“Speculative Overhang Has Yet To Be Bled From Market”
The Herald Tribune reports from Florida. “The Sarasota Association of Realtors wants to secede from the Sarasota-Bradenton Metropolitan Area, at least as far as real estate statistics are concerned. In a first-ever move, the group released Sarasota housing data in advance of the monthly release of data from the Florida Association of Realtors, scheduled for today.”
“On a stand-alone basis, Sarasota’s results are better than its immediate neighbors, and that’s the point of the group’s analysis, said Kathy Roberts, chief executive of the Sarasota Association of Realtors. ‘We’re trying to give our local slant,’ she said. ‘We want to differentiate ourselves.’”
“The group said that total sales have returned to the ‘more normal figures of 2002 and prior years.’ Using only Sarasota Multiple Listing Service data, the run-up in both sales and prices experienced in 2003, 2004 and 2005 is evident.”
“Despite the Realtors’ contention, though, 2006 is still slower so far even than 2002 with 5,158 total home and condominium sales, a 16.8 percent decline from that year. The 2002 market median price was $182,000 for homes and condos. Today’s median price is $328,000, still an appreciation of 80 percent in four years.”
“‘The number of properties sold in higher price ranges has buoyed the median price in our marketplace, both for single family homes and condominiums,’ said Felix Power, the association’s president. ‘Though price-reduced signs are evident in almost every neighborhood, prices are adjusting to the realities of the market which no longer reflects the extraordinary price escalation of the last three years,’ Power said.”
“Single-family home sales from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30 were 3,510, down nearly 37 percent from the 2005 total of 5,562. Condos also dropped in 2006 to 1,648, from the 2,898 last year, a decline of 43 percent.”
“The speculative ‘overhang’ has yet to be bled from the market, said John Tuccillo, a former National Association of Realtors chief economist and consultant with offices in Sarasota. That accounts for the huge inventory increase from the earlier years and the slower pace of absorption.”
From Myrtle Beach Online in South Carolina. “Myrtle Beach’s strong job growth makes it less vulnerable to a housing bubble despite 60 percent appreciation in the past five years, a new report says. ‘There has been home price appreciation but because employment gains have been so strong in the region, it provides enough of an offset that if there was a home price decline, it’s likely consumers would be able to weather it,’ said Ivana Rupcic, economist for RBC Financial Group.”
“The report doesn’t specify what kind of jobs are growing on the Strand, but, statewide, the largest increase has been in construction - which is likely the case in Myrtle Beach, said Tom Maeser, president of the Fortune Academy of Real Estate. ‘It’s a dilemma if your high job growth is due to construction [jobs],’ Maeser said.”
From the State. “Home sales in the Upstate started to slip in September, mirroring a trend along the coast and in most of the nation, according to the South Carolina Association of Realtors. Five of six Upstate regions showed declines for September, compared to a year ago.”
“The Piedmont region, which includes Rock Hill, York, Lancaster and Chester counties, showed the sharpest drop, at 34.5 percent.”
“But Butch Brindel, CEO of the Piedmont Regional Association of Realtors, said the figure is an anomaly and home sales are strong in the region near rapidly growing Charlotte. ‘Everybody’s talking about the housing bubble bursting,’ he said. ‘The bubble’s not bursting here.’”
“Nick Kremydas, head of the state Realtors group, said one reason for the declining numbers could be that investors, who have been pulling out along the coast, are now leaving other areas of the state, such as lake resort communities in some of the Upstate regions. ‘The short-term investors have left the state,’ he said. ‘We can say that now statewide.’”
OT from Virginia:
In a two-page letter dated Oct. 10, Centex Homes Division president Robert K. Davis notified Mayor George Fitch that the Dallas-based company “will not move forward and complete the purchase” of about 385 acres for a gated subdivision on U.S. 29 at the town’s southwestern edge.
. . .
Likewise, Supervisor Chester Stribling (Lee District) didn’t expect the company to scuttle the project. “I thought they were committed to it,” he said. “Centex worked hard on it.”
