Conventional wisdom concludes that real estate market is very cyclical , the typical cycle for a real estate market is about 7 years. If we start to count the year of 2012 as the year price started to increase, 2019 will be the year 7. According to Wall street Journal, real estate price in the west started to decline in June.
As I spoke to realtors, they have indicated that price reduction seems to be widespread cross the San Francisco bay area. Usually, the sales would take place when the prices were reduced.
Signs are pointing the downward trend in the coming months.
However, would a crash come?
Before the last real estate market crash of 2017, a lot of the borrowers bought properties with very low-down payments or even with 100% financing. Moreover, borrowers were even given options to make payment only on 1% interest rate( actual rate was much higher). Therefore, when the downturn came, many homeowners and investors simply abandoned their properties.
This time around, however, nearly all of the buyers put down some downpayments and large portion of them put up 20 – 50% down. Even in the year 2017, there were 21% of all buyers paid cash for properties (down from highest of 36% in the year 2009 December 2017 REALTORS® Confidence Index Survey.[2]) the percentage of property owners who own good amount of equity is high, and are less likely to just walk away when imminent slow down comes, and likely create a crash.