Much Ado About Nothing in Real Estate?

Much Ado About Nothing In Real Estate?

The media doth protest too much, me thinks

Are conditions surrounding the real estate market as bad as we are hearing and reading in the media? Is the mortgage market in as terrible shape as financial pundits claim? In a word, yea . . . and, nay. It all dependeth upon where thou liveth and if thou haveth been a good citizen and paid all thine debts on time.

Yes, the real estate market and the mortgage industry have undergone significant changes over what we have come to know and experience in recent memory and there is no doubt that home prices are falling, foreclosures are up, and money is harder or impossible to get for many folks. Home sellers are making less off of the sale of their homes and home buyers are finding it harder to qualify for a mortgage that they normally would have just a year ago.

But there is also another side to the dismal real estate figures with which we are daily bombarded. Not all areas of the country are experiencing the housing slump that the numbers seem to indicate. So, no, for some people, the housing market is treating them just fine and both home buyers and home sellers are profiting, but not at the expense of each other, something that wasn't always true back in the day. Home prices are stable or climbing and buyers are buying. And, the areas that are hit the hardest with foreclosures are those areas in which the bulk of subprime loans were made, Detroit, for instance, but not as pervasive as one would assume from the media.

The housing statistics that we read and hear about are national figures that are based on averages and other such formulations from governments, real estate associations, and other polling groups that fail to take smaller regions into consideration. It's the same with mortgage figures. The numbers are based on a large pool of national data.