Sellers chop asking prices (High end housing dropping fast in boston area)

http://www.boston.com/realestate/news/articles/2005/12/09/sellers_chop_asking_prices_as_housing_market_slows/

Sellers chop asking prices as housing market slows
Cuts of up to 20% are now common as analysts see signs of a 'hard landing'

By Kimberly Blanton, Globe Staff | December 9, 2005

Boston-area homeowners trying to sell their houses are sharply reducing asking prices -- in some cases, by $100,000 or more -- in response to the sudden slowdown in the real estate market.

Demand for single-family homes has declined as prices have risen in recent years and interest rates have begun to climb, causing the number of properties on the market to pile up.

The median price of a single-family home in Massachusetts has dropped 7 percent in the past two months, to $349,000 for sales that closed in October. But reductions in asking prices of 10 percent or 20 percent are now common in both high and moderately priced neighborhoods, according to real estate agents and listings of homes for sale. In Cambridge, price cuts averaged $300,000 in a sampling of a dozen houses listed in the $1.25 million to $4.3 million price range. In suburbs like Tewksbury and Hopkinton, homes originally listed for around $500,000 have been slashed to the low $400,000s.
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If it's over 100k, I'm out of that market anyway.

I always go into shickerstock when I see anything over 100k ....

but I've noticed on the weekend real estate shows that even houses in the $120,000-$150,000 range are staying on the market now for several weeks of those shows in a row, something that would never have happened a year ago. I started noticing this about last June.

Prices aren't going down here, and they're still showing plenty of monuments that rich men have built to themselves, monstrosities with marble floors, palatial kitchens with obligatory granite everywhere, baths that would make Tiberius blush at the excess. They're not selling, either.

I haven't seen any price declines here, though. I suppose that will be next.

.. are the second-to-last manifestation of a bubble bursting. (The last is foreclosures). People are loathe to admit that there is a problem, and only people who REALLY NEED TO SELL can muster the emotional maturity to cut the price rather than cling to a demonstrably-false belief of the market value of their property.

Once the price cutting starts the speculators, the people who only bought the house because they thought they were going to make a quick easy profit, atart panicing and then Katy bar the door.

Let's hope this is confined to a few overheated areas of the country because it is going to suck for everybody otherwise.

so inflation in prices has not been seen; in fact, our median price is slightly below what it should be. What is a big deal is that one third of all new construction has been bought by investors, not homeowners, and that Californians accounted for one fourth of new construction sales.

We're seeing foreclosures aplenty here, especially in poorer areas. We're still not seeing the decline in prices that will likely happen when those investors get strapped for cash and dump all that housing on a slightly depressed market.