Irvine Housing Blog

Appreciation is Dead

Irvine’s Quail Hill

Home Sales Data thru 4-6-2007

Knife Catcher Award

A brief introduction

Hello fellow irvinehousing blog readers. First I'd like to thank zovall and irvinerenter for inviting me to join them and irvinesinglemom as a contributor to the blog. Have no fear readers the failed flips will not go away and if anything we may have more. I decided to join them because I was not adding new posts to my blog ocecon101 which led to little traffic and even less motivation on my part to add new topics. Zovall thought that having me post here would get better traffic without the pressure on me to keep adding new posts. The idea is to add more content without taking anything away from the original purpose of the blog. Most come here searching for more information on the Irvine housing market and my goal is to add interesting and relevant content for those in search of more information.

For my first post I will give you a little background on myself, why I am a housing bear and what subjects I will be writing about. As some of the readers of the forums here know that I was in the mortgage business and for the majority of my time in the business it was for a lender for one of the larger homebuilders. I decided to leave the business for various reasons but it was on my own terms. I really did enjoy working there and gained a tremendous amount of knowledge from it. I am very thankful for all of great people I met there and remain friends with many of them today. I may in the future post topics on some of the reasons why I left if the curiosity is there.

Even though I am a homeowner I am a housing bear. The appreciation simply does make sense as there is no way I could afford my home that I bought in 2002 today. My income has increased more than inflation but housing prices have soared way beyond my income and many others in OC. I am also an investment property owner and I would like to buy more but I have this unique requirement called positive cash flow. Since 2004 it has been almost impossible to find and 2-4 unit investment property any where in OC with positive cash flow. Depreciation is supposed to offset your income from the property not your regular income.

I am a born and raised OC native who remembers the last crash in the 90s and I will be posting topics on the similarities that we are seeing today. My first topic on my blog has the headlines from the OC Register on housing from 1987 through 1993 and it really is not all that different than this time. I also will be posting about the economy and how it relates to housing. It may not be specifically Irvine but Irvine will be affected from these factors too.

Coming soon will be a post on a deeper look into the jobs in OC and what history can tell us.

Broken Dreams

It’s not the Borrowers; It’s the Loans.