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Quotes about Home Prices from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"But it is challenging to envision a feedback model that has home prices rising rapidly even after stock prices are sharply falling, as happened after 2002. It may seem unlikely that we will ever understand such a phenomenon. It could be that the home price boom, which began in the United States and other countries before the peak of the market, started in 1998 in response to the stock market boom and just fed on itself through its own internal feedback after the stock market fizzled." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Los Angeles has really not been much larger than in Milwaukee. But Los Angeles has gone through two booms and a crash along the way. Based on these trends, owner-occupied housing is looking like a bad long-term investment relative to the stock market: despite the occasional volatility of real estate, it has offered practically no capital gains for long-term investors. But one must remember the implicit dividends that one receives from living in a home, that is, the value of the shelter and other services provided by a home. These dividends are untaxed." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Boston, London, Moscow, Paris, Shanghai, Sydney, and Vancouver, all of them glamorous international cities. The similarity among the price paths for these cities (really stunning price increases both in the late 1980s and after the late 1990s, with stagnant or falling prices in between) is striking, as is the similarity of popular stories of exaggerated excitement about and speculation in homes. And these are not the only prominent cities undergoing spectacular housing booms recently." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "U.S. cities. Prices in Boston and Los Angeles have gone through dramatic swings, and at the end of the sample period shown prices were soaring. But, in sharp contrast, prices in Milwaukee and Cleveland have both grown extremely steadily, and have shown virtually no deviations from a steady trend. Phoenix prices were declining in the 1980s when those in Boston and Los Angeles were soaring, but have since started steadily increasing just as in Milwaukee and Cleveland." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"The boom in interest-only loans—nearly half the state's home buyers used them last year, up from virtually none in 2001—is the engine behind California's surging home prices," said the LA Times.1 California house sales hit a new record in February 2005. And again in March. And again in April. Housing starts nationwide were at a 21-year high. All over the 50 states, people were buying, flipping, refinancing. "It is as if you were paid to live in California," said a skeptic to the LA Times.2 Prices rose 22 percent in 2004." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.)

"And this: "Short of a significant fall in overall household income or in home prices, debt servicing is unlikely to become destabilizing." But just there was the big issue. With 70 percent of the economy now based on consumption and dependent on inflated house prices, if house prices didn't rise, there would be no more equity to take out. What would homeowners take out if they couldn't take out equity? Pizza?" - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.) "The International Monetary Fund analyzed home prices in a number of countries from 1970 to 2001 and found 20 busts—when real prices fell by almost 30 percent. All but one of those busts led to a recession. What happened in the countries with busts? House prices have fallen in nominal as well as in real terms in Germany and Japan over the past seven years. A house in Tokyo now costs less than half what it did in 1991, after a now legendary property-price bubble in the late 1980s." - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.) "Growth in home prices Since 1890. Source: Robert Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). www.irrationalexuberance.com. that thousands—maybe millions—of people not only betted on it, they staked their financial futures on it. At the center of the swindle was the idea that houses go up in value perpetually. But for 100 years, from 1896 to 1996, houses merely kept up with GDP, inflation, and income growth. It was only in the following 10 years that they rose and rose remarkably. (See Figure 13.2." - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.) "Source: Q4 2006 median existing single-family home prices provided by the National Association of Realtors. Trailing house price index data provided by Standard & Poor's. Inflation data provided by the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/. over the next decade—that is, to over $3 million. It was an expectation common to most of the country. (See Figure 13.1.) So it is. At the end of a bubble, the hallucinations become so extravagant that they blow up." - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.)

"Enabled by surging home prices and heavily marketed by banks and other lenders as an alternative to unsecured but high-rate credit cards, "cash-out refis" became an increasingly popular way to raise funds for property owners—and even some prospective purchasers who didn't have quite enough money for a required down payment. The numbers turned out to be huge. From 2001 through 2005, the sum total of mortgage equity withdrawals, or MEWs, was estimated to be around $2.5 trillion, according to the Weekly Standard." - Michael J. Panzner, Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (Get the book.)

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