How Long Does it Take For Real Estate to Come Back From A Crash?

Business Week reports:

There's a lot to learn from history. While national downturns in home prices are rare, we have plenty of experience with busts in local markets. Remember, many regions that have been strong in recent years, such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, were mired in slumps in the early or mid-1990s. People who bailed out of them at the bottom are still kicking themselves or blaming their ill-informed spouses.

How common is this boom-bust-boom pattern? Over the past three decades about 40% of housing busts in big metro areas have eventually been followed by strong recoveries. That's according to a BusinessWeek analysis of inflation-adjusted housing prices. In an additional 15% of markets, prices adjusted for inflation barely got back to their previous peaks after 15 years. In the remaining 45% or so of markets, prices adjusted for inflation were still down a decade and a half after their pre-bust peaks.

The disparity between winners and losers was striking: Among the winning markets, the average inflation-adjusted gain after 15 years was 43%, while among the losers the average inflation-adjusted loss was 19%.

How do you know if your own local market is the kind that will snap back or the kind that will languish indefinitely? One key factor is the ease or difficulty of building new homes. Places where new home construction is a long and expensive process, such as Boston and San Francisco, tend to experience big price movements, both up and down. "Restricted supply leads to more volatility in prices," says Edward L. Glaeser, a Harvard University economist who has studied big-city housing markets.

Those areas that don't believe in free markets sure don't like middle class people.