The Housing Market

Mike Ault, copyright 2006

I read how the home market is imploding, the bubble has burst, home prices have peaked. It seems to me the home industry really shot themselves in the foot. Have you looked at what they call a home these days? There was a time when a home meant a yard, a garage you could park in (maybe twice) and enough room to move around a bit once you got inside. It wasn’t a re-labeled apartment, it wasn’t within arms length of its neighbor and prices made sense.

Call them town homes, condo’s or whatever else, they are still apartments. You can still hear the person beside you, under you or over you. In these re-labeled apartments you can’t run a router in your living room if you want or knock out a wall and add a room. Yet at least here in Atlanta they want to charge you for the privilege of living in these ant farms at the same rate as if you where in a real house. Less than a mile from my house (on a corner lot, about a quarter acre, two and half car garage and 2700 square foot of space) they want to charge you the same price as for my house for an apartment.

Even when they build a house they now all build them what I call “California” style, seven to an acre. One right up next to another the 300K houses line up all in a row. Again, if I wanted to be that close to my neighbor I would invite them to live with me.

It seems here they prepare the land by raping it down to the bare soil, planting a few small trees and running sod over the exposed red clay (the sold all the top soil when they cleared the land.) I guess I am old fashioned, I like a tree to be a tree before I am ready to retire, not long afterwards.

I guess what I am trying to say with all the above is that if they were really giving people what they wanted, then they probably wouldn’t have had a bubble, but a nice steady growth. People are waking up to the fact that they are spending more and getting less. The builders will need to get smart and go back to what really makes a house a home.