Real Estate Confidence 101
It was not that long ago that home values were going up at amazing rates. Well, those paper gains have crashed and burned. We stand on the edge of a total financial meltdown and the housing market may be both the cause and solution to the situation.
Things are happening so quickly that we are losing site of some staggering figures. Iceland, an entire country, is bankrupt and its currency worthless. A $700 billion bailout that does not even include the $120 billion used to keep AIG afloat.
As bad a beating as Wall Street has taken, the drip down effect to Main Street has only begun. Finance is a fickle subject. There are plenty of hard numbers to be crunched, but consumer confidence plays a major role. Consider the housing market.
Confidence plays a huge role in real estate finance. Assume I spend $300,000 for a home on January 1st. By June 1st, it has an entirely different value. This change is due primarily to how confidence has influenced the market.
What if people are generally positive? Assume they feel confident the economy is solid, jobs are safe and so on. What happens? They are comfortable buying homes and my house appreciates significantly has prices are driven up.
Now the opposite works as well. Currently, nobody has confidence in the banks and the banks have no confidence in the borrowers. This deadly mix means nobody is borrowing and there is no money to borrow even if they want to. Down goes real estate!
Are there objective factors involved in the current financial mess? Of course. The CEOs of many banks should be in jail for their reckless behavior. Still, the lack of confidence is making a bad situation a horrific one.
Currently, the financial world is running scared. Banks are scared of loaning money and not getting it back. Consumers are scared of losing their money and retirement funds. This is a double whammy that is going to be hard to break out of.
Given these historically bad markets, is real estate still a good long term investment? Ironically, it is a great time to buy. Values are depressed. They will eventually bounce back. The question is when and how rough will things be till then?
The grim answer is nobody really knows how long this will take to shake out. It is all about turning the confidence of people and banks around. At some point, that will occur. It might be because we go so low that there simply is not anywhere to go but up.
If history is to be believed, a big recession takes between two and five years to run its course. Will that be the case here? Again, nobody knows. What you should understand, however, is it is time to baton down the hatches and wait it out.