Everyone's house is worth less...except mine

Apparently that's what most people believe. This is what the real estate website zillow.com was able to find out. Crazy stuff.

http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2008/08/everyones-house-is-worth-lessexcept.html

It has less to do with the economy and more to do with the school district. That's a piece of the pie most experts neglect to mention.

My own area is selling very briskly, old post WWII starter houses that are convenient to everything in town.

Houses on the edge of town are selling slowly and houses in the exurbs aren't selling at all.

My house has appreciated slightly over the last year but the really good news is that it hasn't depreciated the way houses in other areas of this city have.

in the neighborhood with the 'older' schools is $100,000 less. :wow:

Gentrified cities in trouble since no one can afford the higher city taxes and the schools are often still in bad shape. Businesses continue their flight into the suburbs. Numerous office towers sit empty (in Chicago, they converted many of these abandoned buildings to residential dwellings, but sales are slow). Suburban declines will only hurt the cities more in the long run.

House prices are increasing somewhere, that's true. Charlotte, NC is one of those places for example. But, it's a general case of 75% of drivers thinking they're above average drivers.

so I guess since our house is part of the farm I can say it has gone up.

a home's value. We were thinking about selling ours because my hubby is retiring in Oct. and not only would he like to move closer to where our son lives (about 90 miles south) but I was checking on the cost of medicare suppliment insurance in our state and it depends on the county you live in. Here where we are now the cost is $79/mo per person. The cost in the country where my son lives is $23/mo per person!

But I've checked on multiple web sites to try to find comps, and there aren't any! We are in an older subdivision (1976 era) but wer're surrpunded by lots of NEW much pricier subdivisions. If I check homevalues.com, they have an est. value of $170,000, but I KNOW that's much too high. No homes have sold in our neighborhood since 2003! It's quite a deliema for me!

and any doubt that people are insanely optimistic will be quickly dispelled. It's as if they don't know what's been going on in the real estate market for the past two years, that people with nearly perfect FICO scores aren't able to get mortgages and the banks have pretty much stopped loaning money.

The sad thing is, the longer they wait to lower their price to current market value, the further they're going to have to lower it. Ouch.

tracks the value of their home on zillow- whether they believe zillow's #s, or not, now that's a different story.

We bought in Dec o6 and have seen our value go up as high as 30% above what we bought it for.
It has come back down now to about 8% above. So, we still feel somewhat fortunate.

Price Reduced: 07/17/07 -- $230,000 to $220,000
Price Reduced: 08/16/07 -- $220,000 to $211,000
Price Reduced: 10/30/07 -- $211,000 to $195,000
Price Reduced: 11/30/07 -- $195,000 to $185,000
Price Reduced: 01/08/08 -- $185,000 to $165,000
Price Reduced: 02/12/08 -- $165,000 to $150,000
Price Reduced: 03/20/08 -- $150,000 to $135,000
Price Reduced: 05/08/08 -- $135,000 to $110,000
Price Reduced: 07/21/08 -- $110,000 to $69,900

And it's still not selling.

It may not have happened to your house in particular, but it will. Why? The available pool of qualified buyers has dwindled and will continue to dwindle into next year. That factor, along with a glut of unsold homes on the market, will drive down ALL housing valuations.

Another negative factor is retiring boomers. Many boomers relied upon selling their homes to finance their retirement, and when those homes start hitting the market that too will drive down the price.

Wages have stagnated for years. For a while, upper-middle-class speculation and subprime mortgages were able to hold up home demand and inflate a bubble, but eventually reality kicked in: the majority of households could no longer afford homeownership at the given price levels. Combine that with other factors such as the credit crunch and consumer debt, and it's not surprising to see a fallback in home prices. I expect them to keep falling for a long time.