US housing crash continues....
Why?

Prices disconnected from fundamentals. House prices are far beyond any historically known relationship to rents or salaries. Rents are less than half of mortgage payments. Salaries cannot cover mortgages except in the very short term, by using adjustable interest-only loans.

Interest rates going back up. When rates go from 5% to 7%, that's a 40% increase in the amount of interest a buyer has to pay. House prices must drop proportionately to compensate.
82% of recent Bay Area loans are adjustable, not fixed. This means a big hit to the finances of many owners every time interest rates go up, and this will only get worse as more adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) get adjusted upward. Nationally, about $2 trillion of ARMS will adjust their rates to much higher levels this year and next.

A flood of risky adjustable rate "home equity loans". Just like the bad primary ARM loans, these loans do not have fixed interest rates. When the interest rate adjusts upward, it can double monthly payments, forcing owners to sell.

Massive job loss. More than 300,000 jobs are gone from Bay Area since the dot-com bubble popped. This is the worst percentage job loss in the last 60 years. It's worse than Detroit car problems or Houston's oil bust. People without jobs do not buy houses and owners without jobs may lose the house they are in. Even the threat of losing a job inhibits house purchases. Santa Clara County posted its fourth straight year of job losses in 2005, so it's not over yet.

Salary declines. From <a href="http://www.mccallstaffing.com/need/needsal.html">http://www.mccallstaffing.com/need/needsal.html</a> we hear that "salaries have in fact returned to 1997 and 1998 levels." Local household incomes are not even half of what they need to be to sustain current house prices.

Population loss. San Francisco continues to lose population at the fastest rate of any city in the US and most of those are professional jobs. The problem is not only the dot-com crash, but also the outsourcing technical jobs to India, which continues as corporations realize they can pay an Indian only 20% of what they must pay a similarly qualified employee in the Bay Area. Fewer people in the Bay Area means less demand for housing. It recently cost $3623 to rent a UHaul from San Jose to the midwest, but only $1800 to move the other way. This is because far more people are moving out of the Bay Area than are moving in.

Extreme use of leverage. Leverage means using debt to amplify gain. Most people forget that losses get amplified as well. If a buyer puts 10% down and the house goes down 10%, he has lost 100% of his money on paper. If he has to sell due to job loss, he's bankrupt in the real world. Even a small price decline will bankrupt buyers with small equity. Buyers foolish enough to buy with no money down are already bankrupt, but still unaware of the fact.
House prices do not even have to fall to cause big losses. The cost of selling a house is six percent. On a $600,000 house, that's $36,000 lost even if prices just stay flat.

Shortage of first-time buyers. According to the California Association of Realtors, the percentage of Bay Area buyers who could afford a median-price house in the region plunged from 20 percent in July 2003 to 14 percent in July 2004. Strangely, the CAR then reported that affordability fell another 4 percent in 2005, yet claims affordability is still at 14%.

Surplus of speculators. Nationally, 25% of houses bought in 2005 were pure speculation, not houses to live in. It is now possible to buy a house with 103% financing. The extra 3% is to cover closing costs, so the buyer needs no money down. All this is on the unwise assumption that housing will rise ever higher, covering interest payments through appreciation. Even the National Association of House Builders admits that "Investor-driven price appreciation looms over some housing markets."

Lightbulbs going on in many brains in the Bay Area: "Hey, I can move to New Mexico or Oregon, buy a gorgeous house outright, and comfortably retire on the price difference. My neighbors just did it, so I'll have friends there too."

Trouble at the builders. They are being forced to drop prices even faster than owners. They overbuilt and have huge excess inventory that they cannot sell at current prices.

Trouble at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are being forced to tighten up sloppy lending. This means they are not going to keep buying very low-quality loans from banks, and the total money available for buying houses is falling.

