Housing market is still going down.

A month ago I blogged about the housing market coming apart in Los Angeles. Well, it’s a month later and all the decent homes we looked at are still on the market. Yep, not one of them has been sold six weeks later.

There is a still a huge gap between what people are asking for and what people are willing to pay.

At one house the broker told us that the price was going to go down 10% immediately because the client overpriced the house against her wishes. She said that there was another 10% of room from there. So, in other words the price the person was willing to sell for was 20% less than what they listed it for–at least. Of course, we thought the house was worth 30-40% of what they were asking. Interestingly, 35-40% less the (absurd) asking price would put the house at the price it would have sold about two years ago.

As a serious buyer who wants to get out of a dumpy two bedroom apartment we’re just gonna wait and see how far this comes down. We’ve only had one month of down market statistics (July), and I’m 100% certain August is going to be a brutal month as well when those numbers come out at the end of this month.

The other folks I’ve talked to who are seriously buying are also thinking it’s best to wait another month. Frankly, I wish all these owners would do auctions with a blind minimum price so we could get the real value of these properties established.

Real estate is such an inefficient market–I hate it.

RE Blogs I’ve been reading daily:
http://www.altosresearch.com/blog/
http://bubblemeter.blogspot.com/
http://bubbletrack.blogspot.com/
http://www.socalbubble.blogspot.com/
http://la.curbed.com/
http://360digest.com/
http://www.realestatejournal.com/
NYT blog not updated since Aug 7th! http://walkthrough.nytimes.com/