Im wondering if anyone has developed any charts they can upload of housing prices. Lets say as far back as possible to the present time. I was going to undergo such a project with Excel and certain datapoints, but just thought I might see if someone had a chart and it would be timesaving. I have a theory using the primary trend and the breakout trend similiar to the B.A.R.F. theory. You have a primary trend line and then there is a breakout in price. The breakout then dumps back down to the primary trend line. The primary trend line is violated with the target price being the trend line value minus the height of the breakout trend from the trend line violation. This will probably give me an idea of when the bottom will be in and at what particular target price. I have a chart that I found on a blog with the NAR percent price changes which seems to work well for finding the target and correlates with the B.A.R.F. theory.
You might like the data provided by the Government agency called "Office of Federal Housing Oversight" at http://www.ofheo.gov/HPI.asp
What's going to be the best indicator of when we are at the REAL bottom? I'm thinking the Fed will ring a bell. Have they done that before? To be honest I don't remember the turning point back in the 80's. I look at the charts at the links there, and I don't even see a down turn in the 80's. Does anyone else remember 20% interest rates? At least where I was at the time, home prices declined dramatically as the economy went into a nasty recession, and people just gave up and left. I remember the "last one to leave turn out the lights" joke. Maybe it was just Illinois with the problem, then. When you get high unemployment, that's the result. Thoughts on things that could be used to track it... Selling prices? I worry that the prices don't have the incentives deducted out... Maybe number of vacant homes? Number of homes being auctioned or foreclosed or going delinquent?
Anecdotally, from my knowledge of the market, I believe that the time to buy would be roughly 5 years after the top. So the top of the market was 2005-2006. So the best time to buy would probably be 2010-2011. As this article suggests, we might be looking at a 50% discount on current prices in 4-5 years time. http://www.rntl.net/history_of_a_housing_bubble.htm
Hello thriftbob: You ask if anyone remembers the 80's? I do. The70's-80's related to realestate prices?? I had bought over 20 building sites in one of the highest demand places in the Twin Cities (google: Lake Minnetonka ) It was very very slugish getting anyone to bite at all. I ended up working with home builders by putting up the land and sharing risk untill the home sold. About 13 percent was the norm for buyers on small 3 bedroom homes without any lake rights at all... I could have bought a nice 40 foot Lake shore building site for $15,000 from a contractor that needed CASH asap. I almost did but things were so grim that I passed it up. I already had almost too many properties. That was late 1970's and now that would bring $250 thousand in a flash. Of course you have to factor in general improvments in that area besides just finance. In others words, ya had to get on your knees and kiss the buyers back then. I made out well but it took over 10 years to ride it out. These properties were just a sideline for me but it had me concerned for sure. As I remember, the late 70's and early 80's were at lot of trouble buying and selling realestate... and that was and still is a very high demand area around Lake Minnetonka... The low demand areas did not recover as fast... agpilot Ps: Here is a link 2 high demand Lake Minnetonka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Minnetonka