So the market simply froze with asking prices holding relatively steady and sales dropping to near zero at some point. As of late there is a bit of a recovery depending on the area you look at.
So the market simply froze with asking prices holding relatively steady and sales dropping to near zero at some point. As of late there is a bit of a recovery depending on the area you look at.
Judging by what I see in my region (Pacific Northwest), what has been a positive factor is in-migration from other parts of the country. It leads to a question or two.
I am wondering if within Europe migration is potentially less of a contributor to economic recovery. For example, to find cheaper housing or to go where more jobs are available, there would be a reason to move to another location. But how much is such a move inhibited by language or cultural differences? Is that a significant issue?
Boundaries can be a hazard or protection or both. All kinds of unnecessary barriers can be erected between countries which can make things harder than need be. Scotland needs to be careful about getting what it wants.
Language is one part of the issue, another is that we have a completely different look at distance. I'm living in Romania right now, I don't even know a single other Dutch person that has moved to Romania.
In the US you'd be in the company of 1000's of people from 'out of state', but you're all Americans. In Europe the chances of getting a job differ greatly depending on where you're from and where you are applying for a job.
A Romanian in NL or France would have a harder time finding employment than a local (and would get paid substantially less when they do find a job), a guy from Michigan or even Canada in San Francisco would have roughly the same chance of finding employment as a local and would earn roughly the same amount of money (that's anecdote based, not 'data' based so correct me if you feel this is inaccurate).
Part of all this is culture, part of it is stigma, xenophobia, language, perceived quality over the last decade or so of hiring people from different countries and with different backgrounds.
The US is simply much more homogeneous than Europe will ever be, even though there are large differences between say California, Colorado, Florida, New York and Wisconsin the differences between the people from those places are not all that large mentality wise and so on. You participate in a single set of elections with parties that are present everywhere.
Compare that to Spain, France, NL, Sweden, Poland, Romania and Greece to select a few examples, and the people from those countries, each with a fairly unique cultural identity. No unified elections (some of the parties don't even have parallels across a border with a next door neighbour). There is no shared history, the history books are usually written from the perspective of the country where it will be used for teaching rather than from the perspective of Europe or something a bit more objective than the local country.
I don't think the 'Federated States of Europe' will ever feel as closely knit as the USA does.
Think of the differences between the groups of states on both sides of the American civil war, now multiply by 15 or so and then take all the possible interactions between those parties. That gives you an idea of what the shared history looks like for Europeans.
(In the US you don't end up with a debt to the bank if the value is less than the loan, but thats not the case in the rest of the world)
That's only in certain states. Most states are "recourse states" where the bank can sue you for the difference between whatever they sold the property for and the remainder of the loan.
Could you explain this a bit more. I think you are saying that in the US when you sell your house for less than the value of the loan, the banks takes the loss instead of you, which is not how I thought it worked. Does this have something to do with mortgage insurance?
Credit and taxes -- a short sale is, though damaging, less so to ones creditworthiness than a foreclosure, further, the entire amount of the unpaid principal (in either the short-sale or the foreclosure/surrender case, but foreclosure sales generally return less than a short sale with positive owner involvement would) is taxable as income.
This is generally the case with a voluntary sale at less than the loan value, but those are generally only possible with the consent of the lender (who has a claim on the property which must be extinguished for you to sell it.)
It is also sometimes the case in the event that the lender forecloses on the property for non-payment, and the foreclosure sale produces less than the amount owed on the loan -- but this differs between different states.
This varies between different US states (real property law is generally not federal law) and, IIRC, between first and second mortgages in some of those jurisdictions.