Home prices will continue to decline for several years, Mort Zuckerman, the chairman and CEO of Boston Properties, told CNBC Monday.
“I’m pessimistic about residential real estate,” said Zuckerman, whose firm specializes in high-end commercial real estate and last week bought the iconic John Hancock Towerin Boston’s Back Bay for $930 million.
Zuckerman, who is also the chairman and editor in chief of the weekly news magazine U.S. News & World Reports and publisher of the New York Daily News, blamed the continuing price decline on the so-called shadow inventory of foreclosed homes that's yet to come on the market.
“That’s what’s going to put downward pressure on residential prices,” Zuckerman added, “And in my judgment, that’s going to continue for several years.”
“We’ve seen home prices go down now for four months in a row, according to the Case-Shiller Index, by 1.3 percent in the last month," Zuckerman went on to say. "So it’s an accelerating downtrend in those prices. This is on top of three to four years of declines.”