Condo Speculators Should ‘Prepare To Hang On’: Wash.
The Columbian has this update on the condo market in Washington. “With Clark County single-family home prices rocketing upward in the past 18 months, demand for condominiums and townhouses should be rising, right? But according to the MLS for Portland-Vancouver, condo and attached home sales have been remarkably steady, peaking in September with 100 units sold that month, then dropping to between 50 and 70 units sold per month this spring.”
“With contractors paying top dollar for dirt and materials, new townhouses may take several years before yielding significant returns, said Dick Riley, co-owner of a Vancouver-based appraisal firm.”
“The countywide inventory of condos and attached-wall homes for sale has risen by nearly 40 percent in the past 12 months to an all-time high. New construction, apartment conversions and sales of existing condos added up to 388 attached-home units on the market in May, up from 278 units from May 2005. The inventory of single-family homes for sale has also risen this spring as interest rates cooled demand.”
“Buyers seeking quick returns on their condo investments should prepare to hang onto the home, given cooling real estate markets and increasing supply, Riley said. ‘When you get that much inventory, you’re not going to have a lot of appreciation in the first two or three years,’ he said.”
“Owners of the 194-unit downtown Vancouvercenter announced plans in March to change the development’s dual high-rise apartment buildings to condos. That project and NorthWynd, along with 108 units being converted in the Salmon Creek area, will add more than 500 condos to the local attached housing market.”
“Some condo developers worry about the rising inventory of attached housing units. Trent Pietz said his company has sold 25 units in the 74-unit Vintage Oaks complex in Salmon Creek since converting the development eight weeks ago. But condos haven’t been selling in the company’s nearby 36-unit Running Springs complex.”
“‘We saw a couple of apartment (complex) conversions and thought, ‘Well, let’s give it a try,’ Pietz said. ‘The cost of construction has gone up so much, the rents barely cover your expenses.’”
“The company chose to convert the two projects as a way to recover costs for developing the two projects. Both complexes opened within the last 18 months. ‘We might be competing with ourselves down the street,’ said Pietz.”
‘That project and NorthWynd, along with 108 units being converted in the Salmon Creek area, will add more than 500 condos to the local attached housing market. ‘We saw a couple of apartment (complex) conversions and thought, ‘Well, let’s give it a try,’ Pietz said.’
Because condos, and especially conversions, are a way to cash in on an ongoing boom, developers will jump in and overwhelm the market. It happens in every cycle.
I could not handle living in a conversion. Might as well live in an apartment and save your money for a home with a yard.
Condo speculators should hang themselves also.
“Buyers seeking quick returns on their condo investments should prepare to hang onto the home, given cooling real estate markets and increasing supply, Riley said. ‘When you get that much inventory, you’re not going to have a lot of appreciation in the first two or three years,’ he said.”
In otherwords, don’t try to sell your condo cause there are too many on the market….. get it?
Kind of like the Ardenne, circa 1944; “Hang on, boys!”. Why would anyone voluntarily put themselves in such a situation?
Here comes trouble in Sin City. Investor needs to clsoe a 1031 exchange on a 2 bed condo he bought 2 years ago for $90,000. There are 3 comps listed for 189,000, 192,000,193,000. He is offering his 2 bed condo for $169,000 if it closes before July 31. Will this sale screw the other listings? Will this sale screw up all the 2 bed condos listed in this zip code? Will this be the start of the downward cycle for condos in Vegas? Better yet, this $20,000 discount sale has not had any offers in 10 days, and it is really a good deal. Holy Cow, Batman! Stay tuned!!!
Is it in fact worth $90,000?
I grew up in Vancouver and my parents bought a new 1400sqft 3/2 starter home there in 1990 for $69k. It’s been flipped twice in the last 3 years and now it’s worth about $240k.
http://www.zillow.com/HomeDetails.htm?city=VANCOUVER+&o=North&state=WA&zprop=23276178
That’s just absolutely rediculous. Nominal wages since 1990 have gone up maybe 50%, but home prices have gone up 300%.
foobeca,
Saw your post at the “other” board. I had forgotten all about that ridiculous Time Magazine cover. Was that just one year ago? How things have changed!
lol, I’m really slammed the FB.
“Buyers seeking quick returns on their condo investments should prepare to hang onto the home, given cooling real estate markets and increasing supply, Riley said. ‘When you get that much inventory, you’re not going to have a lot of appreciation in the first two or three years,’ he said.”
It amazes me how many people view the world with real estate blinders on. There are other more profitable places to put your capital to work. It also amazes me how many people feel they can’t sell an investment to realize a loss (folks have won the Nobel Prize for research in this area).