The best summary explanation, from Business Week: "Today's housing prices are predicated on an impossible combination: the strong growth in income and asset values of a strong economy, plus the ultra-low rates of a weak economy. Either the economy's long-term prospects will get worse or rates will rise. In either scenario, housing will weaken. Caveat emptor."
Who disagrees
that house prices will continue to fall? Real estate related businesses disagree, because they don't make money if buyers do not buy. These businesses have a large financial interest in misleading the public about the foolishness of buying a house now.
Buyers' agents get nothing if there is no sale, so they want their clients to wildly overbid, the exact opposite of the buyer's best interest. Agents take $100 billion each year in commissions from buyers. Agents claim the seller pays the commission, but always fail to mention that the seller gets that money from the buyer.
Mortgage brokers take a percentage of the loan, so they want buyers to take out the biggest loan possible.
Appraisers need mortgage brokers for their business, so they are going to give the appraisals that brokers and agents want to see, not the truth.
Banks get origination fees but sell most mortgages, so they do not care about the potential bankruptcy of borrowers, and will lend far beyond what buyers can afford. Banks sell most loans to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. The conversion of low-quality housing debt into "high" quality Fannie Mae debt with the implicit backing of the federal government is the main support for the housing bubble. That is ending as Fannie Mae shrinks.
Even for the "jumbo" loans that banks cannot sell to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they have a motive to lend beyond what buyers can afford. Banks designate interest as "income" whether they receive it or not. As long as borrowers do not actually default, additional interest owed is counted as bank income, and banks can claim higher "earnings". That is going to end when those borrowers cannot even make the principal payments.

Newspapers earn money from advertising placed by Realtors®, so papers have a strong motive to publish the Realtors'® unrealistic forecasts.
Worse, Realtors® have a near-monopoly on sale price information, and newspaper reporters never ask Realtors® hard questions like "how do we know you're not lying about those prices?" The result is an endless stream of stories which quote David Lereah of the NAR playing down the crash, as if there were some news in hearing salesmen say you should give them your money. To be optimistic about this market takes a real estate "professional". Everyone else speaks the truth too clearly.

Owners themselves do not want to believe they are going to lose huge amounts of money.
What are their arguments?

"There are great tax advantages to owning."
FALSE. It is much cheaper to rent a house in the San Francisco Bay Area than it is to own that same house, even with the deductibility of mortgage interest figured in. It is possible to rent a good house for $1800/month. That same house would cost about $700,000. Assume 6% interest we can see that a buyer loses at least $4,936 per month by buying. Renting is a loss of course, but buying is a much bigger loss.
Renting:
    Rent:           $1,800
    ----------------------
    Monthly Loss:   $1,800

Buying:
    Property Tax:     $486 ($729 per month at 1.25% before deduction, $486 lost after deduction.)
    Interest:       $2,333 ($3500 per month at 6% before deduction, $2333 lost after deduction.)
    Other Costs:      $450 (Insurance, maintenance, long commute, etc.)
    Principal loss: $1,667 (Modest 3% yearly loss on $700,000. Reality will be much worse.)
    ----------------------
    Monthly Loss:   $4,936

This is a very conservative estimate of the loss from owning per month. If you include a realistic decline in house prices, as in this rent-vs-own calculator, you'll see that owning right now is a very poor choice.
Here's a more optimistic calculator which ignores price changes entirely.

Remember that buyers do not deduct interest from income tax; they deduct interest from taxable income. Interest is paid in real pre-tax dollars that buyers suffered to earn. That money is really entirely gone, even if the buyer didn't pay income tax on those dollars before spending them on mortgage interest.

Buyers do not get interest back at tax time. If a buyer gets an income tax refund, that's just because he overpaid his taxes, giving the government an interest-free loan. The rest of us are grateful.

Under current conditions, a renter would be able to live in a Bay Area house for 30 years, then buy that $700,000 house outright with the saved principal payments and have avoided $810,846 in interest payments. Rent would be only $648,000 over those 30 years, so the renter comes out at least $162,846 ahead. See any "amortization table" if you don't believe that interest will cost more than the house. This doesn't even count the huge losses the owner will suffer as the value of his house falls year after year for the next decade or more, just as in Japan, nor does it count property taxes, insurance, and maintenance.

Rents will rise eventually, though they have been falling every year for about five years now. Rising rents should be more than offset by appreciation on the renter's saved principal payments, assuming the renter invests in index funds or any other investment that normally brings in more than a CD.

There is no need to wait 30 years to buy a house. As this crash accelerates, prices will fall to the point where it is cheaper to buy than to rent, though that could take five years or more.

