Irvine Housing Blog

Unfortunately at >$400 a square for a condo this place is unlikely to move quickly. Perhaps they shoudl contact USCTMan29 for some insight in how to move this place…

And here’s another question for which I haven’t seen an answer, and I very seriously doubt that anyone’s keeping any serious metrics on it.  I’m curious about the number of cases of cold feet with residential and commercial real estate:  I hear plenty of anecdotes about buyers even putting money down on a house and then bailing out just before signing the paperwork, but is anyone keeping stats of these sorts of reversals?

A better song choice would be “Mystery to me”. With 100% financing, then why not speculate, though the direction that the economy is going is rather clear. But since stocks, bonds, commodities, are all tanking and you’re using someone else’s money it doesn’t hurt to try.

However with a substantial sum of your own money, how can anyone give it so little thought or make such a borderline decision that within a couple of weeks or days they come to change their mind? Can this be some sort of ploy to feed money to the realtors involved? They’re the ones having a good time with this place. Otherwise, whatever is going on here is a mystery to me.

for months now, i have been addicted to this website more than any other.  it is entertaining and informative in the extreme

what is lost in the financial and historical analysis is the tremendous loss of, literally, human habitat in california and florida… places where in theory you could survive sleeping outdoors for the forseeable future

i hope someone with a soft-science degree can come up with another website that asks:  (i) if foreclosed, where did you go?  (family, rental, the street, another state) or (ii) if in danger of foreclosure, where do you plan to go…

spice it up with interviews and political snark at the state level(of course)—what does, i wonder, Dr. Schwarzenegger, the non-girly-man ‘governor’ of our silly state think of people sleeping in cars in Venice Beach?  i think we should be told.  at least we could make a party out of it

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Love the picture of Slim Pickings starring in “Dr Greenspan or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the [Housing Market] Bomb

I was sitting on the bike at the gym and this guy sitting next to me starts making conversation. I ask him what he does, and it ends up he processes lease return and repoed cars.

Funny thing he said was that RVs are still selling. I said that is odd and he thought so too. Then come to find out many of the people buying them are people that have been foreclosed on and they are using them to live in. Kinda funny how these situations play out in unexpected ways.

I actually saw this property at an open house a couple weeks ago while exploring Quail Hill. The RedFin aerial view is incorrect. It is actually located on the most rear, interior location overlooking the park and has direct mountain and partial city views. The place is too small for my needs but is very quiet and secluded. The view from the 2nd floor Master balcony is nice.

Two comments unrelated to today’s topic:  First, it’s good to see Lemmy on IHB, especially on a Friday.  Second, I saw a jackass this morning in a flashy Chrysler 3000 (leased no doubt) with vanity plates reading “REFI PRO.”  Car had tricked out wheels of course.  He was dropping his wife/girlfriend off at work in front of my building, so I guess he’s not that rich after all.  Not surprisingly, he was dressed in a Chargers jersey (I’m in SD) rather than professional attire, complete with gold chain.

Seems like a lot when this 1,620 sq. ft. Quail Hill condo has been asking $499,900 ($309/sq. ft.) since Sept 13th…

http://www.redfin.com/CA/Irvine/59-REUNION-92603/home/5953644

I do like the place. Not going to think about paying $400/sqft for a condo, though. Wouldn’t even consider $300/sqft.

Re: Bagholders
The guy who just offered full asking with no contingencies on our house is putting 25% down.  Yikes!  We wanted to rent back for a month or so but PIPT was $10000 per month.  Just a little steep for us.  The RV idea is attractive.
I have been pushing the wife to rent for a couple of years but she has always owned a home so that is hard sell.  What with the hit we have taken on our investments I don’t want to take another hit on a house.
We can live at no extra expense at our cabin in the Sierras but winter snow lasts 6 months.  Brrrrrrrrr!  Or we can kick the renters out of my old house but that cuts into the cashflow.  They also have been good renters so that is an unattractive idea.
Decisions Decisions.

Off Topic question:

Chris Dodd is pushing the Government to act on the mortgage rewrite provisions of the Bailout program to allow people to remain in homes that they had no business buying in the first place.