The mistake was buying the condo. Keeping the condo doesn’t undo the mistake. Selling has two benefits: 1) it frees up capital to be more profitably invested elsewhere and just as importantly 2) it frees up your mind to think clearly about the opportunities available without being weighed down by an albatross of an investment.
“It also amazes me how many people feel they can’t sell an investment to realize a loss (folks have won the Nobel Prize for research in this area).”
The proverbial monkey with the hand in the jar not wanting to let go of the fistful of marbles…at any cost. Seeing as monkeys are our ancestors there should be no surprise.
“There are other more profitable places to put your capital to work”
The smart money has long ago exited the housing market and gotten into silver and gold bullion for a wild but uneven ride up…WAY up.
HIT THE LINK ABOVE….
GET READY TO DO SOME BARGAIN BUYING
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/daughty/daughty070506.html
READ CAREFULLY
Can’t stand Richard Daughty. I exchanged emails with him one time and the guy is totally clueless. If he is bullish on gold, let’s just chalk that up to a broken clock being right twice a day. That guy has no understanding of basic economic theory.
And yes Oil and Gas and all the commodity sector which is still shunned by the general public and the stupid crowd that listens too much to CNBC and this fascist Murdoch and his FOX TV.
Want something still dirt cheap? Buy natural resources. It so crazy to see Conoco-Philips at a P/E ratio of 6.6 Try buying real estate at a P/E of 6.6 ? The whole sector is still trading at 8 to 10 times earnings. And guess what? Oil prices are not going down soon, the US dollar is.
Whoa! Smart money might have left real estate, but pushing GOLD AND SILVER as an alternative is not what I would call smart. At least with real estate, you do get tax relief, and can exchange profits in a 1031 for no tax growth. Plus gold aqnd silver just came out of a 16 year slump, real estate went for 10 years in the previous crash. I have never met anyone, not one person, who made enough money in gold and silver to retire…
I have met a few people who started with nothing and accumulated a nice nest egg in real estate. I am with Ben all the way on this real estate market going to crash, but the last place I will put my investment earnings is in gold and silver.
I have never understood the attraction of some people for condos. A condo is an apartment, with all the same drawbacks. Only it’s much more expensive, and you are trapped there.
I totally agree. I would never want a condo. You can’t control your neighbors, you can’t control the hoa dues and you have to get approval for anything that shows on the outside.
Dues are bad enough, but some of the HOA’s I’ve had to deal with are run by people that remind me of third-world dictators.
I live in a condo. Which I rent. It is a townhouse condo overlooking the water with high ceilings, big windows and a deck. But when we travel I can just lock it up and walk away without worrying about it, knowing that maintenance is being taken care of.
Great deal. There are condos and then there are condos.
Condos have their rightful place in the housing mix. Just not at today’s crazy FB flipper prices.
Condos should be better built though. If they were built with the needs of real owner-occupants in mind, they’d have less granite and better soundproofing.
Soundproofing. That’s the key to transforming a condo from an apt. into a home. Some of the NYC condo/apts. are soundproofed so extraordinarily that they ARE homes.
“388 attached-home units on the market in May”
But Vancouver’s population is over 500,000. In the 75,000-population Chicago suburb where I live, we have 624 attached-home units on the MLS.
not even close, the population is 143560
http://vancouver.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm
keep in mind that monthy sales are 50-70 homes so 388 is about a 6 month supply
Yeah, this is Washington state.
Vancouver, Washington is not that great a town, kind of a mediocrity. It’s really a Portland suburb, it’s chief advantage being no state income taxes versus a high state tax in Oregon.
“I have never understood the attraction of some people for condos.”
The attraction of condos can be traced back to the Steve Martin song “King Tut”:
He was born in Arizona, got a condo made of stone-a
King Tut!
Did anyone see the OC reigster story today where Gary “15% in the bag” Watts now claims 10-12%. HUH!?!?!? I thought it was in the bag? One realtor from the story called it a full carsh! One of these guys it wrong!
Broker Dick Lobin from Huntington Beach was even blunter: “It’s a moot point. Real estate is beyond a soft landing. It has crashed – for the time being.”
Gary Watts, the Mission Viejo broker and economist, says “I would imagine that a ’soft landing’ would have home price appreciation equaling the inflation rate, but O.C. home prices won’t even be in the ‘approach pattern!’ We are and will continue to climb to an ‘altitude’ (with price gains) between 10 percent and 12 percent this year. And if we pick up a tail wind in the latter half of this year, we may climb to 15 percent. Next year’s appreciation should also keep O.C. home prices up in the air with no plans for landing anytime soon.”
gary watts with his neverending hype BS is going to land him in that jail cell they were holding for ken lay
News at 11:
Did-da-didi-da… This just into the newsroom. Gary Watts has been arrested for faking his own condo flips. Apparently in a complex scheme to keep the real estate market alive Watts started using dead people to purchase vacant properties and report sales to the MLS. The body of Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron was found in the end unti of a Laguna Beach Triplex owned by Watts when a cable installer became suspicious while adding the Nashville Channel to neighbor Elvis Presely’s service…
Today’s Seattle Times did a Rah-rah article about Californians coming to WA. State to buy up apartment buildings for rentals and converisons to condos.
