Yes, I can see housing values dropping more rapidly in the city and nearby suburbs here (East Coast), but I do think that this was just a price adjustment as the housing was pretty expensive. I do believe these areas are going to increase again as more and more people move to lessen commute times.

I have seen homes listed on Zillow that I believe would sell for more than the ‘Zestimate’ because of improvements like large Trex decks, new a/c, new water heaters, new hardwood, new siding, etc., and an estimate is not the same as what a potential buyer would pay.

I hear you about the high home prices… we sold our previous house (built in 1963 — that we had completely renovated from top to bottom) and only 3 mos. later the nearby houses (comps, but none were updated) were selling for $35,000 more than ours had sold; A year later the same houses were selling for about $65,000 more. We were waiting on new construction which never happened. We purchased a home a year later at the high, fearing it was ‘now or never’ (be priced out of the market altogether).

Regarding demographics: My sister-in-law and her family just moved to VA from Yuma, AZ (military, they move every 4 years). I haven’t heard if she is finding a big difference in cost-of-living, but definitely a different culture.

In this area, they lowered prices wholesale–everybody’s value dropped by about 14%. That might be explained if they were using the tax-assessed value, but at least on my house Zillow doesn’t say that. At least, not anywhere I can see…is this piece of intelligence hidden away somewhere, or does is it posted in an obvious place when you look at the house’s supposed value?

In my case, the drop in value could be real. The rental where Biker Boob lived sold for about $30,000 less than the absentee landlord paid for it. Unfortunately, despite months of renovation work that could only have been an exercise in diminishing returns, it appears to have been rented out again. At least these occupants are quiet, so far haven’t set up a car repair shop in the garage, and don’t bring car trunkloads of garbage across the street to fill up our dumpster. But rentals do push down property values.

According to Zillow, a house around the corner that never sported a for-sale sign sold last April about $100,000 under market. And of course Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum was practically given away on the courthouse steps.

On the other hand, Zillow is showing a house as having recently sold for a little over $118/square foot, which would make my house worth $17,000 more than the “Zestimate” — though still way less than I paid for it before the bubble. Several houses in the neighborhood are on the market for what any normal person would think of as market value. But…they’re not selling.

The lightrail construction is not helping things. Even though the city has decided not to run the damn train up to our part of town, they didn’t do that until after they tore out an entire row of homes along 19th Avenue, demolishing property values for a block or two inward. Right now they’re ripping up the road to move the utilities — just in case they change their minds, and probably to spend use-it-or-lose-it funds. They claim they’re going to landscape the scars they left behind and build a wall along 19th, but they refused to block off the streets the burglars in the slum apartments across the road commonly use to raid our neighborhood.

Too, because of the drop in values around here, demographics are changing rapidly. All you have to do is read the comments on local news stories, especially those having to do with immigration, to know that the old nastry prejudices and bigotry that used to force property values down the instant a dusky face showed up in a neighborhood still exist. Although the most vocal hatred is directed toward Latinos just now, if you hate Mexicans you probably hate Blacks even more.

That downward force is compounded by class issues: it’s very obvious that the folks you see walking up and down 19th Avenue and inside the grungy Albertson’s are uneducated, ill fed, ill cared for, and employed — to the extent that they’re employed at all — in minimum-wage work. Our crime rates are rising because poverty in the surrounding neighborhoods is rising.

Okay, thanks; still does seem strange since the house next to us sold in 2008 for 370,000 and it reads the house is ‘worth’ $79,000.

I just looked at it again now and it says: Zestimate: N/A. The values that are showing up say that they are the tax-assessed values (?).

Great post, thanks.

My guys actually have been investing internationally for quite some time…much longer than 15 months.

The real issue with the stock market, IMHO, is that for the average Jane and Joe, it’s a crap shoot. The conventional wisdom that you should be in it for the long haul appears to me to be somewhat questionable. Yes, historically a long hold has panned out for many people. But in the atmosphere we’ve seen over the past decade or so, I wonder. Clearly, few of us are growing our retirement savings in instruments like 401(k)s and Roths. What appears to be growth, at least extrapolating from my case, is actually the accumulation of contributions over the years. And in fact, often those contributions have shrunken rather than grown.

But where else can you invest? Putting your money in CDs would be insanely self-destructive, unless you’re worth several million dollars. A 1% return on a million bucks would supplement your $15,000 worth of Social Security benefits by a grandiose $10,000 a year. Two million at that rate would allow you to spend your golden years in the lower middle class. Maybe three million invested in something safe like CDs would give you enough to live in middle-class comfort, assuming you don’t live in one of the big coastal cities–a $45,000 gross income? Anything less than that, and you’d be eating into principal, which brings you right back to the craps table: how long will you bet you’ll live?

Zillow does not seem accurate; Our house was purchased in 2004 for 315,000. It appraised at the time of purchase for 325,000.

In 2007, based on comps, our house was worth 415,000.

We refinanced in Jan., 2009, and it appraised at 365,000. I had known nothing about Zillow then (if it even existed).

So I found out about Zillow this past May. It reads $89,000. There is no possible way that the house is worth $89,000! This has to be a value used for tax assessment or something!

You might want to ask him why he didn’t suggest this 15 months ago when the emerging markets were way down and there was real money to be made.

Personally, I think there IS merit in investing overseas, and have been doing so for a long time, but these “gurus” often seem to jump on the bandwagon way too late.