Word: boom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...main reason for the boom's doom was that in the nation's San Diegos, double-digit annual price increases put most homes out of the reach of middle-income buyers. The mortgage industry and its funders on Wall Street responded with laxer lending standards and creative loans (no downpayment, teaser rate, interest only, etc.) that really made sense for borrowers only if prices kept going up and they could sell at a profit or refinance. When prices stopped rising last year, the edifice began to crumble...
...very much a national business--and a troubled one--real estate may not be as local as it used to be. It may not even be national: house prices have been rising sharply in Europe, Australia, South Africa and China. Two countries at the leading edge of this boom, the U.K. and Australia, saw housing markets sputter in 2004 and 2005 but then recover. This may indicate that a quick recovery is possible in the U.S. It could also mean that the global boom will end only in a global bust--and U.S. mortgage troubles are now ominously making themselves...
THESE ARE THE KINDS OF THOUGHTS THAT occupy Yale economist Robert Shiller, who with Karl Case of Wellesley has done more than anyone else to document the postmillennium real estate boom and warn about the inevitable bust. Shiller first made his name in the early 1980s attacking the notion, then widely accepted, that the stock market rationally reflects the true value of the companies whose shares are traded on it. He and real estate specialist Case then teamed up to show that home prices are even more subject to booms and busts than stocks. They did it by measuring repeat...
Huge high-rises on the beach, in fact, played a major role in Florida's boom and bust. There are 40,000 condominium units being built right now in greater Miami, and consultant Lewis Goodkin estimates it will take five to seven years just to work through all that inventory. That's five to seven years of downward pressure on local housing prices, construction employment and the like. The great test of the coming months and years is whether the U.S. economy is strong enough to withstand that kind of pressure without buckling. Right now things aren't looking good...
Apart from the risk that it will bring a recession, though, a housing boom turned bust is far from an unmitigated disaster. Some buyers will get great deals on Miami condos, that's certain. And in the San Diego suburb of La Mesa, the downturn has allowed Amy and John Tuttle to finally buy a house. "We tried to buy homes a few years ago, but the homes were too expensive," says Amy, 31, a clinical psychologist. "We put three bids on three different houses, and I think we were simply outbid." In August they closed on a recently foreclosed...