“Pent-up demand.” That is the rallying cry of the housing bulls, as they forecast the great recovery of 2012. So many potential buyers are doubled up with family, stuck in undesirable rentals or just plain afraid to put their current home on the market, but that’s about to change, say these optimistic prognosticators.
“Inventories [of unsold homes] have been coming down, showing very healthy declines,” Ivy Zelman, CEO of Zelman and Associates told the Wall Street Journal. And Zelman is new to the bull ring, as she is famous for predicting the housing bubble in the first place.
Pent-up demand exists, no question, but it has nowhere to go right now for the vast majority of organic home buyers. When I say organic, I’m excluding investors from the mix, because that demand is high and building up cash like mad. I mean regular lower to upper middle-class Americans still struggling in today’s rough economy.