Poll:Has Your Home's Value Rebounded?

[Beryl]

This is similar to the "Real Estate Frenzy" thread but with a poll. Please elaborate your experience here.


My situation:
2009 - Home value** 20% below 2007 purchase price & there were 2-3 long-term empty/foreclosed homes on my block
2013 - Home value 12% above purchase price (not including $60K of improvements), no empty homes on the block & "For Sale" signs stay up less than a month in the sub-division


In 2009, [FONT=.Helvetica NeueUI]My niece & husband walked away from her underwater house losing her down payment and credit rating. Now the house is valued close to their purchase price. She and her husband have been renting, waiting to save up for another house, and letting their credit ratings improve so they can buy.[/FONT]
[FONT=.Helvetica NeueUI]
[/FONT]
My friend and relatives home values are all back to 2005-6 levels.


Last night, CNBC aired an show they produced at the height of the recession in 2009. Most of the folks were underwater in their homes and/or jobless. Many people and businesses walked away from their loan obligations and left neighborhoods filled with empty homes. I wish they would produce an updated show on the "mortgage crisis" because I see a much brighter picture these days. (Also the unemployment rate has significantly dropped -- not that this means much to us here. )


(**Zillow values)

 

[W2R]

According to Zillow it has gone up in price a little lately, but Zillow is virtually 100% useless here because it does not have any information other than location for most homes.

Just looking at real estate listings and sales information, I am starting to see some homes selling here (other than to relatives). This is a big improvement and should be very welcome to those with no money to bring to the table, but who are trying to get out from under their mortgages.

My best guess of the value of my home right now is about 85% of its 2005-2006 value, although more than I paid for it in 2002. Luckily, I do not have to move right now.

Ours is still far from a "hot" real estate market, though, and has not been for a long time.

 

[jon-nyc]

I purchased in 2004, selling now - its under contract and will close in a couple of weeks.


The price more than doubled in that time. In fact I'm selling it for 218% of my purchase price. And moving to a much cheaper dwelling (to a house in Westchester from a condo in the city)


Life is good.

 

[FIREd]

We purchased in 2005. Our realtor says our house is now worth 16% more than what we paid. We spent quite a bit on maintenance in the meantime, but did very little in the way of improvements.

 

[dtbach]

We never had the craziness in real estate here in Madison, so things didn't go up so much and consequently didn't go down much.

I don't look at my home as an "investment" but as a place to live. If it goes up great, if down, well I got to live someplace, might as well be here.

 

[harley]

It's hard to say, since there hasn't been a sale in our neighborhood for years, except for a couple of foreclosures a year or two ago. But just using my best guess, I'd say we're still about 30-35% below our building cost 5 years ago. Luckily we have no intention of selling in the next 10 years or so.

We also recently bought a house in FL for the same price the previous owner bought it for in 2009. It's still about 25% below what it was listed for in 2006.

The townhouse we rent out in Northern VA is currently worth what we paid for it in 2008, maybe a little more. The price dropped a bit more after we bought it, but never very much. We bought it at about a 20% discount to what they had been selling for the previous year before the meltdown. So even that one in a good, strong, federal governmentally propped up area hasn't regained it's bubble price. Which, IMO, is a good thing.

 

[daylatedollarshort]

We are still 12% down from the top of the bubble. We are up 17% from a year ago with low inventory and bidding wars in the area.

 

[FUEGO]

Looks like our house is $4k higher than the bottom price it hit back in 2011 per zillow. And still $19k below the "peak" in September 2008. A little simple math can tell you that our house value only fluctuated $23k from peak to trough during the "great recession", so we didn't really care. And the fact that we had something like a 30% Loan to Value ratio on the house along with 20x the mortgage amount in investments means we never really lost any sleep over home value declines. The house is a very small percentage of our net worth - just a place to sleep at night and recreate during the day, and raise a family.

Sometimes it is nice to live in an area not caught up in a real estate frenzy.

 

[jebmke]

I don't know. Don't know what it is worth now and don't know what it was worth during the depth of the recession.

 

[rbmrtn]

We never had the craziness in real estate here in Madison, so things didn't go up so much and consequently didn't go down much.

I don't look at my home as an "investment" but as a place to live. If it goes up great, if down, well I got to live someplace, might as well be here.

Same here. No real runup or drop in prices. They actually seem to be lower now. Don't really care that much as it is a place to live not an investment. If I sold I'd just be trading it for another.

 

[Midpack]

There's always someone who can't find a suitable poll option, this time it's me.

My homes value has not rebounded to the peak it hit right before the subprime crisis, but then that was a ficticious home value in the first place. So no mine hasn't, but I'm not unhappy about it.

OP notwithstanding, sort of like the folks that harangue about losing net worth since 2007, when their home values weren't real to begin with and investments were all at or near peaks. Just an example of cherry picking data to support a preconceived point. Most of the same people have probably seen their net worth increase since 2009, but that wouldn't serve the doom and gloomers.

 

[Beryl]

There's always someone who can't find a suitable poll option, this time it's me.

My homes value has not rebounded to the peak it hit right before the subprime crisis, but then that was a ficticious home value in the first place. So no mine hasn't, but I'm not unhappy about it.

