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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.153.24] on Friday, May 11, 2012 at 20:15:42 :
In Reply to: they say it's getting better......big joke posted by Jerry in Idaho [69.59.83.175] on Friday, May 11, 2012 at 19:39:09 :
I'm not even sure why anybody would have a new building built these days. At least around here, houses are so cheap you couldn't buy the lumber for what a finished house costs. Lots of them listed for under $50,000, many selling for $20,000 or less. I'm sure the Friday being shut down has something to do with it, but mostly it's just that the boom is over.
Lots of those Californians who sold their tract houses in SoCal for a million or so and came up to Idaho for some sort of fantasy of freedom and pristine wilderness, or whatever, and thought they were "investing" by buying houses here for $200K are just walking away from them now. One house in my town that's up for foreclosure auction was owned by a man who used to run a homeowners association in Callifornia who stood up in the Planning and Zoning meeting and claimed that people are trying to sell their houses for $300K-$400K and if they can't get that on account of the blight of my ugly trucks, they could sue the city. The "blight" now is vacant houses and the cheapest of cheap rentals. Around here, if a guy wanted a garage, it would probably be cheaper to buy a house, gut out the insides, and use it for a garage than to build a new garage from scratch.
Seattle's doing well, I hear, though. The median home price there "sank" to under $400,000 last year but is now back above that level.
All I can say is that if all the best efforts of the Obama administration to goose the economy in this election year aren't enough to turn things around, it's going to really get bad next year. Now we find out Morgan / Chase bank just lost $2 billion on the same crap-shooting shenanigans that put some of its big competitors out of business in 2008. $2 billion's probably not much to the House of Morgan, but it kind of makes you wonder what else they and the other banks are still messing around with that they shouldn't be. All I can say is keep your gas tank full and your powder dry, because it's going to be a wild ride.
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