But he added, “It was a rich deal. Centex was going to give all that money. And it was high-end expensive housing and the market’s cold.”
http://tinyurl.com/y7dmd8
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“Centex wanted to build 298 single-family homes, which would have started at $900,000 apiece, according to the company.”
_______________________________________________________
My Gawd who pays these prices.
He talking about almost third of a billion dollars ( conservative estimate ) to house three hundred families. Lets say that’s 4 people per family. Say 1200 people in the subdivision.
Then $ 300,000,000 / 1200 people = $ 250,000 per person for housing.
Completely insane.
It was going to be a 55+ community.
Even more insane.
And I bet that the local school board budgeted 2 kids per house in their funding plan and would have wondered why the kids did not show up at school from these 55+ age homes. Everybody along the way was betting on getting their piece of the action from these millionaire homeowners.
- ‘Everybody along the way was betting on getting their piece of the action ‘
This is the most important part of the equation that is most overlooked!
Here in So Cal you can see everywhere the additional business that has started (Retail, furniture, hardware, burgers, olive garden’s etc).
It is not just about the run up in home prices - but the
“BETTING” on the continuation thereof.
Graspeer: “And I bet that the local school board budgeted 2 kids per house in their funding plan and would have wondered why the kids did not show up at school…”
I think that will be one of the interesting MSM post-mortem subjects when the smoke clears — how so many taxing jurisdictions, due to nothing but laziness or inexperience in data collection, failed to note that so many buyers either didn’t have kids, as in this case, or were speculators never intending to live in the units.
I hate politics, but I’d just about want to be on a county commission for the sole purpose of rolling back all the increased spending that’s been going on since 2000, when giddy adminidoofs used up the windfall property taxes.
Here on this Maine island, the school-age population has been decreasing for years, while retirees have been moving in. Does the school budget go down? never
Fitch is cool-
these county/city admin zombies better start chopping silly spending programs
they had an ERDU? translater at back to school night
Sales of U.S. existing homes fell for the sixth month in a row in September as median sales prices fell for the second straight month, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. Inventories of unsold homes fell for the second straight month, a sign that the market is correcting, said Laurence Yun, a senior economist for the realtors group. Sales fell 1.9% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.18 million in September, the lowest since January 2005. The decrease was slightly larger than the consensus expectation of a drop to 6.23 million, according to a survey conducted by MarketWatch.
there’s your YOY decline as predicted here on the true oracle BB
LIErah !
Why the Boom Will Not Bust! Lereah’s 2006 book.
Totally discredited.
David
http://bubblemeter.blogspot.com
Here ya go…. fasten your seatbelts for the latest in spin:
“The worst is behind us as far as a market correction — this is likely the trough for sales,” said David Lereah, the Realtors’ chief economist. “When consumers recognize that home sales are stabilizing, we’ll see the buyers who’ve been on the sidelines get back into the market.”
Stop it!! My side hurts. This putz makes John Lovitz’ pathological liar character look like a piker. Was Lierah wearing the fake nose and big red shoes when he said this?
where is his book ranked on amazon?
feb 2006,the trend was clear then
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #690,722 in Books
And can somebody please point out all these buyers on the sidelines? New flippers are gone, qualified buyers bought already, UNqualified buyers bought already, and everybody else is waiting for the falling knife to hit the floor.
(I do feel sorry for the people with divorces/medical/relcations etc)
Just a little friendly reminder from last year.
“House prices are unlikely to continue rising at current rates,” said Bernanke, who served on the Fed board from 2002 until June. However, he added, “a moderate cooling in the housing market, should one occur, would not be inconsistent with the economy continuing to grow at or near its potential next year.”
Greenspan has said recently that he sees no national bubble in home prices, but rather “froth” in some local markets. Prices may fall in some areas, he indicated. And he warned in a speech last month that some borrowers and lenders may suffer “significant losses” if cooling house prices make it difficult to repay new types of riskier home loans….”
