WP: Growth Slows in Housing Market

Professor John Vogel via The Washington Post about the housing market in the US cooling off after a six-year boom.

The housing market also had been "artificially propped up" by speculators and "mortgage gimmicks," said John H. Vogel Jr., professor of business administration at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. "You just see all these for-sale signs out there," he said. "If you're a buyer . . . it makes you question, 'Do I really have to stretch that far to buy a house?' "Vogel thinks this is just the beginning. Housing prices have become so out of line with people's ability to buy, he said, that barring a wage spurt, it won't be possible to escape significant price declines. "It won't be just prices flattening," he said. "I think it's going to be a pretty hard landing."

Source: The Washington Post by Tomoeh Murakami Tse, September 6, 2006