California Real Estate Sales

By Kathleen M. Howley

Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) — Kajal and Vishal Dharod paid $559,000 in 2006 for a new four-bedroom house built in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Today, it’s worth about $360,000.

“We don’t know how we can come back from a loss like that,” said Kajal Dharod, 29, a first-time homeowner with a $4,200-a-month mortgage. “Buying the house was a mistake.”

American homeownership, once considered a path to wealth, is now leading to disillusionment. Home prices in the last four years have been the most volatile on record, swinging from a gain of 12 percent in 2005 to an estimated 13 percent loss this year, according to the National Association of Realtors. Those gyrations have embittered many property owners and potential buyers, said Nicolas Retsinas, director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“We always talk about homeownership as being the American dream, but during the last decade people forgot it’s shelter and started thinking of it as a fast way to make or lose money,” said Retsinas. “The quicker we move back to seeing real estate as a place to live, a place to put down roots, the quicker the housing recovery will strengthen.”

Home-price growth in the next decade probably will average about 3.5 percent a year, based on Retsinas’s estimate of increases of about 1.5 percent above inflation and the Federal Reserve’s long-term inflation forecast of about 1.7 percent to 2 percent. On that basis, it could take a decade or more for the Dharods to recover from the 36 percent loss on their home.

Cities Gained

While median home prices increased 83 percent in the decade preceding the recession, according to the National Association of Realtors, the gain was far higher in the most populous cities. In New York, prices increased 146 percent. In San Francisco the jump was 160 percent, and in Los Angeles it was 205 percent, according to S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price indices.

Read the Whole Depressing Article at Bloomburg and remember this quote from The Oracle of Omaha.

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful. ~ Warren Buffett