Sixty percent of residential sales are foreclosures, totaling in 110,000 homes in Michigan forced to foreclose, said Bill MacLeod of Coldwell Banker Hubbell Briarwood Realty.

The significant decline in the housing market and the downfall of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac troubles the panelists that spoke at the second annual Central Michigan University Real Estate Conference Friday.

“This is by far the worst I’ve ever seen this industry,” said William Pulte of Pulte Homes. “We have to restore confidence in the consumer.”

A group of 18 distinguished real estate professionals spoke to an audience of about 60 real estate employees and CMU students.

Samantha Schneider is majoring in Real Estate Development and Finance at CMU and is worried about the current state of the housing market. The panelists gave her some hope that the market will improve in the future.

“The market is the worst it’s been in a long time, but it will rebound,” the Pewamo sophomore said.

One of the catalysts to the housing market downfall was people buying homes they could not afford, Pulte said.

Pulte also said lenders were allowing young people to buy big houses they did not have the money for.

“The lesson to be learned is, don’t buy anything you can’t afford. There’s no other way to lose it faster than that,” he said.

Robert Vrchota of Fitch Ratings said they didn’t have the historic data to predict this kind of disaster.

“The risk was higher than we anticipated. These are difficult things to predict,” he said. “You do your best on the information you have.”

Vrchota added a side note to all of the worried real estate students in the audience, saying this is a very good time to be in school because students will get to learn about everything that went wrong.

“You’re going to see what not to do,” he said.

With the housing prices so low, currently there is a buyer demand, Pulte said. He believes time will bring improvements to the housing market once buyers feel more confident in purchasing, and banks are more comfortable with lending.

“It’ll come back, it always does,” Pulte said. “A lot of buyers are being pent up.”

Karl Chew, a developer from Brookstone Capital, believes apartment living is a good place for recent college graduates to start. More apartments are acting and feeling like homes, he said.

Student Jazell Gorman attended the conference to see what solutions the professionals had for the unsteady housing market.

“It’s good to learn what people are doing about the housing crisis,” the Frankenmuth senior said.

news@cm-life.com

E-mail the author: Kara Scheerhorn