Barron’s magazine’s latest cover story is called “The Big Glut: Trouble in Paradise,” and focuses on the trouble home sellers are having to find buyers keen enough to snap up their properties at prices that many experts say are still way over-inflated.
“If you want to sell, you’ve got to go back to ’04 prices,” the article quotes Chip Harris of Coldwell Banker Previews International, which is handling a property in Naples, Fla. that just dropped its asking price by $1 million.
“Behind all this is a fervor eerily reminiscent of the late 1990s on Wall Street,” reads the story. “Some 65 percent of second-home owners surveyed by the National Association of Realtors said they considered their second homes better investments than stocks, and 29 percent said they planned to buy additional properties within two years. An eye-popping 64 percent of investors with four or more properties planned to buy another property within two years.”
Oddly enough, however, the article doesn’t feature San Diego as one of the overvalued markets to watch. That’s in marked contrast to a number of other analyses which have placed San Diego as the most overvalued city in the nation.
Indeed, the only California city named as a market that’s “Too hot to handle” according to Barron’s is Napa, where homes are 63 percent overvalued, the article states.