The Housing Bubble

It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Arizona ranks among the top 10 states in the nation in foreclosures, the number of homes for sale in the Valley is at its highest level in years, and people who absolutely must sell face problems. ‘Once we take the listing, we tell them up front that we have to adjust the price every 30s days,’ said Avi Asallas of Century 21. ‘Before, we could sell a house within 30 to 60 days, but now we cannot put a time frame on it because there are so many properties.’”

“Meanwhile, a number of Valley residents are going through foreclosure. ‘I bought a house for $400,000 in Maricopa, and my house isn’t even worth $280,000,’ said one woman.”

“AmTrust Bank of Cleveland began foreclosure proceedings Oct. 19 against a partnership that developed Painter’s Loft, a 20-unit condo at a former factory. Ken Lurie of Rysar Properties said he is disappointed the bank lost confidence in the duo’s ability to sell the remaining units.”

“‘It’s not a failed project,’ Mr. Lurie said. ‘It’ll be a success, but not for me. I’m in business to make a profit.’”

“Central Texas still has a healthy housing market, but homes will take longer to sell and must be priced lower in 2008, broker Dee Shultz said. ‘Our prices are going to have to come down a bit,’ said Shultz.”

“In the downtown condominium market, ‘we’re in uncharted territory,’ said Kent Collins, partner, Centro Partners LLC. ‘Just as we went through a period in the late 1990s when new apartments were being built downtown, and we didn’t know the depth of the market or the price point, we are in the same place today in the condominium market.’”

“Shultz agreed, saying the number of new downtown condos being built is ‘a little frightening,’ and it remains to be seen if they will sell as anticipated.”

“They camped overnight and slept in their cars. But they didn’t do it to buy tickets to a rock concert or get the latest gadget. They did it to buy land. The ACT Government put 55 blocks in the new Gungahlin suburb of Forde on to the market yesterday.”

“23-year-old Angela Tonkovic and her husband got what they had come for. But Ms Tonkovic said she was shocked at how competitive the market was.”

“‘It’s insane that it has come to this. There were people lying out on the grass with pillows and sleeping bags because they didn’t want to risk losing the land they wanted,’ she said. ‘I never thought I would have to do something like this when it came to buying land or a home.’”

“At the Indovina Bank on 39 Ham Nghi Street district 1, there were thousands shoving and jostling against one another to transfer VND200 million to Phu My Hung Corporation which is offering 300 apartments to only 1,000 ‘candidates.’”

“But will there be a time when the real estate bubble busts after reaching its saturation point and becoming stagnant? Meanwhile, the fever is on since it is still very profitable to buy apartments.”

“A man waiting to transfer money at the scene told Sai Gon Giai Phong he earlier bought a $300,000 apartment which now costs $2 million. ‘There’s no business more profitable than this,’ another sitting nearby intervened.”

“Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Sinh Hung promised government will impose progressive taxes on housing speculation to help deflate an impending bubble in the real estate market.”

“Ho Chi Minh City recently saw disturbing degrees of speculation-based property sales ominous of a bubbling market when thousands surrounded a housing site last week to purchase flats even before foundations had been laid.”

“Prospective buyers hired proxies to wait in long winding lines for registration applications, with at least one person paid some US$1,000 simply stand in line.”

“With real estate prices having risen 500 percent since 2002, Latvia has long been an investment hot-spot. But the Baltic state’s property firms are getting gloomy as a government anti-inflation drive bites and jitters spill over from the United States’ home loan crisis.”

“‘Activities in the market have slowed down considerably. People are waiting, though nobody can really predict what will happen in the future. The situation is bleak,’ Aigars Smits, head of the Arco Real Estate company, told AFP.”

“The average price of a single-family home in Calgary has dropped for the third consecutive month and in October was more than $53,000 less than it was in July when it hit a record $505,920. Single-family Calgary metro sales for October decreased by 10.3 per cent from October 2006, and new listings were up.”

“By the standards of our gravity-defying real-estate market, it didn’t sound all that irrationally exuberant: a well-appointed Kits Point pad, with about 1,300-feet of space and a view of the ocean. Price: a cool $1.25 million.”