If you don't own a house but want to live in one, your choice now is to rent a house or rent money to buy a house. To rent money is to take out a loan. A mortgage is a money-rental agreement. House renters take no risk at all, but money-renting owners take on the huge risk of falling house prices, as well as all the costs of repairs, insurance, property taxes, etc. It is much cheaper to rent the house than to rent the money.

There are large tax disadvanges to buying in California. Because of Proposition 13, it is common for new buyers to pay ten times the property tax that their neighbors pay. Tax rates are set at the time of purchase, which means those who bought long ago pay essentially nothing, and the new buyers pay all property tax for everyone else. Upgrading houses makes you a newcomer all over again.

Then there's earthquake insurance. It's really expensive, so most people just skip it and risk everything on the chance that no earthquake will happen.

"A rental house provides good income."
FALSE. Rental houses provide very poor income in the Bay Area and certainly cannot cover mortgage payments. A $1,000,000 house can be rented out for at most $25,000 per year after expenses. The return is therefore 2.5% with no liquidity and a huge risk of loss.
If you actually have a million dollars, you can get better than 5% with no risk, no work, and no state income tax by buying a US Treasury Bond. And your money will be liquid and secure.

"OK, owning is a loss in monthly cash flow, but appreciation will make up for it."
FALSE. Appreciation is negative. Prices are going down, which just adds insult to the monthly injury of crushing mortgage payments.

"House prices never fall."
FALSE. San Francisco house prices dropped 11 percent between 1990 and 1994. This means that people who bought in SF in 1990 probably did not break even in dollar amounts until about 1998. So those buyers effectively loaned their money to the sellers for 8 years at no interest, losing all the while to inflation. With inflation, 1990 buyers truly broke even only about the year 2000, ten years after buying.
Los Angeles' average house plummeted 21 percent from 1991 to 1995. But the current crash looks to be even worse than that one because so many people are in over their heads.

"House prices don't fall to zero like stock prices, so it's safer to invest in real estate."
FALSE. It's true that house prices do not fall to zero, but your equity in a house can easily fall to zero, and then way past zero into the red. Even a fall of only 10% completely wipes out everyone who has only 10% equity in their house. This means that house price crashes are actually worse than stock crashes. Most people have most of their money in their house, and that money is highly leveraged.

"We know it will be a soft landing, since it says so in the papers."
FALSE. Prices could fall off a cliff. No one knows exactly what will happen, but the risk of a sudden crash in prices is severe. As Yale professor Robert Shiller has pointed out, this housing bubble is the biggest bubble in history, ever. Predictions of a "soft landing" are just more manipulation of buyer emotions, to get them to buy even while prices are falling.
Most newspaper articles on housing are not news at all. They are advertisements that are disguised to look like news. They quote heavily from people like Realtors®, whose income depends on separating you from your money. Their purpose is not to inform, but rather to get you to buy.

"If you buy, at least you have a house, but if you rent, you end up with nothing."
FALSE. Renters in the Bay Area end up with much more money, while living in the same quality house as an owner. At the end of 30 years, a renter would have enough principal saved to buy the $700K house mentioned above and would have spent $162,846 less on rent than he would have spent in interest payments. And he would have lived in an equivalent house all that time. Owners frequently end up with nothing because they lose the house to foreclosure.

"Prices have been driven by supply and demand."
FALSE. Supply is increasing rapidly as building continues, and demand is falling as the population of the Bay Area decreases and the salaries of those who remain decreases. Prices have been driven by low interest rates and increasingly risky loans. The dramatic drop in rents and widespread rental vacancies prove that demand for housing is actually much lower now than a few years ago.
The www.census.gov site has data for Santa Clara County for the years 2000-2003 which shows that the number of housing units went up at the same time that the population decreased:

year  units   people
2000 580868 / 1686474 = 0.344 housing units per person
2001 587013 / 1692299 = 0.346
2002 592494 / 1677426 = 0.353
2003 596526 / 1678421 = 0.355

So housing supply in Santa Clara County increased 3% per person during those years. There is an oversupply compared to a few years ago. In a sane market, prices should fall 3% to compensate for the extra supply of housing.
At a national level, there is a similar story in the years 2000 to 2005:

2000 115.9M / 281M = 0.412 housing units per person
2005 124.6M / 295M = 0.422

At a national level, there is 2.4% more housing per person now than in 2000. So national prices should have fallen as well.
Banks caculated that risky loans were offset by rising prices, allowing them to recover their money from bad borrowers through foreclosure. Now that prices are falling, those risky loans cannot be justified. If the borrower does not pay, the sale price of the house will not cover the loan. Banks now have a real incentive to improve lending standards, and that will lower house prices more because fewer people will qualify for loans.

