It's always alarming when prices start to get misaligned with costs.
Here's an ad-hoc, alternative explanation to the recent posted graph by the most excellent Prof. Robert Shiller (Yale) that has at least one explanation for a flat-lined building cost index: shoddy construction:
She wasn't an investor. She didn't have a subprime mortgage. But when Jordan Fogal's house became uninhabitable, the 62-year-old grandmother says foreclosure became her best alternative.
Fogal's troubles began when she and her 72-year-old husband, Bob, moved to a new housing development near Houston in 2002. That first night in the new house, the dining room ceiling collapsed. Bob had pulled the plug in the Jacuzzi tub upstairs, and 100 gallons of water came crashing through the ceiling downstairs because the plumbing drains were not connected.
"That was a preview of coming attractions," Fogal says.
