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housing market ready to bust?

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Guest:
Sometimes running a biz can be like living in a cave, i get so absorbed in the day to day.
  So I did some looking around last night and found the following opinions (and maybe some facts)
  There is a huge oversupply of homes on the market, and the largest unsold inventory of new homes ever.
 There is a slowdown in a lot of the "boom" areas.  
  32 percent of home buyers have ARM's.
 The inflation rate is higher than predicted and the Fed may raise rates again.
 $1 out of every $3 in the Phenix area comes from building related industies.
  There is a ton more but the gist is that a lot of people are predicting the cooling off of the housing bubble is going to be more akin to diving out of the sauna into snow than taking a lukewarm shower.

Guest:
Having inadvertantly posted before i was ready, let me finish the thought--
    So the question is , if the housing market crashs,f it happens, what do I do? Our biz is directly related to home construction, although it is a very select high end market.
Having lived here for many years, we have a lot of equity in our place, but that may or may not buy any sympathy from the bank. I suspect NOT.  
  Any thoughts on this subject?  My thought was to sell now, pick up the apprciation, rent a place and wait for the balloon to burst and then go buy at the bottom.- but it is a risky and difficult effort and the love of my life says no way.

TarpleyG:
It has already "busted" IMHO.

We put our house in Florida on the market in late February for $20K to $30K less than we could have listed it for in late 2005.  Our realtor showed us all the numbers and opined that we should go ahead and list even though we weren't truly ready.  We had an offer for asking price 3 weeks later and it came in while we were pondering a couple of other offers that would have cost us another $10K to $15K.  These people just wanted that house and didn't want to dicker.  We got lucky.

I have friends and acquaintences that cannot sell their houses/condos at all without the risk of losing some money.  The number of houses sold in April was down 30% in south Florida and those that are selling are selling for way under what the original asking price was.

I think that a whole bunch of folks that got sucked in to the ARMs are about to find out exactly how raw of a deal they can be.  We had a 3/27 ARM and got out of it just before the 3 year mark.  We knew we wouldn't be staying in that house for much over 3 years when we bought it.

On the other hand, here in the Raleigh area, in towns like Apex, it is very much a seller's market.  We looked at one house and made an offer.  They had 4 other offers on the table the same weekend and had shown the house 27 times in 4 days.  Needless to say, we didn't get that one.  I decided Apex was too booming for us since we were looking to get away from the crowd.  We opted to look a little farther out and I am glad we did.  I like the houlse and neighborhood much better than anything we looked at closer in.

Greg

TarpleyG:
Just saw your appended post...

You might want to sell now like you are thinking...at least if Phoenix is anything like south Florida is now.

Greg

K Frame:
The housing market has always been, and always will be, highly regional.

I think it was something of a generational fluke that most of the country was in a hot housing market for the last couple of years.

Some areas of the country are cooling off, others are remaining strong, just not going up as much as they were.

I think saying the market is ready to "bust" is a misnomer. Calm down, or mellow out, or simply coming back to a sembelence of reality are better descriptions.

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