qualify.
The first two years of home buying returned will mean buying houses at bargain basement prices, maybe even reducing mortgage payments below the reduced rental prices. If you see five or six million productive private sector jobs created then things will be better. To get back to where you see increasing real estate prices will be hard. This is because people are wiped out no savings left, millions of jobs lost and a massive amount of foreclosed and unsold houses that must first be absorbed before demand would even come close to exceeding supply. Four or five years would be a realistic wait for the return of the housing market and this will only happen with millions of jobs being created.
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