Housing prices continue to fall

You’d think that the sky was falling. Here’s the bad news of the day on housing:

Meanwhile, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller national home price index released Tuesday tumbled a record 16.6 percent during the quarter from the same period a year ago. Prices are at levels not seen since the first quarter of 2004.

This doesn’t make me happy, but I still don’t understand why people overreact so much about things like this. People have become so spoiled due to years of steady appreciation that this blip has everyone running for the hills. We need to all get back into focus. If inflation is 4% annually, any appreciation of home values exceeding that amount should be looked at as a bonus. After years of 8% annual appreciation we are finally resetting back to a level of sanity. We need to get used to it. This is probably going to be the way of things for the foreseeable future.

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