Ya. That is why I was able to sell my previous house in 2010 in exactly 10 days of listing. I only paid $183K to build it in 1993 and although it hit a fictitious value of almost $500K during the boom, I priced it at $400K to sell. Greed didn't get the best of me and the sale was a win-win. The sale didn't hurt the value of the neighborhood homes much, it sold quickly so wasn't empty long, and I made a decent profit. Now the house is valued at $420 so the new owners are happy.

(I guess if I had bought that house for $450 in 2005, I'd be a little sad.)

Maybe some people who could have afforded to make their payments on their underwater homes should have stuck it out instead of walking away.

 

[foxfirev5]

Up slightly from - 1995 level when purchased new. Still down from peak 2006 levels. No intention of selling in the next 20 -30 years. By then I won't care for obvious reasons.

 

[mickeyd]

I don't really believe that the value of our joint took much of a hit during this housing downturn. Of course I did not try to sell it and don't plan on anytime soon but I did not notice many "for sale" signs out around our place during the last 5 years or so. For what that's worth.

 

[sheehs1]

Don't know about fair market in our area. Bought ours in 1993 and put on an addition.

During the bubble, assessment was 125% above what we have in it.
The current tax assessment is now 30% above what we have in it.

I think if I sold it I could get 57% above what we have in it. That may be low as I based it on $100.00 per square foot. Typically contractor grade is going for $140/$160 per square foot. But not many in this area make the salaries they used to make with a major plant closing so I low balled it.

I voted no but the "not happy about it" doesn't apply. Meaning it is what it is.

 

[martyp]

I don't check my Zillow value all that often. Our house is the smallest house in a good neighborhood. When house values increased our value increased more slowly and eventually topped out. During the great recession our house value dropped about $50k from it's peak. Now that I look at it again it has risen $38k above it's pre-recession peak. I guess that's good news however I'm not planning to sell. We purchased the house in 1983 and our mortgage will be paid off in August. Our current value is 350% above what we bought it.

 

[kcowan]

Bought in 2007. Put another $60k into it. I would guess it is worth about what I paid for it. Maybe up $20k. Does not matter. We are not selling.

Sure it is nice to look at the value of things on paper. But for us, if we decided to upgrade today, the cost of any upgrade would be less than it was in 2007. But we are happy with what we have.

 

[rodi]

It's really hard to say. We bought mid way through the up cycle of the last bubble (2003) for $600k. In 2007 we got a HELOC to pay for building a granny flat - at that point (sans granny flat) the bank estimated the value at $815k. Zillow has it at $805k now. I think that's a bit low since the same model (but MUCH more fixed up) recently sold for $785 - and it doesn't have a legal, detached, 1br casita, on the property.

FWIW - San Diego is too expensive. This is not a mansion. But it's in a good, albeit older, neighborhood, with good schools. We're "La Jolla adjacent".

Doesn't matter what it's worth. We're not moving and are less than a year away from having it paid off. It's not an investment - it's shelter. Even the granny flat was built to house a granny - not generate income. It's icing on the cake that we're now at a point to start renting it for income.

 

[toreornot]

I'm listing the home I bought in 2010 next week. I bought it during the federal home buying incentive, and the value dropped somewhat (10%) right after the expiration of the program. Apparently it has come back strongly over the last 6 months or so - 4 real estate agents I interviewed suggested a valuation between 33% and 48% above my purchasing price. I know it sounds crazy, but this is California and the comps the realtors brought in are very convincing.

 

[Sesq]

I bought in 2008. I am about 3% down from purchase price based on a recent appraisal. Of course I expect to lose a bit since I bought new construction. I didn't find a poll answer that matched my ambivalence.

 

[Willers]

Although home values in our city weren't affected significantly by the downturn, my specific neighborhood was. I bought the house as a great place to live (on a lake) rather than an investment. That was the first time I'd ever done that. It's worth about what we paid for it, but 30% less than the purchase+rehab investment. The worst investment I've ever made, but I don't regret it.

 

[audreyh1]

Another one who doesn't fit - we purchased our home in 2010, so it never went down! Didn't own a home 5 years before that - having sold the prior house in 2005.

 

[jon-nyc]

I'm listing the home I bought in 2010 next week. I bought it during the federal home buying incentive, and the value dropped somewhat (10%) right after the expiration of the program. Apparently it has come back strongly over the last 6 months or so - 4 real estate agents I interviewed suggested a valuation between 33% and 48% above my purchasing price. I know it sounds crazy, but this is California and the comps the realtors brought in are very convincing.

I've seen similar craziness here. I had three real estate agents give me a ballpark estimate last September. The same three came back in late January and upped their September estimates by several hundred thousand dollars. The market for large apartments and townhouses here has been insane this year.

The NYT runs an article every couple of weeks about how crazy its gotten, here was Sundays:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/r...arket-so-every-minute-counts.html?src=me&_r=0

 

[clifp]

I use an average of Zillow, Trulia, and my property assessment.

I think it dropped 20% from the top back in spring 2008 and it has gone back up 10%.

 

[ls99]

Missing the option: don't care, I'm not moving.