OmegaMom

A year ago, I began keeping track of house prices around here.  Things just seemed really out of whack.  Prices kept leaping and bounding, gazelle-like, and OmegaDad and I watched with jaws agape at the prices itty bitty houses here in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods were fetching.

At the same time, I did some blogsearching on “housing bubble”.  The results were a bunch of regular visits of mine for quite a few months, the various bubble blogs.  Which were, of course, filled with doom and gloom, predicting the whole house of cards was due to collapse at any moment, with a horrible recession to follow (if not a depression).  The basic idea was that the fed policy of relaxing interest rates down to the bare bones, right after the dot-com bust, was that the US (and other countries) had gone on a spending spree not matched since, say, tulip mania a few hundred years ago.  That the economic bust–the real economic bust, the one that should have hit when the dot-coms busted–was merely being postponed.  That the spending spree of Joe Homeowner, who hocked his illusory equity to pay for new cars, vacations, remodels, and more, would end up forcing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes and ruining their finances.

All of which sounded pretty damned convincing to me.

Lo and behold, come November of 2006, the housing market stopped on a dime.  WHAM!  Sales came to a standstill, people started cancelling their contracts on newly constructed homes, banks began foreclosing, and prices began dropping.

Which was academic to us, right?  I mean, my spreadsheet showing a drop in average asking prices here in HDEW, was merely an exercise.

Right?

Sigh.  So here we are, putting the house on the market so we can move to the final frontier. 

We met with the realtor today.  She was nice.  She hinted that we might get a lot less than we expected.  She seemed relieved to know that we knew the housing market was tanking.  And even with the tanking, we are expecting to be able to clear as much as we paid for the house to begin with (on top of what we still owe on our mortgage).  But, still…I had been secretly hoping that “things are different here”, as so many realtors were saying in late summer/early fall last year about every single housing market out there.  I was secretly hoping she’d walk into our house, gasp, and make us an offer of three times our current outstanding mortgage right then and there.

Go ahead.  Laugh at me.

She gives us a researched asking price tomorrow.

It’s not as bad as all that, because we are lucky enough to have the feds moving us, which means a relocation company, and there’s this itty bitty clause about the relocation company buying our house at appraised value.  So we don’t have the relentless stress of having to sell it ourselves, carry two mortgages, blah de blah de blah.

Another good thing is that housing is noticeably cheaper where we are moving, so we’ll be able to put a good chunk-o-change down on a one-acre parcel with a new home, and still owe less than we currently owe.  Yay.  (Maybe not a lot less, but less, I’m pretty sure.)

But I’m still wisting after that “things are different here” daydream.  No, OmegaMom, sorry, they ain’t.