"They aren't making any more land."
TRUE, but sales volume has fallen 40% in the last year. Apparently, they aren't making any more buyers, either.

"As a renter, you have no opportunity to build equity."
FALSE. Renters are actually in a better position to build equity because:
Owers are losing every month on a cash flow basis. The tax deduction does not come close to making owning competitive with renting.
Owers are losing principal in a leveraged way as prices decline. A 20% decline completely wipes out all the equity of "owners" who actually own only 20% of their house.
Owers must pay taxes simply to own a house. That is not true of stocks, bonds, or any other asset that can build equity. Only houses are such a guaranteed drain on cash.
Owers must insure a house, but not most other investments.
Owers must pay to repair a house, but not a stock or a bond.

"If you rent you are a buyer. You are just buying it for someone else."
FALSE. It may be true that rent covers mortgage payments in other places, but not in the Bay Area. No one buys with the intention to rent out in the Bay Area because that's not viable. The owner is generously subsidizing the renter, a wonderful thing for renters during this crash.

"If you don't own, you'll live in a dump in a bad neighborhood."
FALSE. For the any given monthly payment, you can rent a far better house than you can buy. Renters live better, not worse. All the best neighborhoods have rental vacancies. There are downsides to renting, but since there are thousands of vacant rentals, you can take your pick and be quite happy renting during the crash.
You may worry about being forced to move, but the law says the landlord has to offer you a one year lease at a minimum, and they'll probably be delighted to offer you a two year lease and give you a discount for that. Other people want the mobility that renting affords. Renters can usually get out of a lease and move anywhere they want within one month, with no real estate commission.

It is much easier and cheaper to rent a house in a good school district in the Bay Area than to buy a house in the same place.

The biggest upside is hardly ever mentioned: renters can choose a short commute by living very close to work or to the train line. An extra two hours every day of free time not wasted commuting is the best bonus you can ever get.

"Owners can change their houses to suit their tastes."
FALSE. Even single family detached housing is often restricted by CC&Rs and House Owner's Associations (HOAs). Imagine having to get the approval of some picky neighbor on the "Architectural Review Board" every time you want to change the color of your trim. Yet that's how most houses are sold these days.
In California, the HOA can and will foreclose on your house without a judicial hearing. They can fine you $100/day for leaving your garage door open, and then take your house away if you refuse to pay. There's a good HOA blog here.

"People buy a house for the long term, so things can't crash quickly."
FALSE. People are now buying houses for the very short term. This is how they justify interest-only adjustable mortgages to themselves. The thinking is, "I will own this just long enough to make a profit, maybe a year or two, so there's no need to get a long term loan at a higher interest rate." The distinction between the long-term owner and the short-term flipper has gone away.

"If and when the market goes south, you can walk away."
FALSE. If you have a single loan with just the house as collateral, it may be a "non-recourse" loan, meaning you could indeed walk and not lose anything other than your house and any equity in it (along with your credit record). But if you refinance or take a "home equity loan", the new loan is probably a recourse loan, and the bank can get very aggressive, not to mention what the IRS can do. A reader who lived through the 1989 housing crash in LA pointed out the following nasty situation that can happen:
Let's say you buy a house for $600,000, with a $500,000 mortgage.
Then the house drops in value to $400,000, you lose your job, or otherwise must move.
If you can't make your payments, the bank forecloses on you and nets $350,000 on the sale of your house.
The bank's $150,000 loss on the mortgage is "forgiveness of debt" in the eyes of the IRS, and effectively becomes $150,000 of reportable income you must pay tax on.
It is true that buyers who put zero down and have nothing invested in the house are much more likely to walk away. The large number of new uninvested buyers increases the risk of a horrifying crash in prices rather than a "soft landing".

