They Never Learn

Now lets face it, the housing market has been and remains in a death spiral. The stakeholders include, homeowners, homebuyers, renters, realtors, mortgage companies, builders and the rest of us. All of us are effected by the housing market. The government has about 5 million foreclosed properties and their options on what to do with them are limited.

The government could sell them; but, that means that the construction market will not come back. Even if the government did sell them, the sell them at a tremendous loss which will need to be saved. The government has therefore decided that the best approach is to sell them and require the purchaser to rent them for five years. By taking this approach renters fill the houses and so buyers would need to have new houses built to meet their needs. This action will maintain home prices, making owners happy and help the housing construction industry happy making for more jobs. The people who don't benefit are the realtors because they would prefer to see foreclosures and resales as that is where they make their money.

The Realtors of this country sold us down the river. They promoted loans that they new their clients could not afford and promised that the properties would appreciate. We may have had many dumb buyers; but, the realtors were expected to know better. They haven't learned a thing, a healthy market is one that makes sense for the most people not one that just gives short term returns to realtors.

Wall Street Journal - Realtors Slam Obama Foreclosure-Rental Plan

What the realtors should be doing is moving into the arena of property management as all these rental will require maintenance. It is more work to manage properties than to sell them is the reason why they prefer to just sell them. If we sold all the foreclosed houses owned by the government we would destroy the value of housing even further hurting everyone who owns a house and driving even more people upside down on their homes. The problem is that everyone is still just looking out for themselves and that is what really drove all of the economic failures.

We need to find a new attitude of community if we are ever going to get out of the mess that we are in. It will come in one of two ways, things will just continue devolving until there is absolutely no choice between eating or working for the community good and our benefit rather than our benefit at any cost. The alternative is what I fear, noting works and people put a dictator in power. You can vote a dictator in willingly, the guy who promises to bypass the congress and supreme court in order to fix things and then does fix things, usually by rather harsh methods. People live a good dictator in times of need.