I am experiencing the same here in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area. There are plenty of homes listened, however, the prices are not very negotiable. I figure by the end of the year there should be a 40% reduction in prices in the area and it should be a full out fire sale. I'd love to snatch up some smaller houses and rent them out then buy me a nice place in South Beach. I am keeping my spending to a minimum, I"m holding off on all big purchases. I really deserve a nice car, however, there are much bigger and better things to look forward to than a $60,000 car. Then again, I should probably just go ahead and lease a 6 series bimmer.
Man I hope so. I've been looking at houses but the prices are still sky-high in the places I want to buy. However, 40-50% is quite a drop. I am not aware of it happening in the US before. The Southern Calif bubble of the 90s was -26% and that was a decent sized bubble. I can see it happening in LV and Phoenix, where there was a lot of speculative buying and consequently overbuilding. But not high-priced places like San Francisco because not many people were able to invest there (too expensive).
Nothing like a meltdown in the Silicon Valley area. Just a continued softening. The number of foreclosures seems to be rising out here but the minimum bids are a mockery -- i.e. way to close to "market value."
No disrepect Razorack, but the internal sales in China will not keep up with the loss of export. I am a chinese who ran around HK and South China for the 2 or 3 years before trading fulltime in HK. Manufacturing is still the lifeblood of the whole country, it won't change for the next 5 or 10 years. There are still 800 million people in farming, while the younger generation (with whatever little education) goes to the city to do manual labour in the manufacturing sector. Do you think there the servce industry can take in all those excess labour if export start to drop? Do you think local chinese would still spend like how they do (which is not much, highest saving rate in the world) when manufacturing is going to hell? The only thing that stop China's export going down and fast, is that you can't just replace those production capacity elsewhere overnight, will take years for other countries to build up industries, logistic and other shit. Oh, is not that bad afterall.. LOL