"The house down the street sold for 25% over asking, and that proves the market is still hot."
FALSE. Realtors® try to create the false impression of a hot market by deliberately "underpricing" a house. Say a seller's agent knows that house will probably go for $500,000. He places ads asking $400,000 instead. (Bait-and-switch is illegal when selling toasters, but apparently not when selling houses.) The goal is to first of all prevent buyers from knowing what a realistic price is, and secondly to get buyers to blindly bid against each other. There are four players in this game and three of them are against the buyer: the seller, the seller's agent, and the buyer's agent. Yes, the buyer's own agent works against the buyer, because there is no commission if there is no sale. There's a saying in Las Vegas: "There's a patsy in every game, and if you don't know who the patsy is, you're it."
If you want to prove your agent is not on your side, ask to see houses "for sale by owner" or houses listed by discount brokers.

Update: the underpricing game is now over. You are free to bid far lower than the asking price. You might be pleasantly surprised to find out how desperate the sellers are.

"I was lucky that my Realtor® told me to increase my bid by $100,000. Otherwise I would have lost, because my Realtor® knew about a secret bid $90,000 above mine."
FALSE. Your agent gets paid nothing if you don't buy the house, and he gets more if you waste more money by bidding too high. Those are two big motives to invent false bids.

"The MLS proves things are great."
FALSE. All sorts of funny things happen in the MLS (Multiple Listing Service, a private database controlled by real estate agents). For example, if a house just doesn't sell, Realtors® can remove its record in the MLS so that you cannot see that it failed to sell. Then the house comes back on the market at a lower price, and unsuspecting buyers think it's on the market for the first time. Their Realtor® can "prove" it's a new listing by showing the MLS record to the buyer: "See, here's the listing date, just came on the market. Better hurry and buy it, this one is hot."
There is nobody checking that the MLS shows true transaction prices. The MLS prices are often just wrong.

Furthermore, the MLS will not list any house for sale by owner or for sale through a discount broker, except perhaps those listed by Help u Sell. Those cheaper prices are just not in the system, because if you save money, they lose money.

"The Bay Area is a special place that will always be expensive."
TRUE, but it was just as special ten years ago, so that does not account for the current housing bubble. Even at half of current prices, it will still be expensive.
Many people are confused about the difference between high prices and increasing prices. Prices are high, but they are not increasing. They are falling. Falling prices make housing a bad investment.

"Rich Chinese (or Europeans, or Arabs) are driving up housing prices."
FALSE. The percentage of US houses bought by rich foreigners is tiny. Furthermore, American housing is clearly a bad investment at this point. Foreigners can just wait and watch both the dollar and American housing continue to fall, and then buy for much less in a few years. Rich foreign investors are not dumb enough to buy into a badly overpriced market, but your broker is hoping that you are.

"There's always someone predicting a Bay Area real estate crash."
TRUE, yet irrelevant. There are very real crashes every decade or so. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

"But housing was high when interest rates were 21%."
FALSE. Inflation was much higher then, so fixed debt was easier to pay off with increasing salaries. Now we have adjustible mortgages and stagnant salaries.
House price increases exactly mirror the increase in mortgage debt. According to the Washington Times: "Consumers have doubled their mortgage debt from $3.5 trillion to $7 trillion since 1996, borrowing and spending profusely on the assumption that house prices will keep rising." So the increase in house prices is not backed by assets. It's backed by debt. The debt in turn is backed by the houses. It's just smoke and mirrors.

"My dad made money on his house, and it will work for me too."
FALSE. Your dad bought his house when houses were cheap compared to salaries, maybe 3 or 4 times annual salaries. Go ask him. Things are different now. Here is a chart of median house price vs median income in Palo Alto:
Year  Median House Price    Median Income   Multiple
1980        148900              24743        6.0
1990        457800              55333        8.3
2000        910000              90377       10.0

Most bankers use a multiple of 3 as a "safe" price to income ratio. We are well beyond the danger zone, into the twilight zone. Another rule of thumb is that a fair house price is 200 times the monthly rent. If a house rents for $2000 per month, then a fair price is $400,000.
Since interest rates are now about 6%, yearly rents should also be about 6% of the value of the house. At most times and most places, it was more expensive to rent. This was how the landlord made a profit. So yearly interest should be lower than yearly rent, to make it profitable to be a landlord.