Of course I think it patently unfair to those of us who exercised caution during the bubble to take any actions that help to keep home prices at their still insane levels. I’m wondering how much of this will be possible given that most of these folks have two loans and there is also the issue of these loans being broken into multiple pieces after they are sold. Anyone have any educated predictions here?

they are getting pretty desperate

http://www.elabs7.com/functions/message_view.html?mid=571945&mlid=4658&siteid=1324657905&uid=f24fc8aef8

Dumb question—how can this place have 1 floor and have 2 levels/stories?  Is this some condo-speak that I’m ignorant of?

I still don’t think that the banks won’t lend at the bottom.

In fact, I got a feeling that the magnitude of this drop will force the banks themselves to throw in the towel.

At that point, I figure they’ll be happy to sell the place to someone that will take if off their hands.  At whatever price.

And, I figure they’ll be willing to do a 100% financing just to get the property off their hands so long as (a) the buyer has excellent credit and (b) it’s purchased as a rental income property with a well thought out business plan.

I really think I might want to pick up some rental properties in two years or so….

Bush / AG Did It On Purpose.

When George W. Bush was named president by the Supreme Court in December 2000, the stock market had begun to decline with the bursting of the dot.com bubble.

In 2001 the frequency of White House visits by Alan Greenspan increased.

Greenspan endorsed President Bush’s March 2001 tax cuts for the rich. More such cuts took place in May 2003.

Signs of recession had begun to show in early 2001. The stock market crashed after 9/11. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in March 2003.

The Federal Reserve began cutting interest rates, and by 2002 a home-buying frenzy was underway. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went along by guaranteeing the increasing number of mortgage loans.

According to a mortgage broker this writer interviewed, word began to come down through the mortgage banks to begin falsifying mortgage applications to show more borrower income than borrowers actually possessed.

Banks that wrote mortgages began to offload them when Wall Street packaged them into mortgage-backed securities that were sold around the world as bonds to investors.

Risk-analysts at the leading credit-rating agencies, such as Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch, gave their highest ratings to mortgage-backed securities whose risks were later acknowledged to be grossly underestimated.

Mortgage companies, with Alan Greenspan’s endorsement, began to offer more Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), loans that would reset at much higher rates in future years.

Mortgage brokers fed the growing bubble by telling people they should buy now because housing prices would keep going up and they could resell at a profit before their ARMs escalated.

Huge amounts of money began to flow into the economy from mortgages and home equity loans and from capital gains on resale of inflating property.

Meanwhile, in the world of investment securities, the Securities and Exchange Commission greatly reduced the amount of their own capital investors were required to bring to the table, resulting in a huge increase in bank leveraging of speculative trading.

George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 at the height of the housing and investment bubbles. By 2005 the housing bubble was accounting for half of all U.S. economic growth and yielding huge tax revenues to all levels of government.

Despite the tax revenues from the bubbles the Bush administration was running huge budget deficits from expenditures on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

ABC News reports that during this time risk analysts at Washington Mutual, one of the nation’s largest banks, were told to ignore high risk loans because lending had to be maximized. Those who objected were disciplined or fired.

State attorneys-general moved to investigate mortgage fraud but were blocked from doing so by orders of the Treasury Department’s Comptroller of the Currency. There was no federal agency that was charged with regulating mortgage fraud.

The “toxic debt” from the collapse of the housing bubble brought about a full-scale crash of the U.S. financial system by September 2008. The stock market immediately fell, with 40 percent of its value — $8 trillion — now having been lost in a year. $3 trillion of the losses were in retirement savings.

The crash of the U.S. economy began to reverberate around the world with bankers and the IMF warning of an onrushing global recession.

Massive bailouts by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve failed to stem the tide of the crashing markets. By late October 2008 the recession has begun to hit in force.

As the situation worsened, big banks like J.P. Morgan Chase received government capitalization even as they were buying up banks that were failing. J.P. Morgan Chase paid $1.9 billion for Washington Mutual with assets of over $300 billion.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane with the song this time, IR.  Somehow as a teen I managed to miss the joke of the guy with the East Indian accent saying “White man speak with forked tongue”—that made me LOL.  Also never caught the pleasingly cheesy video back in the day.

The financial markets continue to whipsaw out of control as massive deleveraging takes place across the globe.  But this is Irvine, and damnit, we deserve unsustainable, unjustifiable, and simply repugnant-to-common-sense 600K townhomes.