Irvine Housing Blog

You relate Once some other sector creates jobs, new households will form which will in turn create demand for real estate. With fresh demand for real estate, housing employment will start to recover, and the demand will snowball from there. The catalyst will not be housing. It must start in another sector of the economy.

This is true.

Unfortunately, the economic, investment, and political tectonic plates have shifted the world into Kondratieff Winter. The world has moved out of the Milton Friedman Free To Choose Regime of Neoliberalism and into the Beast Regime of Neoauthoritarianism.

Freedom, Choice, Free Trade, Prosperity, belonged to the Age of Leverage. Now Diktat, Structural Reforms, Austerity Measures, Protectionism, and Debt Servitude are de rigueur in the Age of Deleveraging.

Mike Mish Shedlock writes Protectionism Cannot Bring Prosperity where makes the point that exported jobs will never return; and tariffs will destroy existing jobs.

I relate that the seigniorage of credit and basic materials such as coal, iron, and copper has failed. The seigniorage of diktat is commencing.

You have often reported on HELOC abusers, that is borrowers who withdrew more money in HELOCs and refinances than the house is currently worth.

I ask where did that money go, into trips to Las Vegas, investment property in Reno, cosmetic surgery like boob jobs? Did some of it make it into buying and holding gold coins? 

I relate that In 1974, the 300 hundred of the world’s elite met as the Club of Rome, and presented regional economic government as the solution for the chaos that would come from deleveraging and disinvesting that comes with the failure of Mr Friedman’s Free to Choose dream. Their Clarion Call, has been heard by globalists such as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, who in their August 2011 Communique, called for a true European economic government.

Sovereign armageddon, that is a credit collapse and global financial breakdown, will come out of Gotterdammerung, the clash of the gods, that is the European leaders and the investors together with the rating agencies. This will result in the loss of national debt sovereignty, and extinguishment of state fiscal spending capability.

Sovereign crisis requires a sovereign solution. One Leader, the Sovereign, and his banker, the Seignior, will arise to speak for and to the Eurozone, which will be transformed into a Federal Europe, as leaders meet in summits and wiave national sovereignty, and implement a Fiscal Union, empower the ECB as a bank, and develop a common European Treasury. Seigniorage, that is moneyness, will no longer be based upon debt, but rather will be based upon the diktat of structural reforms, austerity measures and debt servitude; people will be amazed by this, and place their faith in it, and give it their full allegiance.

How did they take out the last two loans in 2009 and 2011?

This post and comment above are so outstanding one can find much to think about almost sentence to sentence.  May I suggest two California-centric bubbles that are “the big picture” above housing?  If jobs are the issue, then the present dot com bubble phase…what, three?...repeating due to facebook/google/instant wealth, that’s still bubbling furiously.  Without that, LA and San Francisco are going to fall on REALLY hard times.  The second bubble is the US deficit spending and trade deficit almost beyond all human credibility:  crank those down, the whole world but especially California will plummet in two waves, the first direct, the second as an echo of collapse of the overseas bubble empires built exactly on the continuation of US bubbles.

Now, the real estate bubble is clear; but somehow people have stopped as much pointing out the disaster several bubbles that are not being addressed or managed in the least, that threaten California.  The third echo of that collapse, will be huge loss of tax income to the state, when the jobs get cut, and the dollar isn’t worth much,the newest dot com bubble collapses fake stock gains, and cheap foreign goods can’t be bought any more, how’s another ten or twenty billion lost to the state budget going to work out there?

Doesn’t anyone think it’s fishy that they were able to take out a HELOC while the financial crisis was about to implode, two loans after the crisis.

Furthermore, the last loan was in Aug. 2011, just two months before the short sale.

My guess is that these people know exactly what they’re doing, i.e. scamming the system.  The short sale is probably just smoke and mirror that they’re in financial difficulty and trying to sell, but probably they will eventually strategically default and let the house foreclose.

This is a good case to follow up!

Any discussion of Redfin pulling its short-lived feature showing sales history for agents/brokers?

http://www.propertyportalwatch.com/2011/10/redfin-pulls-controversial-agent-scouting/

To me this was one of the best features for potential buyers.  It is a shame that because it may not tell the whole story about an agent’s work that it had to be pulled completely.  Just shows you how powerful the real estate brokerage lobby is still.

Always make sure you get at least 3 references from any broker you use from folks who have used them in the last year for a closed sale.  Ask those references what disappointed them the most about the agent and you will likely get an earful.

IR:

1) The caption text in your HELOC.jpg image is not clear to me. There’s 4 bars but 3 descriptions.

2) Something you can add to the “this couple owns their home” image is this: a quote from some of the homeowners who went to their bank to make the final payment, and being told by the bank, “We don’t know how to close your mortgage file. Nobody’s every done finished paying their mortgage here.”

> Is it wise to risk the family home on a business start up?

Normally, in 99% of business plans, no.

But if you are the heart of an existing profitable company and ownership falls in your lap, then it can pay off.

I’ve met some office equipment suppliers and electronic advertisers who had 20 years of industry experience, and were able to capitalize and step into ownership roles with virtually no business risk.

In other words, they had an extreme unfair advantage compared to most slobs.

(Of course, a heart attack or divorce can still derail even a sure thing.)

The last two “unknown” loans for $150,000.00 on 05/14/2009 and $108,000.00 on 08/25/2011 were HELOCs provided by the same bank that provided the $300,000.00 HELOC on 05/09/2008 (Wilshire State Bank)

All three of these loans have the same exact paperwork and Riders to Deed of Trust, the only difference being the amounts, dates and the notaries used.