How bad is the mortgage crisis going to get?
My preferred metric is the ratio of home prices to rental rates. By that measure, average home prices nationally got way too high. We’ll probably basically retrace all that. So that’s about a 25% decline in overall home prices. Only a fraction of that’s happened so far. Of course, it varies a lot. In places like Houston or Atlanta, where home prices have not risen much compared with underlying rents, the decline will be relatively small. In places like Miami or Los Angeles, you could be looking at 40% or 50% declines.
This interview of Paul Krugman is worth reading. And it does seem to me the magnitude of the mortgage crisis is very large and likely will result in national declines in home prices of over 15% from the peak. Which is a very large decline. And in local markets declines of 35% seem likely.
Related: Home Price Declines Exceeding 10% Seen for 20% of Housing Markets (Sep 2007) – Home Values and Rental Rates – Real Estate Median Prices Down 1.5% in the Last Year (Aug 2007) – Real Estate articles
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