“Well, it was no penthouse, dear reader. It was a basement suite in a house. And the view? To get your $1.25-million ocean view, you would have to gaze through a ground-level basement window, peek under a thick grove of rhododendron bushes, then across the street, hopefully nobody parks by the sidewalk here, look past Kitsilano Park and then, oooh-la-la! A tantalizing glimpse of English Bay, about two football fields away.”

“With the housing market melting so spectacularly to the south of us, you can detect a frisson of unease these days when the subject of real estate comes up: Are we, too, sitting atop a massive real-estate bubble ready to burst or are we truly living in a unique market that might soar faster, higher and stronger as the 2010 Olympics approach?”

“Who, in the real world, can afford to live here anymore? New immigrants? The working class? The middle class? Students? Your own kids? Affordability, or more accurately the lack of it, is becoming a national lament. In its latest quarterly survey, the Royal Bank of Canada reports that in every province and city it tracks, the cost of owning a house is eating up more and more of family incomes.”

“The number of Oregon and Salem-area homes slipping into foreclosure rose sharply in the third quarter of 2007, another sign of fallout from the national mortgage loan mess.”

“There were 229 new foreclosure filings in Marion County during July, August and September, a 29 percent increase from year-earlier figures. There were 81 foreclosure filings in Polk County, an 84 percent increase.”

“Ken LeVeille, a mortgage broker in Salem, said Oregon’s market often trails California’s, so it’s to be expected that foreclosures will rise here. ‘This is a normal correction,’ LeVeille said. ‘It has to correct. Otherwise, we’d have a disaster. We’d all be paying California prices.’”

“Those were the days when middle- and upper-income buyers were wishing that God would make more land, when developers were happy that He couldn’t, when mortgage bankers couldn’t decide whether they wanted more land or simply bigger houses to underwrite.”

“Those dynamics were nowhere more visible in Arkansas than in its northwest corner, where food processing and trucking and, especially, Wal-Mart, were creating a demand for upscale housing unlike anything seen anywhere else in Arkansas.”

“A Little Rock attorney paused at my table to confess his fear that he was making too much money. ‘When times are bad, businesses sue other businesses,’” said the litigator, ‘and right now my business is booming.’”

“Need a plumber? An electrician? Another amigo who lives in northwest Arkansas joked recently that getting either these days is as easy as picking up the phone. A joke, yes, but no laughter: What could be humorous about the surge in foreclosures in Benton and Washington counties, up 85 percent and 130 percent, respectively, in the first three quarters of 2007?”

“Now rides the Federal Reserve to the rescue, offering a second reduction in short-term rates in as many months and not bothering to hide its concern over the impact of the sub-prime mortgage debacle on the broader economy, yet cautioning the industry that it had best be prepared (and no pun intended) to clean up its own house. Or houses. In fact it is already doing so — at a price.”

“Defaults on home mortgage loans are rippling through the county. Politicians are picking up the violins and wailing about how borrowers were taken advantage of.”

“Borrowers seem to want to forget that home mortgages are contracts. Obligations are imposed on both home buyers and lenders. These obligations are a two-way street, and both sides must deal in good faith and do their homework before pen is touched to paper.”

“But in the current mortgage mayhem, many buyers overstated their creditworthiness and obtained loans they wouldn’t otherwise have had.”

“If people borrow money, they need to be stewards of their decisions, and manage their finances in a responsible way. When borrowers don’t believe they should be held accountable, contracts become meaningless and society starts to break down.”

“It is an unpopular truth, but many buyers facing foreclosure are victims of their own hand. Too many people bought homes they couldn’t afford. It made no sense to stretch by buying the higher-end homes they did, and many shouldn’t have been buying a home at all.”

“What were they thinking? These are hopeful buyers in a hopeful game that sometimes ends badly. What these people are calling ruination at the hands of predators is their hopeful thinking not coming true when the economics came home to roost.”

The Record Searchlight reports from California. “Nearly 80 lots in Deer Creek Manor are to be auctioned Nov. 21 on the Shasta County Courthouse steps. While the spike in home foreclosures, they jumped 562 percent in Shasta County in the first three quarters of 2007 from a year ago, has been well documented, this is the first large-scale residential development facing a foreclosure since the late 1990s, said Mike Van Bockern, who conducts public foreclosure auctions in Shasta County.”

“‘The whole real estate game is about timing. They missed the market,’ Tom Shuck of Real Estate 1 in Redding said Thursday. ‘When it (housing market) shut down, it flat shut down.’”

