Homes

Housing Prices Drop By The Hour

CORAL GABLES (CBS4) ― These numbers are sobering: If you are a homeowner reading this right now, when you wake up in the morning, the value of your house will have dropped about 45 dollars. And that's if you sleep just 8 hours.

If that isn't disturbing enough, wait until you see how much home prices have dropped in the past 2 years.

"I knew it was softening," said investor Philip Logue. " I just didn't realize how quickly, how fast the market was dropping."

When Logue put his Coral Gables house on the market, he thought for sure it would sell. He started at $650,000 in 2006. A couple of years later, and a $175,000 price drop. He's now renting the house out.

"I was really surprised," said Logue. " Especially at the end when we really dropped our pants down and I felt we were giving it away, and we still couldn't sell it."

Numbers out from housingtracker.com show Logue isn't alone. The average home value in South Florida has dropped $100,000 in just two years. That's roughly $4,100 a month, $136 a day, or $5.70 every hour.

"The markets go up, they go down," said Ray Jourdain, a broker with Urbaniza Realty. "They have for more than 100 years; 5 years, 10 years it'll be different then it is now."

Jourdain isn't surprised by the numbers. He believes short sales and foreclosures that are keeping him busy are fueling the drop. He believes the bottom is still a ways off.

"Can you afford the payments? Can you have the insurance, the property taxes, the monthly payments with a normal 20% down sale? Does it work for the average person? And when that happens, when we hit that, that's when we hit the bottom," he said.

Homeowners like Logue hope it comes sooner than later.

"I think it'll come back," said Logue. "You just have to have the staying power to weather the storm."

When a homeowner is losing $5.70 an hour right now, renters actually are the ones who are making money. The person who this really effects, is anyone who bought a home in the last 3 years. They moved into a house that has dropped in value now by six figures.

(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

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