Real estate agent Steve Thoele is “curious” about the continuing decline in housing prices:
“You do kind of wonder where the bottom is,” said Mr. Thoele. “Sellers know in the back of their mind that their home is worth less than at the peak, but they’re still a little surprised when you tell them their $400,000 house is now worth $300,000.”
I kind of wonder, too. Uh-huh. If only there were data on home prices spanning back, say, a hundred years or so, that might indicate a somewhat stable historical mean house price. Oh, wait a minizzle…what’s this?
This graph of the Case-Shiller index over the past hunnert-twenty years, or so, (last updated to 2010) shows that homes began outrageously over-shooting their historical value starting in about 1996-97. The plot thickens. It was a dark and stormy night. A shot rang out! Where could that housing bottom (and those weapons of mass destruction) possibly be?