The Housing Bubble Is Back

Last week I ran into a friend whom I’d been worrying about. He’s a real estate appraiser and his work had been drying up as interest rates rose and homeowners stopped refinancing their mortgages.

But now he’s back to being happily swamped because instead of refinancing, everyone is buying — often, he says, for above the asking price.

A couple of days later my wife and I were at a slide show put on by friends just back from New Zealand. They’d heard that a neighbor was thinking about selling his house and on an impulse made him an offer. He accepted, and our friends became instant homeowners.

The very next day my wife’s father called to say that the company running a gas station next to his house wants to expand in his direction. They made him an unsolicited – and very generous — offer, which he accepted.

Then, I did an interview with Gordon T. Long’s Macro Analytics website in which Gordon told the following story:

My brother just sold one of his properties in Toronto [Ontario]. He had bidding war with 11 bidders so he demanded cash. Several of the Chinese buyers were on the phone overnight raising the money, which they got. My brother’s still partying after that sale.

It definitely feels like the housing bubble is back. Here’s part of a (factual rather than anecdotal) overview of the subject from Charles Hugh Smith: