patrick.net

elliemae says

I don’t believe it’s that way everywhere. There are some places that are more than affordable. Just not California. People forget that there’s a bit of space between California & Florida.

A fact that has not escaped many Bay Area employers. As I stated in prior posts, many employers, small and large, have equal if not more employees outside of the Bay Area.

marko says

Based on this chart I’d be inclined to agree with you BUT .. the big green line used as a basis can be tilted one way or the other depending on what exactly is used as a criteria for the inflation numbers. Also the prices dont reflect the type of house, the type of buyer, or the condition of the house. Alot of these houses that are dropping in price are dilapidated poo-poo smelling houses

Sure inflation is tricky. You can look to our local emoloyers in our industries.. We can certainly say that the costs of materials, and overhead that went into production of goods, and the costs of machinery that produces these goods, have inflated over the past decades. Steel, Gold, copper, plastics, silicon, etc etc... But we also currently have long running deflation due to growing competition from global producers after our same markets. When I first started in high tech industry, our revenues per unit shipped could cover the cost of many material and employees costs. Today, due to greater global competition our revenue per unit cannot cover labor or material costs. That is why we had manufacturing moved out and continue to move other labor costs to other lower cost regions.

Instead of having 100,000 HP or Intel employees locally, as we had in the past, that number has shrunk to a token 1,000 each. This has gone on for a long time now.

You will find that it was the typical home that went from 200K pre-bubble to 600+K in a few years.

tatupu70 says

And keep in mind that home prices ultimately depend on supply and demand. People who were foreclosed will now rent the houses instead of owning them. It’s a no net change in the supply and demand equation

Not true. Density can vary. Look at for NJ. I lived there in the late 60's and late 80's. In the late 60's the vast majority of the population was in the very densely populated 20 mile area around NY and Philly. Outside those area's the state was rural. By the late 80's this area had spread to about 30 miles. Now when I go back the state is pretty much one large housing development. The population has increased about 18% yet the number of houses multiplied exponentially.

The density can go the other way pretty easily. When people run out of money they can and must double up. Move in with relatives, house share, whatever it takes to survive. With the true unemployment running close to 20% I don't think it's going to be a zero sum game under these circumstances for a long time.

What about the baby boomers? They are starting to retire and this will be a tidal wave in the next 10 years. They will be downsizing and moving into much higher density living situations (retirement villages, assisted living, nursing homes) in large numbers. The number of baby boomers retiring will far exceed tradition immigration increases in population for at least the next 20 years. Who is going to buy all those houses when they hit the market?

thomas.wong1986 says

marko says

Based on this chart I’d be inclined to agree with you BUT .. the big green line used as a basis can be tilted one way or the other depending on what exactly is used as a criteria for the inflation numbers. Also the prices dont reflect the type of house, the type of buyer, or the condition of the house. Alot of these houses that are dropping in price are dilapidated poo-poo smelling houses

Sure inflation is tricky. You can look to our local emoloyers in our industries.. We can certainly say that the costs of materials, and overhead that went into production of goods, and the costs of machinery that produces these goods, have inflated over the past decades. Steel, Gold, copper, plastics, silicon, etc etc… But we also currently have long running deflation due to growing competition from global producers after our same markets. When I first started in high tech industry, our revenues per unit shipped could cover the cost of many material and employees costs. Today, due to greater global competition our revenue per unit cannot cover labor or material costs. That is why we had manufacturing moved out and continue to move other labor costs to other lower cost regions.
Instead of having 100,000 HP or Intel employees locally, as we had in the past, that number has shrunk to a token 1,000 each. This has gone on for a long time now.
You will find that it was the typical home that went from 200K pre-bubble to 600+K in a few years.

1000 employees at Intel ? HP ? Ok that is not your point and I agree that the tech industry has been in a deflation especially when looking at the consumer -driven part of it. A brand new top-o-line PC was $1200 bucks back in 1990. A MAC was probably twice that. With all that, tech is not the only economy in the Bay Area. So I am not sure we could just say we have long running deflation. But this is an example of how you could shift that green line around, depends what the focus is. If we are saying that the Bay Area is in deflation because of tech then we need to drastically lower that green bar for the bay area.

woggs1 says

Based on this chart I’d be inclined to agree with you BUT .. the big green line used as a basis can be tilted one way or the other depending on what exactly is used as a criteria for the inflation numbers. Also the prices dont reflect the type of house, the type of buyer, or the condition of the house. Alot of these houses that are dropping in price are dilapidated poo-poo smelling houses

Great time to buy, you had better buy now or be priced out forever right marko? LMAO!!! You bulls are killing me!