“To date, one house has been built in Deer Creek Manor. The 2,100-square-foot home, which isn’t facing foreclosure, was built by contractor Les Reese Jr., who also owns the lot, and is listed for $499,000.”

“‘I think it’s a bad time for everybody,’ Reese said. ‘Other than that, I really don’t have much to say.’”

The Mountain Enterprise. “Kathy Flick’s job is to compile all the notices of default that are recorded with Kern County each month when people stop paying their mortgages. Flick predicts the rate of foreclosures in the Mountain Communities is apt to be far lower than that occurring in Bakersfield because there were not ‘overnight subdivisions’ being built here.”

“‘Its extremely bad right now,’ Flick said. ‘We are running 50 defaults per day. There are 500 defaults a week since last December. It just keeps going on and on and on. Most of it I truly believe were the loan products that asked for nothing down and now they have gigantic payments they have to come up with.’”

“Local realtors may disagree. ‘Our rate may be far lower than Bakersfield, but it is much higher than any of the years I have been selling up here since 1991,’ commented Gary Wilson of Mountain Properties. ‘I guess you could say ‘on aggregate’ that their pain is more than ours, but we have lots of pain to go around.’”

“Wilson reports the impact that foreclosures, have on the market.”

“‘The bank wants to sell them as quickly as possible so they price them lower than similar homes. There is no emotion in it from the bank and they have not even seen these homes. They are just files—assets to be sold in a timely manner Some asset manager may have a thousand of these to sell around the country, so they have a system,’ he said.”

“They have an appraisal, look at market trends, and price accordingly. They don’t want to be overpriced in a declining market and follow the market down. They under price them right away. If they don’t sell in 30 days, they lower the price again and again and continue to do so until the property changes hands. That’s the system,’ Wilson said.”

From KSBY. “To help people on the Central Coast avoid foreclosures, Peoples’ Self Help Housing has teamed up with Mariner Mortgage to offer free seminars to struggling homeowners.”

“‘Some people were not educated enough to realize what an interest only or a 100 percent loan to value meant at the time. They were eager to get into a home,’ explained Annette Montoya of Peoples’ Self Help Housing.”

“Loan officer David Wilson admits education levels were low in some cases, but he says many hands got us into the mess we are in now.”

“‘It’s hard to pinpoint who the bad guy is, so to speak. A lot of the foreclosures, if you actually look into them, are investment properties,’ he said.”

The Orange County Register. “Mid-October housing stats from DataQuick show that just four of 83 ZIP codes in Orange County (Orange 92865, Tustin 92782, Newport Beach 92661 and Irvine 92612) had year-over-year gains in home purchases in the 22 business days ended Oct. 16.”

“Overall, in the latest October count by DataQuick, sales are down 45.5% vs. a year ago. Pricing remains weak, too. The latest read on median selling prices, $572,000, is equal to pricing seen in early 2005.”

The Press Enterprise. “New-home sales continued to plummet in Riverside and San Bernardino counties in September, and almost one of every three people– and maybe more — who initially agreed to buy a home in Riverside County ended up cancelling the transaction.”

“New home sales fell 37.2 percent to 617 in Riverside County in September, down from 983 in the same month in 2006, according to a report.”

“The jarring part of this report is…there were 617 net sales in Riverside County in September, but sellers thought they had 928 before the buyer backed out. Those numbers mean one in three sales is being cancelled.”

“However, Borre Winckel, executive vice president of the Riverside County chapter of the Building Industry Association, said he thinks that figure is low, based on what he has observed.”

“‘The cancellation rate seems to be north of 60 percent,’ Winckel said. ‘It’s the curse of the lack of consumer confidence.’”

“According to DataQuick Information Systems, the median price for all homes in Inland Southern California in September was about 11 percent lower than a year ago. Sales prices have been sliding month-to-month since April.”

“‘They go home and hear on KFI Radio that another community down the street will be knocking the price down,’ Winckel said.” “Usually builders put up between 200,000 and 220,000 homes a year in California, but next year only 80,000 are expected to be built, he said.”

“‘Everyone thinks 2008 will be a miserable year,’ Winckel said.”

The Daily Press. “Empty lots languishing in partially completed subdivisions have become a common sight in local cities as the Victor Valley feels the effects of the national housing market slump.”

