Congrats on the book.  I’m a long time fan, and frustrated housing bear.  I would like to help you with your book cover.  I created a cover for LA TIMES MAGAZINE several years ago illustrating how the high prices were leaving the average family behind.  Unfortunately, the image was later repurchased and used by (!@#!*) David Learah for the cover of his books (personally devestating).  I would be honored to clear my good name.  Let me know.

Could you put all those colorful pins on one page so we could marvel at the number of foreclosures.

And then do some more chartporn, with those and all the REOs taken back in say, the last year.

That is some nasty sh_t and it is only going to get worse. Much worse. Most people have absolutely no idea how bad this is going to get and are entirely clueless to what is currently happening. As this illustration has pointed out, only the May/June 07 defaults are now coming to fruition. When the Alt-A/Prime ARM’s start to adjust in 09-11, which have double the monetary value as the subprimes ARM’s, the real damage will start to occur.

And when the normal and average American family wakes up to find out that they are 200k in the hole, their financial lives will be essentially over. Refinancing will not be an alternative if their ARM adjusts as the paper will be worthless and unsellable in a declining market. These will all become foreclosures unless they can come up with the negative equity(200k+). Within the next two years, many people are going to be taken out of the system. If you have cash and credit in 2010, and the banking system survives the impending crisis, there will be opportunities of a lifetime.

Graphixs, All this proves is prices will go up as inexperienced sellers are replaced with the pros from the banks. Joe American doesn’t have a whole marketing department at their disposal, but the banks do. Good marketing can solve any problem.

Great job Graphix, thanks…

What’s got me sad is that I have to go to an internet blog to find such great stuff put up by a hard laboring individual such as yourself while the newspapers and TV don’t report these data and diagrams and put it on my doorstep in the morning, printing dumb stuff instead, then whine that their readership has gone down.

Glad you like the book so far and thanks for the mention.

Thanks for the lovely chartpr0n, graphcakes. The red, blue and green pins are a striking visual.

IR, are you getting your inventory numbers from ziprealty.com? Their numbers seem to agree with your inventory figure.

Except realtor.com shows 1134, after excluding multi-units and a few listings that aren’t actually in Irvine. Median list on realtor.com is 679k.

Also, redfins figures are close to realtor.com, not ziprealty.

Right….  because dumping hundreds of foreclosures on the market always boosts prices.

“pros from the banks”—okay.  The same pros who made all these bad loans in the first place?  The pros at the banks are the ones most in denial of reality, sitting on foreclosed inventory while it loses even more value thanks to deferred maintenance, abandonment, and vandalism.

When an identical home right next door to you sells for 200k less than what you paid for yours, you are not giong to be worrying about what is ubiquitous and what is not.

It is amazing how many people are still so utterly clueless on the severity of things believing that words like ubiquitous are going to make things better.

Pros from the banks?  Surely you jest.

Pros and “banks” don’t belong in the same sentence.

Kirk pwns everybody but me.  Good stuff.

I think I’ve answered my own question. Ziprealty (and indeed, Redfin) are not showing all the listings for a given area. I’ve found listings that are indeed active, and yet don’t show on ZR or RF, but can be found on realtor.com (and, interestingly, on craigslist).

In fact, a neighbor of mine has been for sale, with a realtor (a well known one), for 6 weeks now, and the listing only shows up on realtor.com and craigslist, but not on zip or redfin. It seems to be some kind of “pocket listing” dealy.

I can’t stand realtors. I hope they don’t have children so the vermin will disappear.

Yes, the pros at the banks. Your derision would be rightly directed at the underwriting departments of the banks, but I’m talking about the *marketing* departments. The smartest people in any company are in the marketing department.

I headed up marketing at a small company a few years ago. Before I came on-board they had a difficult time turning a profit on their core product: prepackaged saline injectables for in-the-field treatment of dehydration.

The first thing I did when I joined the company was rebrand the product as Insulin® brand saline injectables. There are subtle things that must be done in marketing that most people wouldn’t think make a difference. Brand name is obvious, but what isn’t is font size. I directed our team to use a 20pt font for the brand name and a 4pt font for the product description. While this may seem counter-intuitive, people are often turned off by long labeling.

The result was that we tripled the price while simultaneously increasing sales tenfold. That is how marketing solves problems.

Kirk,

You aren’t taking into account that distressed sellers need to get 2+ parties to agree to a short sale.  that isn’t the case with the banks.

so right off the bat, the crack marketing department has a lower target than the seller.  second, have you ever met the folks who disposition RE for banks?  they’re washed up realtors.  In other cases, it’s farmed out to a local agent, who has to deal with the bank to negotiate a sale, which can take forever and further pressure on prices as we continue our spiral.

I’m sure you’re great with branding, but if top dollar in RE doesn’t come by way of granite and cast iron banisters, it sure as hell isn’t coming with font size.

Today, the marketing mix is about 3 things: price, price, price.

One thing I noticed were most of the homes on foreclosure radar were not listed. I would say at best 10% were actually listed. So with just the REOs, there is a bunch of shadow inventory, and the way NODs and NTSs are converting to foreclosures, then there will be a bunch more inventory coming.

Too bad banks are banks, and not purveyors of real estate. That is like asking a doctor to sell used cars. You can’t expect much when this happens. That is why banks inevitably dump real estate holdings.

Marketing makes people buy stuff they don’t need. Never so true as applied to an overpriced Irvine crackerbox.

The market decides what people need. The market says people need houses, gasoline and Insulin® brand saline injectables. People that think they know better than the market suffer from a God complex.

He probably did it that way because the site only shows you 200 pins at a time.

Stephen,

Can you send me an email? I would appreciate your assistance.