What a bunch of Bull

bob2356 says

The density can go the other way pretty easily. When people run out of money they can and must double up. Move in with relatives, house share, whatever it takes to survive. With the true unemployment running close to 20% I don’t think it’s going to be a zero sum game under these circumstances for a long time.

I agree--unemployment will always have a pretty serious effect on home prices.

bob2356 says

What about the baby boomers? They are starting to retire and this will be a tidal wave in the next 10 years. They will be downsizing and moving into much higher density living situations (retirement villages, assisted living, nursing homes) in large numbers. The number of baby boomers retiring will far exceed tradition immigration increases in population for at least the next 20 years. Who is going to buy all those houses when they hit the market?

Another good point--changing demographics may have an effect on prices too. I'm not sold that it will be as drastic as some, but it's definitely a factor.

Demography is like the motion of an ocean liner and stuff like house prices, Moore's Law for deflation, etc. are the goings on aboard the ship.
The ship can be undergoing acceleration or decceleration and at those moments the passengers don't notice it, but later on they will when the time to get to the destination is shifted. The demography passengers can also party on while the ship heads straight into a catastrophic collision with an ice berg or another ship, or into getting mired in a shoal; they won't know its coming unless they're in the bridge overlooking the shoulder of the pilots.

Just the market correction one again.... move along not much to see here....

sybril, the deflation i speak of is on the top revenue line due to increase in competition and price cuts. Moores law never forsaw international competition with favorable lower cost could impact domestic producers near pricing monoply.

You have have declining revenues per unit shipped to end user, vs increases in cost to produce. To combat rising costs.. mfg, and now pretty much everthing else is moving out. ... This is deflation I speak off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Relation to manufacturing costs
As the cost of computer power to the consumer falls, the cost for producers to fulfill Moore's law follows an opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. Rising manufacturing costs are an important consideration for the sustaining of Moore's law.[33] This had led to the formulation of "Moore's second law", which is that the capital cost of a semiconductor fab also increases exponentially over time.

Materials required for advancing technology (e.g., photoresists and other polymers and industrial chemicals) are derived from natural resources such as petroleum and so are affected by the cost and supply of these resources. Nevertheless, photoresist costs are coming down through more efficient delivery, though shortage risks remain.[36]

The cost to tape-out a chip at 90 nm is at least US$1,000,000 and exceeds US$3,000,000 for 65 nm

Thomas,

"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year."

That is Moore's Law, as he defined it, in his own words, from his 1965 Solid State Technology paper that's on the Intel website, it is cost reduction and it is deflationary.

A whole lotta low hanging fruit went into that cost reduction, like the economies of scaling from a niche component industry to mainstream, cheap cost of capital during the Greenspan years in the USA and in Japan by the investment dynamics there in the late 1980's, more of it during the spillover of dot.com mania into hardware stocks in the late 1990's, planned obsolescene by team Wintel in the days of incessant upgrades, giveaways and local subsidies from local governments like in the SW of the USA, and later on regional gov'ts in places like Hsinchu and Communist China.

These "innovations" may also have been key in the Deflationary Moore's Law as are the technical innovations.

tatupu70 says

woggs1 says

Great time to buy, you had better buy now or be priced out forever right marko? LMAO!!! You bulls are killing me!

Woggs–You are completely ridiculous. Marko posted nothing even remotely implying that now was a good time to buy. All he said was that the graph that was posted was still open to interpretation and he questioned some of the conclusions from it. Are you that closed minded that you can’t even listen to other views?

It was clear what his point was. The data was clearly spelled out right in front of him but refused to see it. The beauty of the bull/bears debate is that time will show who is right. BTW I agree I am ridiculous. Not being ridiculous is just boring.

APOCALYPSEFUCK says

Bottom line: DEAD MEAT. Anyone buying a house in the next 20 years is committing suicide.

Oh yeah? Well I say FIFTY YEARS! Do I hear sixty, sixty, going once. Sold! to the new Bearmarket.

woggs1 says

It was clear what his point was. The data was clearly spelled out right in front of him but refused to see it

The point of the graph was clear, no doubt. He was questioning one of the implicit assumptions though. I like people who question the obvious...

schmitz_kris says

Well, duh.
You’re still doing better than the exurbs of Minneapolis - our sales are down much more significantly m-o-m. Then again, the moral fabric of California being what it is, your real estate officials are probably just lying.

Im a newbie and apparently I need (3) posts to create a new one.. but I saw your.... thinking about dumping our n. cali home (tops schools, good neighborhood, town, etc) and moving to MSP. Edina or somewhere in that neck of the woods.