Irvine Housing Blog

People are used to being able to own a home for a couple years and make a healthy profit selling.  That is far less common now than during the bubble, but I think people look at getting a ‘deal’ and then being able to make a little off that home.  Transaction costs are just too high for homes to make that a worthwhile investment.  The NYTimes Buy/Rent calculator takes those into account and factors in a return on your down payment.  With that, prices to buy vs comparable rents still don’t make financial sense a lot of times with their calculator - even factoring in living in the home for 5-7 years.

We bought a year ago in a neighborhood that has held its value relatively well.  However, we probably could have gotten a long-term rental in a bigger home down the street (been for sale for 2 years and they’re now looking to rent it).  I’m not sure what we would have done with our down payment, but we’d be in a more flexible situation moving-wise.  Moving after 2 years of getting to an area is not uncommon, you might not like the job, or have family issues come up.  It seems better to rent short-term until long-term plans are firmer.

I agree that the biggest hit will be to consumer confidence. People are generally just scared of their own shadow at this point. That and the inability of government to do anything but shoot itself in the foot.

“Market insiders had envisioned that the housing market would be well on its way to recovery by now”.

  Of course they did,the problem is, they share their “envisions” and People believe them.

By the way, this is an Irvine Blog, we have #OWS protesters at City Hall…

What are your Guys thoughts on this?

Great song.  But I prefer this home done music video for it.  Fits well with the OC Housing Cult.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lvU-DislkI

The Tea Party was no mass movement.  It was largely a way to re-brand the GOP, which after Bush and McCain was on the ropes.  Lucky for the GOP, they had Obama in office to let them off the hook (and they are returning the favor by making sure there is no credible GOP nominee for president in 2012).

The “Tea Party” phenom was mostly an astro-turf effort paid for by corporate money from the Kochs and the Roves and Dick Armeys.  If you look at the polls of those who say they are “tea partiers,” they are just pissed off Republican voters.  It was no mass movement, just a lot of socially conservative yahoos who were depressed as main-line GOP voters, but got energized again under the Tea Party banner.  But unfortunately these voters tend to be hard to control once they open up (which is why the GOP didn’t win the Senate).

And lets remember that OWS had to start somewhere.  They have a whole year to impact the 2012 elections, so I think it is a little premature to write them off.  If not for the 2010 elections, the Tea Party wouldn’t have any concrete success to show for it and you could easily argue that Obama’s mistakes were as responsible for the landslide GOP wins as anything the Tea Party did (and the Supreme Court had perfect timing with its Citizens United ruling, which of course wasn’t a coincidence at all).

It’s too obvious that the so-called Tea Party exists to misdirect the outrage of the masses away from those monied interests that are actually causing all the misery ever since they successfully convinced the voting public to vote in favor of deregulating and expecting good things to trickle down.

In other words the ultra rich use the rich to get the middle class to direct their outrage at the poor.

There’s nothing new about “divide and conquer,” the funny thing is the way they get certain people to be all smug about being divided against their own interests. It’s as if talking “rich” is going to get them into the club.

The easiest way for OWS to impact change is to get people to move their deposits out of the too-big-to-fail (but-not-too-big-to-bailout) banks.  Some say that the banks don’t need people’s deposits, but see what happens if they lost 50% of them.  Deposits are the equivalent of the commercial paper market, that when Lehman lost access, they were shown to be insolvent.