Its looks like its going to get ugly out there..

[bparker]

Thats very encouraging to hear coming from someone in the business. I know you cant take the medias reports for 100% truth or an real world accutate picture. However, one has to worry when you start seeing stats on the market to help tell the story.

Maybe the market corrections are in fact isolated bubbles and wont hit the more stable areas that have been somewhat unaffected by maintaing reasonable prices.

Its a personal concern of mine as we are thinking about selling and moving a bit out of the city into the country and need to know if we need to sell while our appreciation is at its highest if the market is going to turn down on us in our area.

Originally Posted by mikejr

I wish the media would just clam up about the housing crisis. The problem is, they are painting the entire county with a broad brush. Yes there certainly are areas of the country that have seen home values decline 40% or more and home sales decline a similar amount.

BUT what they aren't reporting is areas like Western PA have only seen sales decline 4%....and values something less than that.

Being a real estate broker, I get questions and comments daily from people wondering how we are making a living being that we're in real estate.

Well let me tell you this....2007 is our BEST year on record by about 20%.

Has the sub prime debacle caused issues...sure it has....its harder to get people financed, but, they were financing people that should never have been financed. Stories of people buying a house and never making a payment are very common around here. But in true American Capitalism, where there is a need, someone will fill it. So I would expect to see someone stepping in on void left in the subprime market.