6 months ago
SACRAMENTO, CA - Speculation is running rampant on whether the recession finally hit bottom last month. If northern California's economic woes have indeed hit bottom, what do we do now?
Jeff Strader's company A Better Tree Service saw business fall off by 50 percent -- but he believes he's on the rebound and said so is the economy.
"I don't think we're going to get any lower. I think people are understanding you gotta go to work. We gotta eat and we have to live," said Strader.
Dr. Jeff Michaels produces the Business Forecast for the Eberhardt School of Business at UOP. While being near or at the bottom is a positive, he forecasts happy days are very far from being here again.
"People still need to be careful, particularly when it comes to the job market. We haven't really seen good news yet in the employment and we do anticipate some further layoffs. You know, another 2 or 3 years of double-digit unemployment, I think, is in our future," predicted Michaels.
Declining home values might also be in our future, especially homes priced at $300,000 and up.
Jim Waters, a regional director for Lyon Real Estate, said there are more than 20,000 foreclosed homes waiting to be released by lenders just in the Sacramento region.
"We're going to see a good surge, probably in the middle to latter part of September or the end of the 3rd quarter, and that surge will run all the way through the end of the year and all of next year, from what they're telling us," said Waters, who talks regularly with banking executives.
When asked if the economy will see as many foreclosures in the coming year as the past two years, Waters replied, "More, more."
The good news for those people who do have jobs is that more of them will be able to afford a home -- and even though there will be more jobs lost, the numbers suggest the massive layoffs of late 2008 and early 2009 are over.
But experts warn that for most, a sobering fact still needs to be embraced -- the fact that there will likely be no bounce off the bottom of the nation's economic plunge, but more of an on-hands-and-knees crawl back up to normalcy.
by Dana Howard, dhoward@news10.net
News10/KXTV