The angle was : Be Very Afraid. Rents Are Going Up.
They interviewed a couple of the CA equity buyers who had just been buying down in - gasp– Phoenix ! and were now continuing on with a plunge into Seattle.
Personally, I think RE’s going to be hit equally badly all over the US. But I also think that, theoretically anyway, if some markets were to hold up better than others, Seattle would hold up a tad better than Phoenix in an ideal world.
So it was stunning to think that some of these investors are apparently making no distinctions at all. If they get burned super bad in Phoenix won’t that make their Seattle hit all that much harder to take?
It’s like these guys are leaving themselves no leeway at all. Just loading up on properties everywhere.
From http://www.latimes.com/classified/realestate/news/la-re-auctions9jul09,0,3494596,full.story?coll=la-home-realestate
Minutes later, after a rat-a-tat-tat of climbing offers for a condo, investment partners and auction veterans Robin Morgan and Miriam Wimberly came up with the winning bid of $436,000.
“I think we got a bargain,” Wimberly said. Agents say that comps for the two-bedroom, 2 1/2 -bathroom condo in 1,023 square feet suggest the sale price was right on target for the neighborhood.
I know that some are in denial that condos go down faster than SFRs in every downturn, or that there is even a downturn every decade or so, or that we’re currently barely into year one of a 5+ year crash, but what kind of idiocy does it take to believe this is a “bargain?” It’s like buying SUNW at $97/share the day after it dips from $104 in 2000 and then having a noosepaper publish a quote from an “investor” who got a “bargain.”
Just heard a lady on the tv say LA real estate was “like gold”. Her condo doubled in price. They always go up, to the moon!!
Classic case of the last GF casting about for the nonexistent next GF. LA real estate was like gold. Just like gold until gold crashed. Oh wait, just like gold even after gold crashed.
Robert’s Rule #114a: Condos are not real estate, condos are concert tickets.
gold just corrected during a bull market, it was even as bad as other gold corrections.
But the price of oil is real nice, steady, firm and solid!
It is probably all a symptom of the same problem.
It is probably all a symptom of the same problem.
That problem being the monetary system that we live under is set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
“Any kind of home ownership is going to build equity, and you don’t build equity renting.”
oh man, he just made my little list of stupid RE bubble quotes.
Do you like being broke? Keep renting
Renting versus buying
It’s a renter’s market
Housing market turning in favor of renters
( If he is bullish on gold, let’s just chalk that up to a broken clock being right twice a day.)
haha, you’ll buy one day, the price will convince you.
(gold just corrected during a bull market, it was even as bad as other gold corrections.)
sorry, I meant to say it WASN’T even as bad as other gold corrections.
Don’t like gold? Well try oil. Everybody is soo convinced that it is going down big time, that I am almost certain that the exact opposite will happen. As for the condo speculators they can go hang themselves from their appartment balcony.
Oil is going up.. We are in a 12 year bull run for oil. Once folks get use to 70 oil it’ll trend to 80 and so on.
Oil is in a hold pattern for now since it rebounded the last couple weks buy I’d recommend COP on any dip.
as for gold wait till it test new lows, sub 600 again.
then buy like mad anywhere near 500-540 if it gets that low.. start phasing in sub 600.
Housing will trend down nationally for 8-10 years.. My folks can’t sell their house in Massachusetts. beatiful old colonial on a huge chunk of land reaonably priced for Mass.
Secondary bubble areas. SLC ALbaqurque Boise look ou.. next 4/5 years will deflate.. possible exception is SLC casue of Defense spending.
If you have cash today buy natural gas.
Look at EOG CHK for big ones, then go from there. been beaten down cause gas is 5 bucks.. think that’ll last????
good luck ALL
Robert Cote - your newsflash about Watts was great. Would really like to see his fat ass in handcuffs. He deserves it - along with all of the other BS RE shrills.
Here comes trouble in Sin City. Investor needs to clsoe a 1031 exchange on a 2 bed condo he bought 2 years ago for $90,000. There are 3 comps listed for 189,000, 192,000,193,000. He is offering his 2 bed condo for $169,000 if it closes before July 31. Will this sale screw the other listings?