Oh yes, it’s a bit scary out there, isn’t it… Ooooh, the real estate Halloween indeed. Existing home sales nationwide fell 27.2 percent in August from the previous month to 3.3 million, new home sales are at the records low. Brrrrr, chilly indeed.
Bay Area, however, seems to be weathering the storm pretty well. The inventory is slowly rising and sales are slowly dropping, nothing too dramatic for the time of the year. Some buyers are out and about happily hopping around buying homes and some are understandably a bit apprehensive.
So let’s see if we can broaden our view of the horizon though. Yes, the market is not perfect but it rarely is! The thing is… if it’s cloudy a bit but the weather is favorable, a good captain will sail out not waiting for the sun to come out because he knows it may not come out for a long time. Goods will spoil, time will be lost, days will turn to weeks and months will go buy staying in port drinking rum. Where I am heading is… if you want to buy a home – it is very unlikely you will time this market to find most optimal conditions. Life is always in a flux and so are the markets, would you agree?
You see, even though “experts” say a home is no longer a safe investment, no one is saying that a Mercedes is not a safe investment. How about a new boat or that 401K at work… are any of these safe investments? A house is a house, it’s a home, it’s the place where your children grow, and it’s where you spend your days and nights living your life. One really can’t put a price on the kind of joy that comes with homeownership. Ask anyone without a home whether it’s a dream of theirs to own a home and you’ll likely hear a resounding “yes!”
You see, its these intangibles of home ownership that will keep this market alive. You probably know so many people who just can’t wait for their incomes to go up so they can comfortably afford a home… this feeling is not going away. In fact, funny part is, the less people can have it now, the more they want it. It’s human nature.
What hopefully has changed is the nation’s appetite to treat their home’s equity as a never depleting slot machine. For that part, I can teach you about some much more reliable and safer strategies from the insurance industry. You truly CAN retire like a lottery winner these days! Just not from the equity in your home, that technique has proven to be feckless.
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