“During sample periods in 2006 and 2007 examined by the Daily Press, new building permits for single-family homes decreased by 53 to 83 percent in Apple Valley, Hesperia and Victorville.”

“Jon Roberts, city manager for Victorville, said the city finally had enough time to begin reorganizing its permit process 30 days ago.”

“‘When the economy and development were going so strong, it was such a volume coming in that we couldn’t get it through the process quick enough,’ he said.”

The Daily Bulletin. “The High Desert and San Gorgonio Pass - two regions beyond the fringes of the Inland Empire - have much in common. The Joshua tree-filled cities of the Mojave Desert and the chaparral towns of the Pass region are both traversed by interstates and railroads used by commuters and freight haulers. Both areas have been hit by the current housing market slowdown.”

“Beaumont, in the San Gorgonio Pass, is but one example of a town where the housing market has cooled off this year. Median home prices in the city dipped from $372,000 in August 2006 to $365,000 this August, according to DataQuick.”

“David Dillon, economic development director for the city, said that housing trend might not be such a bad thing, since a slower pace of residential growth could allow for new residents to be absorbed into the local economy before the next housing boom.”

“‘It helps catch up the jobs and housing imbalance,’ he said.”

Some housing bubble news from Washington and the Wall Street Journal. “Merrill Lynch & Co., in a bid to slash its exposure to risky mortgage-backed securities, has engaged in deals with hedge funds that may have been designed to delay the day of reckoning on losses, people close to the situation said. In one deal, a hedge fund bought $1 billion in commercial paper issued by a Merrill-related entity containing mortgages, a person close to the situation said.”

“In exchange, the hedge fund had the right to sell back the commercial paper to Merrill itself after one year for a guaranteed minimum return, this person said.”

“‘Merrill has been making the rounds asking hedge funds to engage in one-year off-balance-sheet credit facilities,’ Janet Tavakoli, who consults for investors about derivatives, told clients in a recent note. ‘One fund claimed that Merrill was offering a floor return (set buy-back price),’ she said in the note, ’so this risk would return to Merrill.’”

“‘Ms. Tavakoli said such transactions would explain how Merrill’s mortgage-related exposure dropped in the third quarter.”

From Bloomberg. “Merrill Lynch & Co. fell the most in more than six years after Deutsche Bank AG said the world’s biggest brokerage may write down another $10 billion for losses on subprime assets.”

“‘We have increasingly lost confidence in the financials of Merrill,’ Mayo said in a report today. ‘If there are much higher CDO writedowns, Merrill may have additional credit rating downgrades.’”

From Reuters.”The risk of owning credit and bonds of Citigroup Inc and Merrill Lynch rose to the highest in at least a year on Friday and Merrill credit default swaps are trading like junk, Moody’s Investors Service said.”

The Financial Times. “The mood in credit derivatives markets turned ugly on Thursday, with the cost of insuring corporate debt hitting multi-week highs on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘It’s scary out there - there’s blood on the streets,’ a trader at a US brokerage said.”

“‘[These triple-A rated companies are] exposed to the crumbling housing market,’ said Gavan Nolan, an analyst at derivatives data provider Markit. ‘Investors in monolines will be waiting for the coming months of housing data with trepidation,’ Mr Nolan said.”

Dow Jones Newswires. “Bond insurers slumped on Thursday amid concern that they may be hobbled by rising defaults on subprime mortgages and downgrades of the asset-backed securities tied to those loans. There’s a ‘general level of anxiety about whether or not we will continue to see waves of rating agency downgrades of subprime mortgage-backed securities and of collateralized debt obligations,’ said Kathleen Shanley, an analyst at Gimme Credit LLC.”

“If subprime mortgage defaults and foreclosures get high enough to imperil insurers like Ambac and MBIA, investors will have a lot more to worry about, said Michael Grasher, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.”

“‘If that were to happen we’ve all got bigger problems. You, me, the whole world,’ he said.”

From MarketWatch. “‘There is no question that there is stress out there, and we are trying to be reflective of that stress in the marketplace’ when rating the creditworthiness of the bonds and other securities it guarantees, Ambac Chief Financial Officer Sean Leonard said Thursday in an interview.”

“Leonard noted Thursday that some of the CDOs Ambac guarantees that started out rated double-A have gone down to triple-B, one step above junk status, in the company’s own internal rating system.”

