Home Page Radio - HOME Bubble

WPKN Community Radio

Thursday, May 27, 2021, 12 noon WPKN 89.5 FM www.wpkn.org Host: Duo Dickinson If you are older than 40, you remember the first seven years of this century. For many reasons, not the least of which was greed, the peak buying years of the Baby Boom Generation perverted the basic human need to have a home we love into a fevered housing boom, then a worldwide economic crash in 2008. In the previous 30 years there had been about three other housing bubbles, and their inevitable bursting to housing busts. But the 2008 housing bust lasted a decade in Connecticut. Low or no growth in prices, slow construction activity, and a depressed reality that the extreme cost of Connecticut homes had topped out, perhaps forever, made for chastened expectations. Then another bust, Covid-19, ended any number of home renovations, sales, building. It was only natural that mandatory sequestration stopped many things people do every day, including thinking about our homes – new or renewed. But a funny thing happened, we were all force fed our homes as our one place of working, learning, eating, working out, even connecting (now through our computers). Collectively many of us found that we loved our homes, but they can be improved upon. So as soon as the bonds of lock-down were loosened, a rush to revise where we live began. The mortgage rates are still low, the houses that are up for sale (AKA “inventory”) is low – the lowest since 1963 according to the website “Meanwhile in Markets”), personal savings are up after a year of no where to spend income, and, “Voila!” a housing bubble. This means prices of everything related to homes, construction, home prices, even fixtures are exploding, and often, impossible to obtain right now. Three Real Estate and Architecture Mavens join HOME PAGE to give us all a snap shot of where we are in a crazy moment of our hone-based lives.Leigh Whiteman Is a real estate broker and leader of The Whiteman Team at William Raveis Real Estate. She has been selling real estate up and down the Connecticut Shoreline since 1988 and has helped her clients Todd Gould has lived on the Connecticut shore his entire life. He has been a broker/manager/owner for 27 years, from a family that has been involved in Real Estate for generations, and lives the market. Martin Pedersen helped create The Common Edge Collaborative , and was Executive Editor at Metropolitan Home for 20 years, seeing many (many) Booms and Busts.