This is all a big lie, the real estate prices never fall, if you dont buy you are an idiot! buy buy buy!

Great article-- how long before JC joins the rest of the state? See link to pdf of 5 yr sales data for jersey burbs:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/200 ... -region-housingchart.html

February 22, 2009
A Market Going Downhill Fast
By ANTOINETTE MARTIN

Montclair

IN the heady real estate days of the summer of 2005, a well-maintained house in a decent school district would not last long on the market. That was when a three-bedroom ranch house at 46 Windermere Road here achieved its peak-value moment.

The red-brick ranch sold that July for $709,000 ? fetching $50,000 over asking price ? after just 10 days on the market.

Fast forward to the spring of 2008, and a market gone slack, not just in Montclair or Essex County, but in all 21 counties of the nation?s second-wealthiest state. The brick ranch was for sale again, and had been, on and off, for more than a year. The owner had given up on getting his price, and moved out. The bank had agreed to a ?short sale? in which it would recover less than it was owed. The asking price was reduced to $599,000.

?That seemed like a really good price when we first saw it,? said John Strong, who finally bought the house with his partner, Heather Carter. ?But there were no lights in the house ? the electricity had been turned off ? and later we could see there were problems, because it had been empty and not kept up.? The final price at the closing last month: $528,110.

Over the course of three and a half years, the New Jersey residential market has headed downhill fast. In September 2006, Jeffrey G. Otteau, whose Otteau Valuation Group gathers data on the residential market for many builders and brokers, said there were 68,000 houses sitting on the market unsold for a month or longer, more than he had ever seen in his experience in this market. By spring 2007, there were 71,000 unsold houses, his firm reported, and by May 2008, that number had climbed again, to 74,000.

At the same time, the pace of sales kept lagging, sometimes erratically, but always headed down, according to monthly reports from Mr. Otteau?s firm, based in New Brunswick. Each December, on a line graph depicting month-by-month sales during the year, the squiggly line ended in a deeper valley than it had the previous year.

More than a year ago, Mr. Otteau announced that his calculations indicated there would be a long wait before prices returned to 2005 levels. Not until 2014, he said at the time ? and that prediction was made well before Wall Street quaked, the mortgage lending market foundered and unemployment statistics started to skyrocket.

The problem for many sellers now is that they cannot wait five years to sell their homes at prices comparable to what they paid for them.

Tom Wragg, a mortgage broker with Worldwide Financial Resources Inc., has his family?s three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath town house condo in the Crystal Woods complex in West Orange up for sale right now.

He purchased the condo for $438,000 five years ago, when his first child was about to take his first step. Last year, after he and his wife had their third child, Mr. Wragg put the town house on the market at an asking price of $525,000. After 125 days without a buyer, the listing was withdrawn ? and the house was relisted on Jan. 1 at $489,900.

Over the weekend of Feb. 7 and 8, when the weather was relatively balmy and small swarms of home shoppers actually emerged for various open houses around northern New Jersey, not a single prospective buyer showed up to view the town house, Mr. Wragg said.

?It?s a little disturbing,? said his real estate agent, Perri K. Feldman of Keller Williams in Summit, ?because this home is now very well priced.?

Ms. Feldman said last week that she was talking with two other sellers whose homes? values had apparently slid below what the sellers originally paid. She said she was considering when to tell them that their only option appeared to be selling short and moving on with no nest egg profit in hand.

As of January, the state had a 17-month supply of houses on the market, according to Otteau Group figures. That means that even if no other houses were put up for sale, it would still take 17 months to sell those already available, under current market conditions.

In Bergen County, it would take an estimated 15 years and 4 months to sell all the houses now on the market priced at $2.5 million or more. In Morris County, for homes priced from $1 million to $2.5 million, it would take seven and a half years, and in Warren County, for homes priced from $600,000 to $1 million, five years and one month.

With unsold-house inventories like those, and the probability that the economic malaise will continue for some time, Mr. Otteau?s most recent prediction is that New Jersey home prices will continue to drop.

Prices have declined by an average of 15 to 20 percent in every county in the past three and a half years, contract sales data indicates. At the start of 2009, some real estate professionals said they had noticed a few sellers starting to ?see the light? and agreeing to slash asking prices by 10 to 20 percent, sometimes even 25 percent.

James Bednar, who writes the real-estate blog njrereport.com, said last month that it was high time for both buyers and sellers to face reality. He proposed a new mantra for them: ?Home prices can fall. Home prices can fall. Home prices can fall further than I believe possible. Home prices are falling and will continue to fall.?

From the NY Times

Quote: Potential buyers are not here to bailout anyone, especially realtors' commissions. I can't wait to cross the Hudson to Wall St to find my next group of cheap labor !

It would be nice if this index could be more detailed and include a section for Hudson County, but the best we can do is look at NYC area condo prices. They were down 4.4% from 12/07 to 12/08 according to the latest Shiller/Case report.

Anyone know how JC real estate fared at the end of last year?

A Sharp Drop in Home Prices at End of Year

By JACK HEALY

Published: February 24, 2009

Home prices in the United States plunged at the fastest pace on record in December, a sign that housing is likely to continue declining in the months ahead as the economy sinks deeper into recession.

Single-family home values in 20 major metropolitan areas fell 18.5 percent in December compared with a year earlier, according to a data released Tuesday by Standard & Poor?s Case-Shiller home price index. Housing prices dropped 2.5 percent from November to December.

Nationwide, housing prices in the last three months of 2008 sank to their lowest levels since the third quarter of 2003.

Prices fell in all of the 20 cities surveyed by Case-Shiller, but the declines were starkest in Phoenix and Las Vegas as well as much of Florida and Southern California, where development has all but dried up.

?The Sun Belt continues to get hardest hit in terms of just about any measure,? said David M. Blitzer, chairman of Standard & Poor?s index committee.

Prices in Phoenix fell 5.1 percent in December alone, and were down 34 percent since December 2007. In Las Vegas, which was recently rated ?America?s emptiest city? by Forbes magazine, prices dropped 4.8 percent in December and were down 33 percent for the year.

The declines for 2008 were shallowest in Dallas and Denver, where prices fell about 4 percent.

Housing prices are now falling so quickly that economists worried that potential buyers will stay on the sidelines and wait for the market to deteriorate further, reinforcing the downward momentum.

?It?s a deflationary spiral,? said Dan Greenhaus, an analyst in the equity strategy division of Miller Tabak & Company. ?Prices go down, people hold back, prices go down further, people hold back, and so on and so forth.? Although houses are now cheaper and mortgage rates have fallen to 5.22 percent from 6.10 percent about a year ago, the rapidly deteriorating economy and rising unemployment have scared off potential buyers, economists said. The unemployment rate has risen to 7.6 percent nationwide, and the economy is shedding more than 500,000 jobs every month.

?We continue to believe that it is unlikely that we are anywhere near a bottom in nationwide home prices,? Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR, wrote in a note.

Since the recession began in December 2007, the pace of declines in housing prices has accelerated as the financial crisis spread and unemployment rose.

According to the National Association of Realtors, the country?s median home price was $175,400 in December, down nearly 25 percent from its peak of $230,100 in July 2006.

The two-year decline in real-estate prices followed more than a decade of steady growth in home prices.