Monday, April 18, 2005

USNews.com: Condo prices are soaring quickly and construction is frenzied. But is it too much, too fast? (4/25/05)
If you saw CNN's Open House on Saturday, you heard the segment on the real estate bubble issue. Here's an article Fred Pilot forwarded that takes it up specifically regarding condos, which are the first to get hit when there is a real estate downturn:

Condomania is back.While the nation has been focusing on the white-hot single-family-home market, condos have been staging a pretty impressive run-up of their own. The median price of an existing condo in the United States jumped 17 percent in 2004 to $193,600, compared with a gain of 8.3 percent to $184,100 for a single-family dwelling. And that was the fourth year in a row that condos, co-ops, and townhouses have increased in value faster than their single-family counterparts. Some 15 years ago, homeowners feared that condo values wouldn't hold, but today, says Bruce Karatz, CEO of Los Angeles-based KB Home, "People are a lot more confident these days that the value of a condo is solid." Maybe too confident. With prices climbing so high, so fast, and with new construction moving at such a frenzied pace, some experts warn that the sizzling condo market--indeed, the entire real-estate market--could start to fizzle.

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