Washington Post October 27, 2005
http://tinyurl.com/85v9s
I’m sure Lereah himself is even thinking: “Gee, how much longer will general society continue to listen to my fluff? Now, what new book title can I sell these suckers….maybe, “Maroons and Buffoons”.
“The worst is behind us as far as a market correction–this is likely the trough for sales”
–David Lereah, NAR chief economist
“We are surrounding them and pounding them. The whole trend has changed and we are going to finalize this very soon.”"
–Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, former Iraqi Minister of Information
“We are surrounding them and pounding them. The whole trend has changed and we are going to finalize this very soon.””
–Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, former Iraqi Minister of Information
He was right, just a little off on his timing.
Liereah is right too - just WAY off on his timing!!
BigDaddy, does Lereah end all of his sentences with “yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket”? He should.
From AP:
“The median price of a single-family home fell to $219,800 last month, a drop of 2.5 percent from the price in September 2005. That was the biggest year-over-year price decline in records going back nearly four decades.”
This is from a 25 Oct AP Financial story. Most likely this article will make it to the financial pages of many, many newspapers. And it’s nothing that all of us haven’t heard about for months.
This blog IS the cutting edge of RE bubble news! Why go anywhere else–they are only going to be reporting on last week’s news.
Here is the link to the AP story:
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/10/25/D8KVN3000.html
“[MSM] reporting last week’s news”–do you really think they’ll be that current? I expect no less that last week’s SPIN on last month’s news…
“On a stand-alone basis, Sarasota’s results are better than its immediate neighbors, and that’s the point of the group’s analysis”
Right. Just like the Santa Barbara Realtors refusing to give out data once it got bad, and the CAR rejiggering the HAI numbers to make them less horrible (and preclude comparisons to the past). It’s pretty sad that we rely so heavily on Realtor numbers. Each transaction is in the public record. Why don’t journalists go there for data?
Maybe the Florida Chamber of Commerce can get NOAA to re-define the hurricane scales such that the lowest windspeed for a Category 1 hurricane is 90mph. Then they can talk about how the next few years have the fewest hurricanes on record, and that Florida is projected to continue this trend forever. That should help the slumping housing market.
We just came from Sarasota and they are going through pain. Our friends dropped their house from 295k to 250k and were willing to take 220k. The only offer they got was 185k. Luckily they don’t owe very much and were staying in town so they are just using it as a rental. If they had to sell it would have been brutal.
The building is crazy also. There were about 4 major, 200+ units, of condo conversions in the last year. Not to mention all the 1mil+ new codnos downtown.
90 MPH to start, with an annual inflation factor.
Lame attempts by those asshat Florida Realtors(tm) to massage the numbers, milking every bit of sunshine they can use to spin-up one last round of sales…..as in, “put on a happy face and sell some inventory, dammit !!”
That’s one last drink at the bar for most of these Realtor types. Never again. Never.
All of this will be aired out again in the upcoming media frenzy that will docu-drama The Big Crash.
The Big Lies will be exposed as will be the Big Liars. There will be investigations at the local, state and federal level. You betcha. Politicians will bandwagon on their concern for Joe Sixpack and Mary Soccermom and the toxic loans that they were hoodwinked into.
There will be lots of blame to go around. I don’t see any way that all the players in this sham market will go unscathed. There will be allegations of fraud in financing, appraisals, property transfers….etc.
Every part of the Real Estate transaction has been contaminated by easy money and greed.
In five years, property purchases and transfers will be more transparent and Realtors will have gone the way of the Travel Agents and the Stockbrokers.
Title: “Job growth balances home prices”
“it’s likely consumers would be able to weather it”
but…
“The report doesn’t specify what kind of jobs are growing, but, statewide, the largest increase has been in construction”
How do these people make money as journalists? They are really just typists.
Agreed.
What a Fender Head. Construction jobs constitute the majority of all the additional employment added over the last 4 years. As these jobs are melting away they leave behind the service industry work to ‘make ends meet.’
