Bloomberg columnist's message to homedebtors looking to sell: Enough with the balloons, open houses and incentives - just cut the damn price

The whole world is going HousingPANIC now, wouldn't you say?

What took so long?

HP adds one piece of advice to this: Cut the price BIG TIME. Shock yourself at how far and how fast your home's value plummeted. If you want out from under your debt-trap, you're gonna have to shock your neighbors with the new comp on the street.

Or you could hang on, watch your home rot on the MLS for another few months or years, and watch it sell for even less down the road than you could have gotten for it today.

Housing party over. Get out. Now.

Housing Market's Stench Means Cut Price to Sell

ov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Raffles, festive balloons, open houses, car giveaways. Will any of these incentives sell houses? Not at the moment.

You don't have to be particularly creative in a market glutted with homes for sale. The painful reality is that homes are commodities. There are more than 4 million of them sitting out there unsold and more coming on the market every day due to foreclosures. If you really need to sell a house, price is the one lever that will move a property.

Almost everywhere your competition is abundant while buyers are waiting for prices to fall even more. U.S. existing-home prices are expected to drop almost 2 percent this year nationally, according to the National Association of Realtors, and are likely to fall further in areas oversaturated with homes for sale.

``Buyers just want price,'' says Mike Morgan, a Stuart, Florida-based lawyer, real-estate broker and consultant who researches property markets for hedge funds and financial institutions. ``Buyers have become educated and they can easily cut through the fluffy incentives.''