Welcome Home Edition: Lookie Loo & Good News/Bad News
For the first time in years, I took a vacation last week. While I tried to tune it out, I sort of followed the news. There was some good news last week in that mortgage rates dropped to 5.94 percent. However, the stock market had tanked. The politicians attacked, then retreated. And there were other bad stories about fires, robberies, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was definitely a great week to get away from it all!
The news is better this week. Today the stock market is working hard to rebound. Fingers are crossed that my daughter’s college savings comes back before she heads to college in the Fall.
I read that former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has weighed in on the housing market and is predicting the recovery to begin in early 2009.
Greenspan wrote that the recent slowing in the rate of decline in U.S. home prices is the first positive note in the year-long trauma and that eventually, frozen credit markets will thaw “as frightened investors take tentative steps toward reengagement with risk.”
“More conclusive signs of pending home price stability are likely to become visible in the first half of 2009,” he wrote.
Three cheers for that diagnosis!
Meanwhile the Florida housing market seems extremely affordable right now. I watched a lot of the real estate shows and there are some VERY nice homes in the Emerald Coast area.
Here are four homes priced under $200,000.
$189,000
$172,000
$149,000
And for a mere $99,900 …
A few moments away from this mobile home is why people have paid the big bucks in the Florida market.
