Michael Carliner Quotes (9 Quotes)

When prices go up, buyers say, 'Look how much money I would have saved if I bought last year, and if I don't buy now, I won't be able a new home next year,'

I think we're about to face a glut. There's been a tremendous surge of condo construction and also condo conversions over the past couple of years.

With clean water, if you submerge a house for a week, it's not going to be livable anymore. It would be very difficult to get those contaminants out of the houses.

In most hurricanes, you're talking about wind damage, lost roofs -- that kind of thing. Flooding is much more insidious. Structures are still standing, but there are devastating effects. With the dirty water, it may never be possible to repair it. You'll have to rebuild, or at least gut it.

Rebuilding occurred over years, just in the normal course of events -- I don't think we'll have a building surge here.

Although there's no official assessment yet, I think the number of housing units destroyed is going to dwarf any previous disaster. Hurricane Andrew was estimated at 28,000 homes destroyed. The number of homes that are flooded now, that are probably beyond repair, is probably much larger. There are 200,000 homes in New Orleans alone.

It's not unusual when you first start to see the beginnings of a rate increase, that the immediate effect is an acceleration of sales as people try to lock in the lower rates,

Only after that will contractors turn to rebuilding, and that takes a long time, ... A lot of people who get insurance money for rebuilding don't do so -- they just move someplace else.

I don't want to overstate it but this is such a huge event it's bound to have a big effect on many construction materials and other construction costs. This is 10 times worse than Hurricane Andrew, when 28,000 homes were destroyed.