“The speculative ‘overhang’ has yet to be bled from the market, said John Tuccillo, a former National Association of Realtors chief economist and consultant with offices in Sarasota. That accounts for the huge inventory increase from the earlier years and the slower pace of absorption.”
Bleeding = lower prices, sellers getting gored…
From the Sarasota article:
“With the continued migration of wealthy retirees into the region, any price decline will likely be short-lived, the report said.”
Whew! I was afraid that Florida’s fundamentals had changed. Sorry Vegas, Phoenix, Ashland, Tahoe, etc. looks like FL gets the rich ones. You’ll have to squeak by with what’s left over.
Oh, I forgot about downtown condo developers. Sorry, guys, you’ll need to prey on the poorer retirees, unless you are near a Florida beach. Given the paltry retirement savings (on average) of the boomers, there isn’t all that much money to go around.
“Given the paltry retirement savings (on average) of the boomers, there isn’t all that much money to go around. “
But, but, but, all the boomers will sell their houses for a million dollars to people who on average make $50,000 a year.
Quick update on the existing home sales report is available at my blog. Looks like sales rate dropped to a 32-month low, while inventory moderated a bit (absolute number, not months-supply). Here’s the kicker: If my spreadsheet is right, this was the biggest YOY decline for single-family home medians in any month in NAR history. See my chart …
ttp://interestrateroundup.blogspot.com/
So those are the national numbers? Yikes! Glad to see we’ve finally stared the correction phase. I wonder what outside-the-box thinking the NAR will come up with to spin the numbers going forward. My guess is that they just lay low with the numbers, making them hard to find.
Yes, these median price stats are national figures for single-family homes only going all the way back to 1969 (NAR condo+SFH stats don’t go back as far).
home sales are strong in the region near rapidly growing Charlotte. I work in LA with folks in CLT and I can say new homes are all anyone is buying/building. Some of my co-workers there have 2 or 3 homes (they are inexpensive on a square foot basis) that they rent out or let relatives live in. Its the new homes that are pushing the numbers. Why buy an existing home when lots are 5% of the cost and you can build to your spec. Some homes there took 1 year to sell in 04 and 05. Its a strange market and will be interesting to watch long term. As this work force gets more mobile (we are software developers) it will be interesting to see how many of them can hold multiple homes for 12 months and live elsewhere.
” Some of my co-workers there have 2 or 3 homes..”
Jeez only 3?, What’s wrong with these people?….I had 3 when I turned 18 I have the whole collection now…sarcasm off~
Sales ,and price are down again….People around the world will soon be getting a long needed lesson on fundamentals…..
I would NEVER buy a new home in this market with the type/quality of construction most are built under! Nor would I buy one a few years old.
A friend bought a 2001 built house in a upper-end area…the windows leaked and so did the doors, etc… had to spend mucho $$ to fix (essentially, the entire outer brick shell and window installation was defective). It was 3 months out of warranty when this was discovered (of course!).
Meanwhile in my 1935 built home…just normal maintenance. Sure a bit of settling decades ago…but it’s a known entity. The settling of a 2001 or 2006 house is unknown.
I SO agree with you about the construction quality, everyone’s read my incessant bellyaching about it. Most older homes were built to last. These soulless, faceless, crammed in development homes look like communist country construction and it’s enough to make a person believe in conspiracy theories. I do know that in Florida, some insurance companies won’t insure unless you purchase a home built after 1980. Screw them. Looks like they are a** in glove with the developers/builders.
Actually, when things get really bad in a couple of years and most builders are out of business or scrounging…one may be able to find someone honest and able to do high quality construction again. They may be mostly the only ones left (or re-entering).
Compare a house built in 1985 with one built in 1990 in Austin TX.
There’s no good reason not to have more than one house when they only go up!
