Sunday, March 11, 2007

1) The Bubble Goes…

The past year or so housing prices have been declining due to one major reason - people are unsure of the current housing market. Are we in a housing bubble or not? Should I buy a home or rent? Should I sell my home now or wait? Many analysts and economists have commented and studied the particular phenomenon of housing bubbles and the current state of real estate affairs. There are many beliefs on what will happen in the near future due to the recent decline in housing prices and surplus of homes for sell. The importance of the housing market is due to the substantial amounts of wealth invested in real estate by U.S. citizens. The real estate market is regularly used as an index for economic conditions and forecasting. Therefore, if housing prices were to substantially decrease it could cause an economic disaster. Currently, there are many economists on both sides of the argument some saying the housing bubble is in the process of bursting and either 1) will crash quickly and cause economic problems or 2) decline slowly and economic problems will be manageable; then there are other people that feel the market is just slowing down and the market will soon pick back up. No one can surely know what will happen, but it is evident that the increases in housing prices year to year have been decreasing after tremendous gains in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Furthermore, in the next couple of weeks, I will be researching and analyzing the argument over the real estate market through a variety of sources: The Housing Bubble Blog, Housing Crash News, MarketWatch's Real Estate Weekly, among many others.

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