Another article about the bottom of the market. This one says that it is coming in 2009 and then the market will wallow through 2010. I have found a couple of very interesting details about the market discussions. First, no one is kidding us any longer. Throughout 2007 we kept hearing about how it really wasn’t that bad… and it really wasn’t that bad… and no, really it wasn’t that bad. Unfortunately, we were headed down, but no one wanted to talk about it or consider what was going on. Those days are gone. Everyone talks about how we are down and how we came crashing down.
Second, a lot of the analysts are talking about how the market will do some wallowing, maybe for a season, maybe for a year and some say, maybe for two years. What this implies is that we have either come to the bottom or we are very near to it. It takes time for the entire market to shift gears and it will struggle with the changes that have already taken place and those that will emerge over the winter.
“Business as usual” doesn’t appear to be anywhere on the horizon (and that is a good thing) but business as it was before the lending madness is still here. While there is talk of wallowing and struggling and financing difficulties and crashes, there are still people (and hundreds of thousands of them) out there, in the market, buying and selling homes. When the stock market bubble burst in 1999 there were a lot of hurt portfolios and feelings but the market never turned off the lights and went home. It came down and kept going, and real estate is doing the same thing.