“The diminished expectations have ‘eroded some of the protections we had’ against having to pay out on its financial guaranties, he said.”

“The expectation is that loans written from late 2005 onward will perform worse than originally expected, though there is still uncertainty over ‘what level of poor performance’ the later loans in particular will demonstrate.”

“Emerging-market bonds fell, as losses related to subprime mortgages prompted investors to shed riskier assets.”

“‘Losses in financial markets are the main driver,’ said Tomasz Stadnik, who helps manage $3.1 billion of emerging-market debt. ‘There are rumors on Barclays, and the Merrill Lynch saga continues. It’s a sequel to what was happening a few months ago.’”

The Seattle PI. “New York’s attorney general has accused Washington Mutual Inc. of pressuring a real estate appraisal company to deliver inflated home values in order to justify making loans.”

“The suit filed Thursday in a New York court by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo doesn’t name Seattle-based WaMu as a defendant. But WaMu figures prominently in the complaint.”

“EAppraiseIT ‘improperly allows WaMu’s loan production staff to hand-pick appraisers who bring in appraisal values high enough to permit WaMu’s loans to close, and improperly permits WaMu to pressure eAppraiseIT appraisers to change appraisal values that are too low to permit loans to close.’”

“‘It’s about time,’ said Richard Hagar, who owns American Home Appraisals on Mercer Island, teaches anti-fraud classes and helped write Washington’s mortgage laws. ‘I have been surprised that no investigations have been started earlier on something like this.’”

“Graham Albertini, a former WaMu appraiser who now works for Hagar and teaches appraisal classes, said the bank’s appraisal process has been increasingly problematic since 2002.”

“‘Starting in 2002 they shifted the emphasis from quality to quantity,’ he said.”

“A hot home market caused buyers to bid prices to new heights. Now that prices have started to level off in the Seattle area and decline elsewhere, some buyers are finding they cannot sell their homes for what they owe, leaving them with few alternatives to foreclosure.”

“‘A lot of this doesn’t get revealed until you have a downturn in the housing market,’ said Scott Jarvis, director of the state Department of Financial Institutions.”

The LA Times. “The fraud suit by New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo represents the biggest regulatory crackdown yet on the type of allegedly abusive practices that many experts believe fed the housing bubble in California and elsewhere as well as the current rising tide of foreclosures.”

“The lawsuit is based on e-mails written by top executives at EAppraiseIT, who initially complained about pressure from Washington Mutual for high appraisals but ultimately acquiesced to it.”

“‘We have agreed to roll over and just do it,’ Anthony R. Merlo Jr., EAppraiseIT’s president, wrote in an e-mail to First American executives in February.”

“EAppraiseIT acquiesced to Washington Mutual’s demands even though it knew that was wrong, according to the suit. ‘We view this as a violation’ of federal rules, Merlo wrote in an April 17 e-mail.”

“In some cases, appraisers were removed from the preferred list if their numbers were too low, the suit said. A Washington Mutual sales assistant told one appraiser he was dumped from the list because he wouldn’t boost his assessments, according to the suit.”

“‘I have been singled out by WaMu and have been pressured on every appraisal I have completed that did not reach a predetermined value,’ another appraiser complained to EAppraiseIT. ‘I feel that WaMu is in the process of ‘blacklisting’ me as an approved WaMu appraiser by going after each appraisal I complete and looking for violations.’”

“Excessive appraisals have particularly dire consequences for so-called sub-prime borrowers who have weak or spotty credit, experts say.”

“‘When reality sets in, as it has today, these buyers, through no fault of their own, now face foreclosure,’ said Robert L. Gnaizda, general counsel of Greenlining Institute, a consumer group. ‘They’re paying for homes that aren’t worth anything close to what they paid.’”

“The rate of foreclosures in the United States will remain higher than normal for the next 18 months as the current home loan crisis plays itself out, a senior U.S. Treasury official said on Friday.”

“‘A rising foreclosure rate during a housing downturn is not surprising, but largely because of lax underwriting in recent years, especially in the subprime market, a higher than usual number of homeowners will face delinquency during the next year and a half,’ Robert Steel, undersecretary for domestic finance, told a congressional panel in prepared remarks.”

