Gettin’ Creative

Yours, for $101 and some sweat.

Can’t sell your Hawaiian house? No problem! Why not host a writing contest, with the winner getting the cottage! At $101 – and with a stated aim of $6,000 entries – you could move that 3 bed/2 bath house for over $600,000! There’re a couple other prizes, and some of the money is being donated to area schools… call it $550,000.

I love this idea. Always fun to see folks thinking outside the box – and it’s attractive enough that I’m even considering spending $101 I don’t have to entre. The biggest stumbling block for me – the topic. One of those “What’s aloha mean to you?” type thangs. By the time I finished 3rd grade those types of forced topics started churning my stomach.

But, it’s a house! I can always buy some alka-seltzer.

Bits and bobs.

This is what bits and bobs look like.

Yesterday, the housing market gave some unexpectedly good news – existing home sales rose 6.5%. Of course, much of that was predicated by an 18.2% drop in the price of homes, to 2004 levels. Now, 2004 is about when the bubble started going crazy, but the housing market was in a bit of a bubble from 2001 onwards. When bubbles pop, they usually need to fall below the trendline, before evening back out right around that trendline.

The trendline for housing has always been appreciation more or less in line with inflation. House prices in 2004 were well above the trendline (even the trendline carried forward five years to 2009).

In other words, house prices still have plenty of room to fall.

Meanwhile, consumer confidence is at an all-time low. Everyone’s feeling this thing. Not really surprising, then, that everyone’s looking for something else to do. After all, the old job didn’t work out, did it?