Will housing prices rise or fall? Real Estate in the virus era.

W

WhatInThe

SF VIP
Wondering if house prices will rise or fall after the economy is "opened" back up. Some keep on saying there will be a demand to get a house to live in and/or move out of an apartment or small city home. The problem is there won't be a supply of money to match that demand for a house.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...avirus-fallout-u-s-housing-prices-will-tumble

The good/bad news is that rents might drop as well because this also will take out a lot of landlord want to bes or filter out those that depending on monthly rent income to pay their mortgage on those properties. Take out some of the investors/investor types demand will drop in many areas. Same thing. It's about the supply of money.
 

Prices in my area seem to be dropping. I've been looking for a house for about 2 years now. The houses here currently on the market have all dropped pricing 3-6%.
 
I can definitely see where a push will be mounting for those in apartments and other shared, miscellaneous housing units to find a true space of their own, after the Covid-19 pandemic has settled.

As an addition to this topic, in the Province where we reside, the average price for a home is now $678,625, and mortgage borrowing rules have tightened exponentially over the past number of years.
 

My daughter is in her mid-forties and wanted to downsize from her large house since she only has one child still at home. She waited because the value had been dropping prior to the pandemic. This isn't good news for her. On the other hand, both of her adult children are renters in Pennsylvania and California. I hope you are right about rents going down. They are facing much worse impact due to the virus. As for myself, I just have to worry over the potential rise in real estate taxes. Living on an extremely small fixed income is already challenging.
 
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Here in the San Francisco Bay Area: I expect housing prices to fall between 10-20%, rents will decline only slightly - probably between 5-15%, with the bigger loss at the very highest end. Those high-end rentals are the overpriced new urban developments coming onto the market - tiny bedrooms, minimal kitchens, with lots of Millennial "extras" like gyms, pools, concierge service, BBQ and firepit rooftop patios, weekend "social hour" cocktails - but sited in "hot" neighborhoods.

Mortgages are already hard to get, with standards tightening. But in the long run, prices recover and go upwards. The simple reason is that the SFBA is enclosed by mountains and contains a massive freshwater Bay that opens to the Pacific. There is a limited amount of developable land, and single family homes are not economical when land is expensive.

Modest SFHs for the middle-class, like our cottage, then got pushed out to suburban areas where farms and ranches used to be. More people = more demand = longer commutes. When commutes get too long, prices go up for older homes that are located more conveniently to work.

Also, we prize our many huge "green spaces" so what new housing is built, is urban-dense blocks of condos for rental or purchase. Very few SFH developments get built here - maybe 3% or less of annual housing units. Those SFH that are built nowadays are very high end "estate" homes.

All those Napa Valley wines? Vineyards like those in Napa, Sonoma, Solano, Monterey, Contra Costa and Sierra foothill counties cover thousands of acres of land. CA is one of the leading agricultural states in the US - more acreage that grows your lettuce, artichokes, almonds, and tomatoes. Or ranchland - CA is third in dairy and cheese production.

This is why coastal CA RE is so expensive. Although the prices rise and fall, overall it remains expensive. Lots of demand for it, and not just for those "little boxes on the hillside" that Pete Seeger sang about back in 1963.
 
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