Irvine Housing Blog

Lightning is crashing all around, zapping prices back into 2004-land.  I’ve seen an uptick in reductions over the last two weeks.  I think the “WTF” moment in the stock market plus the recent MSM headlines inre subprime has a few Joe Sixpacks scrambling to cut their price.

The number of RSM condos priced deep into 2004 territory is amazing, and I think Irvine is creeping out onto that branch as well.
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Inventories are building up and maybe, just maybe, sellers are starting to get the message. I think that 2004-land sounds like a good start.

Condo? CONdo? CONDO?

Where I come from they call those apartments that somebody did a convrsion on. That was really popular in the early 80’s. When you built em you made sure you had a condo map on em, just in case.

#381 a foot for an apartment?

Steve the Dog

woof.

that POS would not be worth $100,000 in most areas of the U.S. !!!!  who cares if the weather is a little nicer here, it’s not $400,000 nicer!

I wonder how long until they just walk away and let New Century become the proud new owner of an apartment, I mean, “condo”.

100% financing - what a stupid bank!

Not sure where the others are from, but that is a condo in the sense of how condos were built by developers in CA during the 70’s and 80’s.  Developers are run by idiots.  They built nasty condos for almost 20 years and kicked off the 00’s by building no smaller than 2,500 sqft in one of the most expensive markets in the nation, all the while entry level homes were basically disappearing.  Sounds like the work of people too caught up in margins to see that the market was over saturated with properties that were not affordable, even with OC salaries.

I’m currently looking for a starter home.  I have a saved query on a site that sends me emails when new listings enter my search parameters.  I am looking for under 400k with 2/2.  6 months ago I would get one email a week with 1-2 listings.  Now I get daily emails with 5-6 listings, some including 3br and even a few detached homes.  The last 2-3 weeks in particular have been great.  I am starting to see 2/2 below 330K with the newer nicer 2/2 creeping below 400K in some neighborhoods.  I haven’t seen Irvine get there yet, but I know it’s coming.

Although these homes are now firmly in my range, I’m going to keep waiting.  Given the new credit hurdles, that I only have about 10% down, and the continued downward spiral of home values I’m just going to keep waiting.  I figure at some point I won’t even need to save up to 20% down, I think what I have saved will become 20% down as the value keeps dropping.  It’s good to have been levelheaded during the period that it appeared I would never be able to own in my home county.

Nice place if you can afford it.

What do you think will happen to home prices, now that the idiots at the fedreal reserve board think it is their responsibility to bail out irresponsible homebuyers by dropping interest rates? 

For years, the feds kept interest rates low, taking money from fixed income retirees, who depend on a decent rate of return on their CDs and giving it to flippers who were out to make a fast buck.  Now the feds are at it again!

In the U.S. interest rate are going lower, Gold is going higher, Oil is going higher, inflation is going higher, the dollar is going lower. What is wrong with this? Everything! At some point the FED is going to have to raise rates bigtime. We are in a very, very, precarious situation at the moment. I think Gold will tripple to over $2,000 an ounce when the market finally wakes up and sees the real inflation. Last I checked a lower dollar = higher import prices. There is no inflation deflator here. With commoditioes on fire you can forget about that. Bernanke should have never lowered rates last week. However, the Fed might be doing something that few have talked about. Maybe the Fed has abandoned the dollar to crush the trade deficit. Good luck, it will take 20 years to correct our 6% of GDP trade deficit and move it back to under 1% of GDP, unless you want to seriously disrupt the global economy. We are in for tough times people. Very tough! The FED will not be able to save housing with lower rates. We are in for a 10 year decline in home prices. It is called a cycle!