Quote from Pa(b)st Prime:
What I find ironic is that beleaguered real estate-that overlevareged sub-prime asset blamed for stock market crashes, bank failures and Obama-those sad home prices are almost buoyant compared to equities. In even the weakest markets-So Fla, Vegas, parts of California-home prices are all the way back to..... 2003 prices. Forget 1999. Hell some markets are hardly down at all.
This is mostly an artifact of the different capital structures for home ownership vs. company equity share ownership. Moreover, if you look at the capital structure of home ownership, the crash is much worse than it seems from the price declines.
In the case of stock market shares, the shareholders are last in line for the economic value generated by the company. Bondholders, workers, suppliers, governments, etc. all get paid first. If anything at all is left over, the shareholders get it. Thus, in a downturn, small % losses in revenues or asset values (relative to costs or liabilities) translate to large % losses in profit and large % losses in equity prices. The more leveraged the entity (C being a very good example), the worse it is for shareholders when the fundamentals deteriorate.
In the case of homeowners, the owner gets everything minus the mortgage and the taxes. For people that own their home outright, this "crash" has not been that bad and they've retained much of their real estate wealth gains of the past couple of decades. That said, on a home equity basis, this has been a massive crash. At the time real estate peaked, the average U.S. home owner, only had 53% home equity. That means that each 1% decline in home price created a 2% decline in home equity levels. On a home equity basis (i.e., on the basis of the amount of wealth people have in their homes), the crash has been twice as bad as the price declines indicate. And that's just the average. For people that bought or refinanced near the peak with a 20% down payment, a 15% decline in home prices represents a 75% loss of their home equity (and a 20% drop in home prices represents a total loss of all home equity). The 25% of mortgages that are underwater represent people that have had a greater than 100% loss of the "share price" of the home. At least the price of C can't go negative!
To put it another way, anyone who has a mortgage equivalent to the 2003 price of their home (or higher) has been wiped out.