"Look, housing continued to rise after the dot-com crash, so it will always rise."
FALSE, consider the turkey in the farmer's barnyard. He thinks the farmer will always come feed him and not ask for anything. Then Thanksgiving comes. Whack. Past performance is no indication of future results.

"Rent can go up, but a 30-year fixed mortgage payment cannot."
TRUE, but irrelevant. House owners lose even with a fixed mortgage, because the price of a house falls as interest rates go up. Most people want to sell within 7 years of moving in, and many have to sell because of job loss, illness, or divorce. No one can afford what the owner paid for it, so the owner has to take a large loss. Renting it out will not come close to covering the mortgage. Bay Area rents have fallen 23% in the last 4 years.

"You have to live somewhere."
TRUE, but that doesn't mean you should waste your life savings on a bad investment. You can live in the same kind of house by renting during the crash. A renter could save hundreds of thousands of dollars, not only by paying less every month, but by avoiding the devastating loss of his downpayment. In fact, it's currently cheaper to live in a nice hotel in most parts of the US than it is to make mortgage payments in the Bay Area.

"Newspaper articles prove prices are not falling."
FALSE. The numbers in the papers are not complete and have murky origins. Those prices are "estimated" from the county transfer tax and making that tax public record is optional. A buyer who does not want you to see how little he paid has only to ask to put the transfer tax on the back of the deed and it will not show up on computer searches of the deed, which show only the front. Others voluntarily pay more tax than they have to, in order to inflate the apparent price to fool the next buyer. At a tax rate of about $1 per thousand of sale price, as in San Mateo county, you have to pay only $100 extra tax to make your purchase price look $100,000 higher.
Even though you can in theory go to your county building and get sale price information, in reality the county will give it to you in a painfully slow and inconvenient way. For example, in Redwood City's county building there are PC's where you can look at data for any particular house, but you cannot print, you cannot save to a floppy disk, you cannot email data out. All you can do is write things down manually, one at a time. And that's how real estate interests like it. Your elected representatives are serving them, not you.

Builders do not want to annoy buyers who recently purchased houses from them by dropping the selling price up front. That would be bad for business. Instead, the builder throws in large free extras, such as a swimming pool, rather than drop the price by $20,000 or $50,000. Listing agents encourage this because they get paid based on selling price. A higher price means a higher comission, no matter what the effective rebate really was.

"My appraisal proves what my house is worth."
FALSE. "An appraisal in its typical residential real estate form is little more than a comparative analysis conducted by someone with no skin in the game offering confirmation that other lemmings are paying too much for their houses as well." -from an article on morningstar.com
Amazingly, government house price measures do not include houses with mortgages greater than $417,000. This excludes well over half of all houses in California. So the government can report a slight price rise, but fail to mention that prices actually fell for the other 60% of houses in California.

"It's not a house, it's a home."
FALSE. It's a house. Wherever one lives is home, be it apartment, condo, or house. Calling a house a "home" is a manipulation of your emotions for profit.
As a Realtor® said to me, "a house is a wooden box that sits out in the rain and slowly deteriorates. No one would buy in this market if they really thought about it rationally. That's why we have to sell them a home, not a house."

Also, Realtor® is a commercial term, not a real word. Note the "®" symbol.

"If you don't buy now, you'll never get another chance."
FALSE. This argument was also popular in 1989 in Los Angeles, just before a huge crash. It is silly. If no one like you ever gets another chance to buy a house, then you will not be able to sell your house in a few years either, because, hey, there will be no more buyers like you, ever.
Here is a great quote from June Fletcher, a Wall Street Journal reporter, that says it all: "The real issue isn't whether you will be stuck being a renter all your life, she says. Its whether you'll get so scared about being shut out that you'll buy at the market's peak and be stuck in a property you can't afford or sell."

