Desperate sellers are giving their houses away
Florida Housing Crash, The Economy, Real Estate September 2nd, 2008
More signs that the real estate crash is far from over. This from the New York Times:
Homeowners are struggling nationwide. But here in South Florida, the reversal of fortune has been especially severe, scrambling the psychology of a community that has historically treated real estate as a game of how-rich-can-you-get.
Overdeveloped and still building, this remains a place where conversations about the market are sugared with a rush of dreams and speculation. Now, though, people start with “if only I had sold when,” rather than “I should have bought.”
Home values in the Miami area rose reliably for 86 consecutive quarters, or 21 years, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. Then last fall, they started dropping.
The declines have been significant. The widely respected Case-Shiller index reported last week that prices of previously owned single-family homes in Miami fell by 28.3 percent over the last year, second only to Las Vegas, where home prices dropped 28.6 percent.
Analysts said it could take another year before the local market stabilizes.
“It flew the highest and the farthest during the boom days, and now it is falling the hardest,” said Michael D. Larson, a real estate analyst with Weiss Research, an investing research firm in Jupiter, Fla.
