The Housing Market-What is yours like?

[peter_nap]

For your sake, I hope so also but my gut feeling is that it will take longer and when it does come back, it will be an entirely different game.

The last few years, I've been buying up all the bargin timber land I can find. I used one real estate agent for all but one of the purchases. She's young and just got married and works hard to represent me. Most others remind me of lawyers (do nothing, talk a lot and be unavailable when there are problems) No offense to you...just a generality......

Anyway, she called me and asked for advice when the sub prime hit.
I told her that my best guess was it would last a year or more and when it did come back, selling houses would be the easy part. Getting them financed was the key so she needed to start looking for owner financing and directing buyers to houses they could afford rather than the most expensive thing she could qualify for.

I also told her that she needed to look into doing something full time and keep the real estate on a high priority part time basis for a while. She took my advice and started teaching this fall.

It's tough to accept those facts sometimes but at least she isn't moving backward.

IMHO, we haven't seen the worst of it yet!

[desdawg]

I'm with you Peter. I have been predicting 5 years before it starts to come back around. Also I like your thinking about the time horizon for investments. There are no free quickie lunches.
I watch some of those "Flip this house" episodes. For starters they are buying 50's and 60's houses for 250K or more. Then they are going to resell them for 450K. Those people must be californicated. They have schedules that are seldom met and budgets that are shot coming out the gate. Glenn and I need to teach them how to salvage and recycle.