"Property in the Bay Area is a luxury good, and so will be less affected by economic downturns."
FALSE. 82% of last year's Bay Area mortgages were ARMs, and ARM loans are not taken out by the rich. People on the border of bankruptcy take out ARMs because they can't afford fixed rate loans. The rich don't have loans at all.
Many of these ARM loans have exceptionally deadly repayment terms, and so are known as "neutron mortgages". Like the neutron bomb, they destroy people, but leave buildings standing. They are also known as "suicide loans".

"Housing will be permanently higher since downpayments are now obsolete."
FALSE. The first big wave of default will cause downpayments to suddenly seem like a good idea again. Lending standards are already improving.

"House ownership is at a record high, proving things are affordable."
FALSE. The percentage of their house that most Americans actually own is at a record low, not a high. We do have a record number of people who have title to a house because they have dangerous levels of mortgage debt, but that is no cause to celebrate.

"California houses are worth whatever fools will pay for them."
FALSE. At interest rates of 6%, houses are worth about 16 times what you can rent them out for per year. Since typical house rent is about $24,000 per year in the Bay Area, the typical house is worth about $384,000, not $700,000.
Another rule of thumb is that houses are worth about three times the median household salary of an area. Let's say four times the median salary because this is a desirable area. Since the median household income is under $70,000, the value of a typical house is under $280,000. Again, not even close to $700,000.

"The limited land in the Bay Area means prices will always go up."
FALSE. Japan has a very severe land shortage, but that hasn't stopped prices from falling for 14 years straight. Prices there are now at the same level they were 23 years ago. If we really had a housing shortage, rents would be similar to mortgage costs. They are not even half that much.

"It would take another 911 terrorist attack or a major earthquake that wipes out this area in order for the price to fall by 50%."
FALSE. Even with a 50% decline in prices to $350,000 or so, the median price in the Bay Area will still be roughly double the median price in most of America, and the median Bay Area household income of about $70,000 will still not be sufficient to buy a house. So a 50% decline is well justified by the fundamentals.

"Housing is a hedge against inflation, so you should buy now anyway."
FALSE. Interest rates go up with inflation, and higher interest will be the last straw for ARM mortgages in the Bay Area. Their defaults and foreclosures will drive down the cost of housing for everyone else around here. Remember that 82% of recent Bay Area mortgages were adjustable. There is little chance that salaries of ARM owners can keep up with inflation because of two billion people in India and China who would be happy to do their jobs for much less money.

"Houses always increase in value in the long run."
FALSE. House values are actually constant. Adjusted for inflation, prices in Holland, for example, rose less than one quarter of one percent annually in the 350 years since their tulip bubble. Warren Buffett and Charles Schwab have both pointed out that houses don't produce anything. They do not increase in intrinsic value. Unless there's a bubble, house prices simply reflect current salaries and interest rates. Consider a 100 year old house. Its value in sheltering you is exactly the same as it was 100 years ago. It did not increase in value at all. It did not spontaneously get bigger, or renovate itself. Quite the opposite - the house drained cash from its owners for 100 years of maintenance and taxes. Its price went up about as much as salaries went up.
My grandmother always used to complain about the cost of milk. "Why, when I was a girl, a gallon of milk cost a dime! Just look at how much people are overcharging for milk now." I asked her how much people got paid back then. "Oh, about $15 a week", came the reply. Hmmm, sounds very much like the reasoning people use now when they talk about how much their father's house appreciated "in the long run" without considering that salaries rose a proportional amount.

"Maybe we should just accept that we missed out on a great opportunity to get into the real estate in the past N years."
FALSE. Did we all miss out on a great opportunity to get into the stock of pets.com or other Internet companies with no business model? The real question is what is likely to happen in the next few years according to fundamental economics. The answer is a huge crash. The last guy to buy into the bubble will get hurt the most.

"I just want to own my own house."
TRUE, most people do and that's fine. Buyers will get their chance when housing costs half as much and they have saved a fortune by renting. House ownership is great - unless you ruin your life paying for it.
As reader Sean Olender put it: "Many people have forgotten that their number one restriction on future freedom -- to do what they want when they want and to go where they want -- the number one power over them in the future isn't the Iraqis, or Iranians, or North Koreans, it isn't the axis of evil, it's their mortgage lender."

What should you do?
If you own, consider selling so can actually keep some of that funny money that appeared out of thin air. Otherwise, it will be painful to watch it vaporize back into thin air.