When $7.5 million Just Isn’t a Good Enough Offer

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The price of land, and houses, is slipping, but they are still building houses like crazy out in Ontario, as the Times’ Alana Semuels reports today.

I know that the Inland Empire economy is booming; I just get the impression the growth industry out there is growth itself. What happens to a region built on building if the building stops?

Worth noting from her report:
--City planners forsee 30,000 new houses, and 120,000 new residents, in Ontario over the next twenty years.
--’In March, sales of existing homes in the city were down 59% from the same month last year... , The median sale price fell to $408,000 from $425,000.’
--’The value of undeveloped land, much of it still home to cows, has fallen by as much as $100,000 an acre in this part of San Bernardino County in the last six months...’

She ends with an anecdote about a farmer who had a deal to sell 20 acres of farmland at $515,000 an acre in 2005 -- that’s a bit more than $10 million. But the deal fell through, and the farmer is balking at a reduced offer of $375,000 per acre, or $7.5 million. ‘He figures it will be more than seven years before prices will climb to where he wants them,’ Semuels reports.

That is a confident farmer, I guess. Your thoughts?