This kind of reminds me of a quote from Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin's "Empire of Debt": Yahoo!: What you yell after selling your tech stocks to some poor sucker for more than you paid for them. ...only replace "tech stocks" with "house".
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2006-02-28-real-estate-usat_x.htm Real estate continues to cool quote No one needs to tell that to Fran Floyd. She took her Houston townhome off the market Saturday after nearly six months â even though she was willing to sell it for $3,400 less than she paid in 2002. "It's just sad," said Floyd, 81. "I've got to sell. I don't know what I'm going to do. What I'm thinking about and praying about is renting it for a year, hoping the real estate market gets better." quote
...Sacramento area is definitely in correction..... LA will be next (already has started there in the luxury market).
Yup. The market is cooling but my business is great. I'm a Hard Money Lender and I do a lot of Foreclosure Bailouts and BK buyouts. If the market tanks I still make a good living. Being a private money lender helps to finance my trading.
The next "bubble" might be in divorce stats...as we see stories like this more and more on real estate blogs and in the news. It is usually one spouse or the other that drives these âinvestmentsâ. Gee whiz, what happened to all that "demand" we had???..OWP How to Lose One Hundred Thousand Dollars (or 200k...OWP) "Looking through the NoVA inventory yesterday, I came across two nearly identical homes in Lovettsville (a very rural town about 70 mi from DC), both listed at $555,000. They were smallish, vinyl-sided tract homes on 1/4 acre lots." "On further investigation, I found that both are owned by the same couple, a Cathy and Andrew Boyd. County tax records indicate that one was purchased nine months ago for $529K and the other was purchased six months ago for $574K. So the current combined asking price is nearly equal to the combined purchase price: about $1.1 million." "Both listings say that the homes have never been lived in. I would guess that Cathy and Andrew paid $10K in closing costs for each home. When they finally sell, Realtor fees @ 6% come to $67K, so weâre up to $87K in buying and selling costs. Now letâs look at the carrying costs. The two loans (assuming interest-only @ 5%) would be approx. $2200 and $2400/mo, respectively. Add another $500 per unit for taxes, interest, maintenance, etc, and the total carrying cost for both units since time of purchase comes to $42,000." "So if Cathy and Andrew sold both units today at the current listing price, theyâd be out roughly $128K. However, these homes have been on the market for a long time and they were previously priced at $585K and $575K, according to a Google search, so theyâve knocked $50K off the combined price with apparently no takers. Itâs reasonable to assume that some further price cuts may be in the making, and at least a few more months of carrying costs as well. If this couple doesnât go into foreclosure, itâs not hard to see how they could be $200K in the hole by the time they unload these albatrosses." "Itâs a painful lesson to learn about the power of leverage, and one they donât seem to teach in all of the Get Rich in Real Estate pulp fiction currently on the bookshelves." http://www.realtor.com/Prop/1052217368
Florida in a bloodbath... http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060305/BUSINESS/603050435 âAt a Thursday meeting of the Sarasota Association of Realtors, veteran broker Candy Swick held her own informal poll, asking the roughly 300 in attendance to raise their hands if they thought prices were still going up. No hands.â âThen, raise your hands if you think prices are remaining the same. No hands. âThen I asked them if they believed prices were adjusting downward. It would be accurate to say 99 percent of the hands went up,â Swick said. Welcome to the new reality of residential real estate in Southwest Florida, where a dearth of homes for sale has turned to glut.â âOn the surface, the latest report from the Florida Association of Realtors would have you believe that prices in the Sarasota-Bradenton market appear to be hanging in there at a median of $353,500, a stellar 23 percent above a year ago. But there is a lag time built into that system, as Swick points out. âI would say the price lag is at least a quarter to six months behind,â she said.â âIn the Sarasota-Bradenton market, agents closed just 511 transactions in January, down 48 percent from 976 a year earlier, the FAR reported this week. âForty-eight percent, that is shocking,â said Jack McCabe. Almost half the market is gone. And the reason is the speculative investors have quit acquiring properties and have moved to disposition mode.ââ Here are some more stats on Florida: http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060301/BUSINESS/603010396/-1/archives âBrevard was one of five Florida metropolitan areas where median prices fell by at least $10,000 from December to January. The others were: # Fort Myers/Cape Coral: $322,300 in December; $287,200 in January; down 10.9 percent. # Fort Walton Beach: $242,100 in December; $225,500 in January; down 6.9 percent. # Pensacola: $170,700 in December; $158,100 in January; down 7.4 percent. # West Palm Beach/Boca Raton: $408,200 in December; $393,700 in January; down 3.6 percent. Of course, there never was a âdearthâ of homes anywhere, and I plan to remind the press of their folly everyday. Could it be insurance rates will bring it all to an end in South Florida? "Tim OâBrien, of Fort Lauderdale said the cost of insuring his dream home is giving him nightmares." "OâBrien, 42, had paid about $2,800 for hurricane insurance on the home that he spent nearly two years remodeling." "When he got his renewal this year from Citizens, his premium nearly doubled. He now pays $5,400. And it could rise even more, if Citizens gets to raise premiums in his neighborhood by 67.2 percent." "That means he could pay another $3,628 for windstorm insurance, bringing his total to more than $9,000 just for hurricane coverage â which doesnât include what heâll pay for flood, fire and theft protection." http://www.sun-sentinel.com/busines...04mar04,0,3587559.story?track=mostemailedlink
I see the -condoflip- site is up and running ... I wonder now that the RE market is cooling down in a big way in many areas how popular the site will be