“A top U.S. Treasury official asked for congressional help Friday in reaching out to borrowers with risky mortgages.”

“Robert Steel said in prepared remarks to a House Financial Services Committee hearing that a direct-mail campaign to at-risk borrowers is starting up Nov. 19.”

“Steel told lawmakers that a group called ‘Hope Now’ — composed of mortgage servicers, lenders and counselors — is reaching out to borrowers to educate them about refinancing options.”

“‘When you are home in your districts over the weekend or for the holidays, please tell your constituents about this mail campaign,’ Steel said. ‘Tell them it is OK to contact Hope Now for assistance.’”

“But both the Bush administration and Democrats say they’re not in favor of bailouts.”

“‘We are not talking about any kind of bailout in the sense of public money,’ said Rep. Barney Frank, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee. ‘We are mitigating pain, we hope,’ by offering proposals to help troubled borrowers.”

“Rep. Al Green said lawmakers want to help those facing foreclosure but don’t want to interfere in the markets. ‘We want to let the market do what the market does,’ said Green.”

“Bill Longbrake, a Washington Mutual executive working on the Hope Now alliance, said the group is sending out 200,000 letters to at-risk homeowners beginning Nov. 19. ‘We want to show people that help is available,’ Longbrake said.”

Miami Today reports from Florida. “Recent reports show South Florida is second in the nation in foreclosures, with Brickell condos racking up the highest numbers locally. With 54 foreclosures, The Club at Brickell Bay, 1200 Brickell Bay Drive, leads to pack. The Vue at Brickell, a conversion project follows with 49 foreclosure actions. In third place is The Jade at Brickell Bay.”

“In all, Condo Vultures reported 8,533 Miami-Dade properties worth $2.37 billion in some phase of foreclosure over the year to date.”

The Daily Businesse Review. “Talk of short sales in real estate circles is soaring along with loan defaults and foreclosures in South Florida and nationwide. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac encourage working out loans in default for people in trouble with their primary residences, said Timothy Allen, president of the Mortgage Bankers Association of Florida.”

“But real estate agents who need deals to make a living aren’t likely to be pushing that option.”

“‘That’s not the advice the Realtors are giving because they are selling a house and the lender is the screwdriver and the Realtor is the hammer,’ Allen said. ‘If the only tool I have in my toolbox is a hammer, every problem will be a nail.’”

The Naples News. “Collier County continues to see a decline in prices and sales. A report by the Naples Area Board of Realtors shows the median home price in the third quarter fell to $375,000, down $15,000 from the previous quarter.”

“There were 786 closed sales, down from 1,326 in the second quarter and 961 a year ago. In Lee County, 327 existing single-family homes sold in September, down 53 percent from 693 a year ago, according to the Florida Association of Realtors. The median home price fell 11 percent to $231,600.”

“There is more than a three-year supply of homes on the market in both Naples and Fort Myers.”

The News Press. “Housing permits remained at low levels in October, with Cape Coral recording 15 for single-family homes. That’s the lowest in memory, about half of September’s 29 and less than 8 percent of October 2006’s 203, according to a report.”

“The pace was a little better in unincorporated Lee County, where 91 single-family permits were issued, the county reported.”

“‘The market got so wild and hot that even the government couldn’t have corrected what happened,’ said Bob Knight, president-elect of the Lee Building Industry Association. ‘We just happen to have climbed a higher altitude than other areas of the country.’”

“The number of foreclosures filed in Lee County spiked to an all-time record of 1,538 in October — led by a big increase in primary homes.”

“In Lee County, of the 1,108 single-family homes that went into foreclosure in October, 472 were homesteaded residences where a family lives a majority of the time. That’s up from 395 homesteads in September.”

“‘The homesteads are starting to creep up too; that’s the unemployment,’ said mortgage broker Jeff Tumbarello of Network Funding Solutions. ‘That’s bad, that’s not something we want to happen. It’s one thing for that to happen to the speculators, that’s kind of a cleansing, but the people who live and work in Lee County, we need to keep them here.’”

“Cape Coral also led the county in foreclosures with 679, followed by Lehigh Acres with 427 and Fort Myers at 308. Overall, the number was up 26 percent from September’s 1,220 and up 337 percent from 352 in October 2006.”

