LOL.... You guys have to be kidd'n right. You feed into the crap that hits the headlines. This is old news. Nothing new and all those 9to5ers have been on the side lines for a while now. The median price for a home is 286 or around there. (median for all you math wizards.) Once again, much like the stock market,which happens to be strong because of certain sectors, same with pockets of Real Estate. Texas, South Texas, homes are flying off the lots at 1.1 million to 5 million. Commerical Real Estate is hot. This trend is only in its begining phase and should last a few more years. So the doom and gloom are not for all. Sure, there is a serious problem for all you who "bought Investment Property" thinking ur gona flip the product...now ur stuck holding the bag along with you personal home mortgage. Much Like trading, Real Estate has been cluttered with the sheep who have been lead to the slaughter house. For us that are smart, we are waiting to take the Inventory for pennies on the dollar. It is just like a game of chess, nothing more nothing less.
The ones building the houses are illegals. Ghost workers. They just melt into the woodwork. Go back to Mexico, find other jobs etc. John
It has. My wife works in mortgage banking for one of the largest home builders. They are laying off ppl left and right. About 40% of their mortgage division has either been laid off or fired. Luckily for us, she has not yet. She talks to former co-workers at other large homebuilders and they are cutting left and right too.
Yep. I have many, many friends in the mortgage business. The last 5 years have been feast. It is now famine. And I am not overstating the famine part. Ask a real estate agent how bad things are, if there's one that you know whom you can trust. I can buy all the lots I want right now for much less than they were just two years ago, when you couldn't even find lots that were available - some developed, some not - from Pulte, Toll Brothers, Centex (these are the lots they actually closed on - there are hundreds of thousands they just forfeited their deposits on and walked away from). Oh, another thing - I actually am seeing builders sell model homes before the sub is 1/4 of the way built out. There's no worse sign than that in the building business.
I guess good to know for my parents when they sold and upgraded homes a couple of years ago; things were pretty hot in my town there and a bit around the area...now it's definitely cooled off and a few developments aren't finished yet...nor will they probably be anytime soon (more like build one, sell it, then build the next as most of the $$$$ ran out)
Could you expand on this number please? I believe the correct number is 1 trillion of B paper with 80% resetting. If I am mistaken please excuse me. I can't remember the exact figure for A paper but I believe it is about 60 trillion or around 1.5%. Default paper even in some parts of CA where prices have fallen sharply hasn't reached 2001 levels (yet)
As of Q4 write-downs of 2 billion were collectively logged for forfeited deposits on plotted lots and undeveloped land, whereby options to purchase were foregone by publicly traded home builders. The raw acreage obviously had a lower 'per lot' cost than plotted or developed lots would have had. In fact, as of October of '06 - OCTOBER - (the wrose hadn't even been announced yet - just one builder - DR Horton, wrote of 22,000 lots: "Horton is now scrambling. The company has reduced the number of lots on which it can build from 396,000 to 340,000. It recently walked away from options it had on 22,000 lots..." http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_44/b4007077.htm Of course, the shit hadn't even hit the fan as of October. That's 22,000 lots foregone by just one builder, as of October '06.