Pigs fly, cows talk, and Realtors are now endorsing lower housing prices in California?
You heard me right. Realtors are beginning to speak like bubble heads have always done.
Painful as it is, all this housing distress has one advantage, says Joel Singer, executive vice president of the California Association of Realtors.
It’s no longer impossible to buy houses in a state where median prices hit nearly $600,000 in the recent boom.
“In a sense, what has occurred is probably in our best interest,” he told hundreds of real estate agents gathered Thursday in Sacramento for a statewide convention. “As brutal as it is if you’re a homeowner who is selling, this incredible drop in prices brings California closer in line to the nation as a whole.”
Today’s statewide median, skewed by high numbers of bank repos and other distressed listings: $256,700.
“That affordability, in itself, will help cure this problem in the future if we can maintain it,” said Singer. “It also makes California, in my book, a more competitive place, something we all need in terms of long-term economic growth.”
The fact remains, high housing prices are a drag on the economy, whether you like it or not. Like an illicit drug, the high produced by rising prices of assets seems like an innocuous and downright positive thing at first. Long-term, the higher percentage of income spent on housing translates into lower consumption and inevitably fewer jobs. Thus, higher housing prices causes the crash; sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
Southern California Housing Bubble Blog has been here to remind people that we don’t want lower housing prices simply so we can buy a house (although that would be a prerequisite for me), it is because it is inevitably better for our society and our competitiveness as a city, state, and country. Everyone can enjoy a higher standard of living with lower prices. Higher housing prices produces more economic friction, locking people into locales that may not economically make the most sense for the whole.
Now, it seems, the only people left out of this, and they are beginning to sound stupid, are our lawmakers. Higher prices do NOT translate into a better economy. It is the higher prices that caused a crashed economy. Let’s all hope that some of our enlightened congresspersons can see the light of lower prices and start to INCREASE the rate of foreclosure, not slow it down this will speed the recovery in our economy.
Beginning to sound stupid? Did you just start listening to them or something?
The lawmakers have been consistently the most brainless, the most moronic, the most clueless destroyers of prosperity, freedom, and the hope of economic recovery in the entire country, both recently and historically. There’s no reason to believe that the idiots in elected office will not continue to be the worst thing possible both for our continued freedoms, and for any hope of an eventual economic turnaround.