“As foreclosures have mounted, prices have plunged but that’s not enough to bring back the market, Tumbarello said. ‘You can buy houses for well under 100 grand in decent areas, but taxes and insurance are still more than $400 a month’ and that’s keeping buyers away.”

“He noted that for a $90,000 house, about $450 of the $1,050 total monthly payment would go for real estate tax and home insurance.”

“Real estate broker Steve Koffman in Cape Coral said that as prices have fallen from their peak in December 2005, a lot of people now are trying to sell their houses for so-called ’short sales.’”

“The median price of a single-family home in Lee County has fallen to $231,600 in September, the latest month available, down 28 percent from an all-time high of $322,300 in December 2005, according to the Florida Association of Realtors.”

The News Journal. “The Volusia-Flagler economy got a double dose of bad news this week from two reports released Thursday.”

“RealtyTrac reported court filings related to foreclosures were at 2,636 in the third quarter in the two-county area, up about 288 percent from 680 in the third quarter of 2006. Taxable retail sales took a tumble in July, down about 4.5 percent from July 2006.”

The Orlando Sentinel. “Home builders continued cutting back in the Orlando area this summer, as new-home starts plunged 47 percent in the third quarter compared with the same period a year ago.”

“Anthony Crocco, director of MetroStudy’s Central and Northeast Florida divisions, said the sharp decline in Metro Orlando is a reflection of ‘the slow sales paces and high cancellation rates of late summer and early fall.’”

“His survey of subdivisions showed that the number of homes sold and occupied in the third quarter totaled 3,850, down 29.8 percent from the same period in 2006.”

“Total inventory, homes under construction, finished-but-vacant units and model homes, totaled 10,412 at the end of the quarter. But at the recent slow sales pace, that still amounted to a 6.6-month supply. And the critical finished-but-vacant category fell just 9.9 percent from a year ago, to 5,264 homes.”

The Ledger. “Polk County’s economic forecast for the coming year isn’t great, but it could be worse. That was the message from a local economist and a national analyst.”

“September sales of existing homes in Polk are down 44 percent from a year ago; building permits for new home construction are down about 36 percent and the county’s unemployment rate is on the rise.”

“‘Can it get worse?’ asked Gordon Kettle. ‘In all the years I’ve been tracking data, I’ve never seen it worse.’”

“There are about 4,750 existing homes for sale in Polk’s real estate market. New home construction, declining home values and high asking prices are all slowing the market. At the current rate, Kettle said it would take nearly two years to turn the entire inventory.”

From TC Palm. “The number of new homes being built in St. Lucie and Martin counties dropped to among the lowest levels in a decade during the third quarter of 2007, while the construction of new homes fell in Indian River County, a quarterly housing report showed.”

“There were 463 new single-family homes occupied during the third quarter in St. Lucie. Finished vacant inventory totaled 1,283 units at the end of the third quarter of 2007, down from the record level of 1,369 in the second quarter of 2007.”

“Martin County’s supply of vacant developed lots was 1,905 at the end of the third quarter, a 66.6-month supply at the current annual starts pace — the lowest in more than a decade — the report stated.”

“The inventory of finished vacant homes fell to 905 units, from 1,012 at the end of the second quarter, bringing the months-of-supply figure down to 7.8 months from the record 8.3 months at the end of the second quarter.”

“There are 5,083 vacant developed lots in Indian River County, a 74.2-month supply at the current annual starts pace.”

The Tampa Tribune. “Slow job growth, coupled with the effects of a troubled real estate market, is pushing down demand for new homes in the Tampa Bay area, according to a report.”

“Builders started work on 1,732 single-family homes during the third quarter of 2007, down nearly 57 percent from 3,993 in the same quarter last year, according to Metrostudy.”

“Single-family closings during the third quarter of 2007 totaled 2,754 units, 35.8 percent lower than last year’s third-quarter rate of 4,287 units. Metrostudy counts a closing as a home that is now occupied.”

“Single-family inventory, which includes units under construction, finished vacant units and model homes, was 8,242 at the end of the third quarter. That represents a 6.8-month supply of homes and means it would take that long to sell them all at the current selling pace.”

“Joseph Narkiewicz, executive vice president of the Tampa Bay Builders Association, said the increased finished inventory is made up mostly of homes bought by speculators, not homes that builders have been unable to sell.”

“‘There’s still demand for new homes,’ Narkiewicz said.”

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