PunkAssBlog.com

Great news for homeowners! While the current housing market is not so hot, if you’re lucky enough to own a house whose value falls in a narrow range of the “that’s fucking expensive” spectrum, then sell, sell! SELL!

“The homes that are having a hard time selling are the average-priced homes,” said Vanessa Justice, a real estate agent with Pacific Union GMAC in the Bay Area, where the median house price is about $750,000. For upper-end homes, she said, “it’s actually pretty crazy right now.”

Before we start getting all snarky about how the wealthiest of the wealthy are getting wealthier while the rest of us are getting shafted, let’s be clear that people aren’t going crazy with greed, here. Mansions and sprawling vacation home sales are still sluggish. Sales are especially brisk only in the area of absurdly luxurious homes that the owners plan to spend most of their time living in. True, times are hard for all of us.

Even as foreclosures keep rising and overall sales continue to plummet, more expensive homes have staged a bit of a comeback in recent months. They’re spending less time languishing on the market than others, and their prices appear to be holding up better…In fact, the very top of the housing market — the sprawling vacation homes and 10,000-square-foot mansions — seems to be doing considerably worse than merely expensive homes. Ines Hegedus-Garcia, an agent in Miami, recently looked at sales volumes there and found the market for homes that cost $1.2 million to $2.5 million to be holding up decently. The situation was much worse for those priced above $2.5 million.

It seems like this is a perfect example of the Littlest President’s not-so-secret economic policy of enriching the rich while screwing the rest of us:

As Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, summed up the market: “The low end is getting creamed. The middle is struggling. The high end is running on its own dynamic.”

…but like all seemingly perfect plans, there was an Achilles heel. The law of unintended consequences makes its mandatory appearance: the rich here are getting richer, but their dollars are worth less and foreign rich people are taking their condos.

The upper end of the market has also been helped by an influx of well-off foreign investors whose buying power has grown with the recent decline of the dollar. Hard as this may be for an American to imagine, New York, San Francisco or Miami can now seem like a bargain, compared with London, Moscow or Sydney. Jason Haber, an agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman in Manhattan, said he had recently taught himself how to convert square feet into square meters — you divide by 10.8 — because of all of the international buyers traipsing through New York apartments.