Legit bottom forming in housing

[Qdog]

Can't get anywhere near that much house in Canada for that price.

Congratz. 60k left on a home is nothing to be honest.

If you save up 100 ounces of silver and keep working, you'll have that paid off in under 5 years.

Yeah, unfortunately, I am going through a career change, into nursing, so I have another 2 years before I will have a good income again. Silver seems like it is definitely the way to go. I have 30 oz now, for just in case the dollar collapses I will be able to barter for food.
I also want to get some Mosin-Nagant surplus rifles. They sell them online for $100 each. Seems like a good investment.
http://www.jgsales.com/mosin-nagant-...d.-p-1041.html
This is the rifle used by the famous Russian Snipers, Vassily Zaitsev, and the Finnish Sniper Simo Häyhä, who killed over 500 Russians in ww2 using one of these with iron sights.
The cheap surplus commie ammo goes for 18cents a round too. Not bad for a 7.62x54 round, which is comparable to a 30-06.

[angelatc]

Houses are selling above asking price with multiple offers in California and Arizona.

The prices seem to be ticking up around here too. It's Michigan, so there's no bidding wars, and 90% of what's on the market are foreclosures, but looking at those it seems like the prices are starting to come up.

[oyarde]

Buying one to live in , OK ,take the fixed rate , in a 15 , 20 or30 yr loan buying any others as an investment ,unless you can pay it off , not a good idea.

[Steven Douglas]

There's an old joke about two guys, out camping on safari in India, who spy a crouching tiger in the nearby brush. One of the campers immediately starts putting on a pair of running shoes.
"Are you crazy? You can't outrun a tiger!", says one companion to the other.
"I don't have to outrun the tiger," said the other as he finished lacing, "I just have to outrun you."

The Fed's dollar is like that. Small boats sink much faster than larger boats, and the Fed dollar is the Grand Daddy Titanic, or slowest sinking of all the sinking vessels. Rats leaving a sinking ship will head straight to another sinking ship if that's all there is to choose from, and that is not just reflected in the currency, but also the real estate market. The US market is no exception, due to the sheer quantity and prices of available real estate relative to all other countries. A Japanese businessman can own a large mansion on a decent-sized plot of land very near San Francisco for the same price as he would pay for a small condo in downtown Tokyo.

Capital flight from developing countries, while largely unobservable (economically difficult to measure or quantify), is nonetheless a very real factor that I think gets mostly ignored, even though it has an overall effect on the price floor. And in major metropolitan areas, it's an unmistakable birds of a feather phenomenon. For example, more than a third of the states have a so-called "Little Saigon" (California has many); areas where the real estate market is dominated, and even whole economic communities established, by immigrants clustering together and condensing in their cultural comfort zones. That is multiplied by the number of populations immigrating from other countries.

US immigration laws and visa requirements are written to make it next to impossible for poor people from developing countries to be able to get so much as a tourist visa. But a large part of those restrictions are based on economic status. The restrictions are lax, and practically non-existent, when it comes to educated and wealthy people from those same countries, who have no problem getting in.

I watched a massive amount of real estate in Fremont, CA (where my brother lived), get bought up almost exclusively by Pakistani and Indian buyers from 2004-2007, prior to the collapse. There was so much demand for residential real estate in that area that it created a bubble on top of the bubble in that area.

Here is but one example, taken at random from that area:

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/35...25020841_zpid/



The price of real estate now has returned to the mid-2004 levels -- the bubble was hardly a blip for them, and that props up the prices of neighboring real estate as well -- and all because the alternative for those populations (back in their own countries) is untenable.

It was mentioned once before that the rest of the world is in a housing bubble that has yet to collapse. And I believe that is true. What I wonder about is what would happen once those bubbles, assuming they exist, collapse. That would present opportunities to foreigners living in the US, because the other countries won't have a Fed buying up assets and taking them off the market. Those lands and properties really will have associated fire sales. And the falling values of both real estate and currencies could further prop up their export markets, so no worries about economic opportunities all around.

It all equilibrates in the long term, and triggers are impossible to predict, but I do think about that. Just as the US housing bubble collapse was felt around the world, could a worldwide bubble collapse trigger a further collapse here, once it became truly cheaper to live anywhere else but the US?

[Carehn]

http://www.realestateabc.com/outlook/overall.htm

[Seraphim]

The fact that the housing bubble popped in America, the Fed is outright debasing the USD and most of the world is facing economic plight, the US and it's housing market is VERY attractive in general.

Property in America is so cheap relative to the rest of the developed world.

[cbc58]

The fact that the housing bubble popped in America, the Fed is outright debasing the USD and most of the world is facing economic plight, the US and it's housing market is VERY attractive in general.

Property in America is so cheap relative to the rest of the developed world.

I think your opinion is partly based on the humungous property bubble in Canada. I have been in real estate for 25 years and have to tell you that prices here are NOT as attractive as you make them out to be. Come buy a house now since you seem to feel it's such an opportunity.

That chart in the prior post has data from the NAR. NAR is a lying, cheating trade group.

[Seraphim]

^^ I already have a house.

:-)

[misterx]

You're wasting your breath. People on these forums think real estate is a horrible investment. They are under the delusion that people are going to be giving away houses when the next crisis comes. Because nobody actually wants a place to live, right?

I bought last year, and according to my insurance company, replacement cost is almost four times what I paid. I fail to see how that is a bad deal, but others on this forum will disagree. I wouldn't buy a new home, but if you can find a foreclosure or short sale that is in good shape, you can get a nice house ridiculously cheap. The thing is that foreclosures and short sales that aren't damaged are going for the same prices as those that are damaged. That's where the great deals are found.

[Seraphim]

Opportunity knocks when one is willing to search and shed all the doom and gloom.

I am a strong bear on many aspects of the market (and with it, measures of prosperity for many, many people) BUT...

The housing bubble has popped in the US. With a centralized ponzi machine that will force interest rates down for years and years and rev up the printing presses, SMART, SAVY and WELL ORGANIZED ventures into real estate will be very beneficial for many Americans from this point on.

You're wasting your breath. People on these forums think real estate is a horrible investment. They are under the delusion that people are going to be giving away houses when the next crisis comes. Because nobody actually wants a place to live, right?

I bought last year, and according to my insurance company, replacement cost is almost four times what I paid. I fail to see how that is a bad deal, but others on this forum will disagree. I wouldn't buy a new home, but if you can find a foreclosure or short sale that is in good shape, you can get a nice house ridiculously cheap. The thing is that foreclosures and short sales that aren't damaged are going for the same prices as those that are damaged. That's where the great deals are found.