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Boston tops PMI Mortgage Insurance Company's list of areas where housing prices are most likely to decline.

By mythicflow on Thu, 07/14/2005 - 2:19am

Heard on TOTN this afternoon.

From RealEstateJournal:

The Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, Mass./N.H., metropolitan area tops
the list as the region with the highest probability of experiencing a
housing-price decline. The area scored a 533 on PMI's Risk Index, indicating a
53.3% probability of weaker home prices in the next two years.

That marks a big increase in risk for the New England hub. A
year ago, Boston's probability for home-price declines stood at 23.3%. The
area's problem "is that it has had strong home-price increases relative to poor
income growth," says Marco Van Akkeren, an economist at PMI.

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Comments

By [email protected]... on Fri, 07/15/2005 - 6:14pm.

Interesting. The article is four months old, but I don't think that changes the numbers any.

The Atlantic Monthly showed a survey in the issue last month which showed Boston as the 37th-highest overheated market out of 150 metro areas nationwide. That gave me a bit of rationalization when I closed on my new condo in Brighton last week... Of course I didn't overpay for it. :-)

Also, the housing price-to-rent ratio here is around 20:1; five years ago it was 10:1. Nationwide it's 17:1. A bit scary, but also consider that some areas in California are greater than 30:1.

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By mythicflow on Sat, 07/16/2005 - 2:04am.

What's happening with the real estate here, and elsewhere, doesn't make sense, and doesn't seem sustainable, but it's been going on for a while. I've also heard that people are paying cash for some of the ridiculously priced places in the South End. It's all a big mystery to me. In any case, it doesn't make it any easier if one is already averse to the idea of house hunting.

methinks [mythic flow]
Ideological Quagmires

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