I suppose we should be grateful that these sort of stories are even being done, but if you were an editor, wouldn’t you utterly ban your reporters from going to a Wachovia economist for quotes on how things really are not that bad and could be much better with more subsidized mortgages?
At any rate, yes, Charlotte is in the same housing start slam as the rest of the country. Has to be. And we are talking a 500 percent drop in housing starts from the boom times of recent years. As we’ve talked about the past few months, spec building and builders are at a dead stop.
But here is the money quote from Stella Hopkins’ story:
And buyers, knowing builders have houses to unload, want fire sale prices.
“A lot of buyers have turned into somewhat of a vulture,” said Jake Kent, president of K2C Real Estate Solutions in Charlotte. “We’ve had houses where we reduced 15 percent, and we still don’t get a buyer.”
Uh, Jake, buddy, that means the price is still too high. It does not matter what came before, or how much the builder has spent. If you can’t find a buyer it is because you have not yet reached a market-clearing price. This is what a correction means — prices were too high and now must be permanently cut back to reflect actual value.
The thing is, I thought the single-family housing correction in Charlotte would be on the order of 10 percent. Now I wonder if it is not going to be more on the order of 25 percent.
Update: The county Web site indicates that K2C Real Estate owes over $2600 in 2008 property tax on two parcels in Matthews.
