Irvine Housing Blog

Needs new carpet, fresh paint?  Still looks like WTF pricing to me @ $444,000!!!

Hallelujah, it’s about time. I don’t know much else about Mitt Romney but good for him, finally a Republican running with housing policy that reflects a position a Republican should take.

As much as I would like to demonize the ethically deficient borrowers, the vast scale of our housing disaster requires a little more perspective.  Were these folks bad?  Of course.  Did they single-handedly create the massive over-pricing that they were able to take advantage of through piggy mortgage equity withdrawals?  No.  So therefore, we can’t put the blame (and the pain) solely on borrowers.

Here is a good place to understand why there are other ways to look at what is going on here (the Madoff analogy is an excellent one - who on this blog shares any sympathy for a Madoff investor?  none - but that doesn’t mean that Madoff investors should be completely hung out to dry - the Madoff recovery lawsuits have been funded with a budget that almost exceeds the entire annual SEC budget - imagine if that kind of money had been spent going after the housing finance fraudsters among the i-banks, warehouse lenders, mortgage brokers and chiselers at the private mortgage shops and home builders (all of whom spent vast money recruiting more fools for their ponzi schemes).

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/10/25/how-ed-demarco-finally-cried-fraud/

No he isn’t. Ron Paul has been beating this drum much longer. Ron Paul has been warning about this manipulated
Economy for 15 years.

You’re way off. Ron Paul has been saying this since before the housing bubble burst. Mitt Romney is nothing but a carpet bagging phony RINO.

Romney’s contrarian remarks are going to attract a lot of fire from critics, but they may bait Obama and other candidates into defending the efficacy and fairness of government handouts to insolvent banks and unqualified home debtors, the waste of valuable time and resources, etc. 

My question is did Romney come to this conclusion on his own or did he have “pray on it”?

I find both parties remarkably unpleasant to deal with as voter, but it’s striking to me that Republicans actually believe they will win more elections with C-grade holy roller candidates like Bachmann, Perry, Romney, etc.  I look at the list of candidates and think to myself these guys are to the Presidency what the St. Louis Rams are to professional football.

HoA appears to be $354.50. “Home” appears to be a 1980 2-level townhouse.

I personally think it’s worth half of the $444,900 ask, but if I had a nagging wife that insisted on being a loaner in Irvine, you could do worse.

It appears that foreclosure auction collusion is a federal crime:

San Mateo Daily Journal: Investors guilty of rigging real estate auctions

I guess when you mess with the banks, they show who has the power.

Sorry, the time for this has long passed: just because Irvine and pockets of Southern California have resisted the full brunt of the housing market decline, doesn’t mean the rest of the country has.

For all the talk of letting the markets “naturally” hit bottom, residents of the heartland have seen enough decimation of both local economies and housing markets. They’re not going to tolerate government allowing another wave of housing market declines so that a handful of sidelined Irvinites can stop renting and afford a 3/2 in Turtle Rock. Perspective, folks.

While I agree entirely with the sentiment that the quickest way to clean up this foreclosure mess would be to let the markets clear…I am not at all certain that the markets themselves can handle it.  Meaning if we clear homes through foreclosure are the banks solvent?  Haven’t the banks passed a goodly portion of their mortgages on to the GSE’s?  If so doesn’t foreclosure en mass result in simple debt transference to the government and people?  Maybe still a wise idea in the sense that by clearing the bad debt we can spur the economy as we nationally become more globally competitive.

Regardless, this mess is going be be with us for quite a while and be messy.

According to today’s OC Register feature story on Donald Bren, Bren “thinks Mitt Romney should be the next president.”  “He’s the most qualified.”  So given that, and Romney’s stated preference for the market to correct through the foreclosure process, what will that mean to the artifically high prices in Irvine?  With Bren’s apartments renting at $1800+ (and there are already 39,000 units of them) and his plans to add some 6,000 more in the near future, can he artifically sustain the prices in the for-sale sector by manipulating rental prices to sustain the cost of his dirt?  Lansner this week quoted a source as forecasting rents to raise 12% next year and that renters are currently spending 38% of income on rent.  Is this the ‘competitive’ market we can look forward to?  Isn’t it just as onerous as the one we have?