Are We On The Cusp?

Mary Umberger, a reporter who works for the Chicago Tribune, has a roundup feature story on today's front page about what's going on at ground level as the media continues to stir up headline storms that predict the bubble will burst. Here's an excerpt:

Joe Becker is worried.

No, he's more than worried. He says he's "confused, scared to death, paralyzed."

The man is plagued by real estate doubt.

Becker, a 37-year-old college admissions officer, has been pounding the pavement in search of a Lakeview condo and doesn't like what he's finding--the cramped spaces and high prices that often stymie first-time home buyers.

But looming over every unit he visits, he said, is the specter of a housing bubble.

"What I hear is that it might burst a year from now, and prices are going to be cheaper," said Becker, who doesn't want to keep renting but fears he will end up losing money by buying at the top of the market. "I can't sleep at night, thinking about it."

Housing-market experts are divided--sometimes heatedly--over whether being sleepless in Lakeview is a justifiable condition.

But certainly there are many who share Becker's anxieties that we may be on the cusp of some kind of significant change in the market.

Read the entire Chicago Tribune story at this link.
— The Boy in the Big Housing Bubble