I remember at the beginning of the bubble the feeling that I wished I had bought a more expensive house, because the appreciation would be many more dollars assuming the same percentage increase. Luckily, there was also an alter-ego who kept saying that there was no point in having a much larger fixed expense when things stopped going up at an unsustainable pace.
People who own multiple homes are the hidden inventory that will hit the market when they panic after the first wave of declines.
Yep, Charlotte will save the housing world. Charlotte better pray nothing bad ever happens to Bank of America. The city of Charlotte is probably more dependent on that one company than other city in the U.S. is to one company. There is not a lot of economic diversity in Charlotte. It is Bank of America and home building driving the entire Charlotte economy.
Charlotte has become a poster child for urban spawl. Driving 485 will soon be like driving in L.A. No thank you. But hey, it will save the housing market. LMAO.
OT (looking for the bits bucket) — SD commercial office vacancies are rising along with residential vacancies, thanks to rents that nobody can afford…
Hint to SD office owners, landlords and homesellers: You may need to lower your wishing prices in order to make a deal.
———————————————————————————————-
Demand for office space slowing
Prospective tenants may be balking at rents
By Mike Freeman
STAFF WRITER
October 25, 2006
Despite a relatively strong economy, many of San Diego County’s office landlords are finding only tepid demand for their buildings, according to a recent report.
Vacancy rates inched higher during the third quarter in many of the county’s business districts, said CB Richard Ellis, a large nationwide commercial broker. Countywide net absorption – a real estate term that measures the total amount of square feet leased minus the total square feet vacated – is still positive but has slipped to about half of what it was at this time last year.
The higher vacancy stems in part from new construction increasing the supply of office buildings available. But perhaps a more telling reason for the falloff in demand is the high rents many landlords are seeking, brokers say.
“I think it’s rate shock right now,” said Buddy Norman, a senior vice president with Burnham Real Estate Services. “We’ve run out of law firms that are willing to pay $3.50 a square foot. They’ve all done their deals in Carmel Valley. Who else can pay $3.50 a foot? It’s the law firms and the venture capital firms and some brokerage houses. The tech guys can’t pay that.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20061025/news_1b25office.html
Same everywhere. Here’s a nice perspective on the hedge fund bubble vs. the housing bubble:
http://jeffmatthewsisnotmakingthisup.blogspot.com/2006/10/hedge-funds-game-over.html
Txchick
What exactly is a “hedge fund”?
I always thought that they were a pool of investor funds used to pay Mexicans to trim bushes. Looks like I was wrong.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
It is a fund that is lightly regulated private investment fund often characterized by unconventional investment strategies and often making use of legal structures (sometimes offshore) to mitigate the effects of local regulation and tax régimes. In contrast to regular investment funds, which are usually limited to only being able to “go long” (buy) instruments such as bonds, equities or money markets, hedge funds also have the ability to “short” (sell) instruments which they believe will fall in price. In this way, hedge funds are able to create more complex investment structures which can, for example, profit in times of market volatility, or even in a falling market. They are primarily organized as limited partnerships, and previously were often simply called “limited partnerships” and were grouped with other similar partnerships such as those that invested in oil development. Hedge funds are normally open to institutional or otherwise accredited investors.
They are unregulated funds whose purpose is to trim investors’ wealth by charging exorbitant fees for little-if-any added value to index fund investing.
P.S. I am guessing that “unregulated” + “institutional” = “opportunities for fund managers to invest in hedge funds in a mutually-beneficial arrangement for all parties except for those whose assets are invested.” Check out Amaranth & SD County govt pension plan for a case in point.
Commercial in SV is less than $1 a sqft. Good luck in SD if you have a startup.
San Diego is not a good place to start any business. Costs are way over anyone’s budget. That’s why there isn’t any high paying jobs in SD and the real estate just makes life miserable in SD.
As mentioned awhile back, the law firm I was at in San Diego (a big LA firm) recruited at UT law school and got quite a few people to come out. It was an easy sell.
Until people saw housing costs. And this was in the ’80s. The firm lost 100% of the UT grads back to Texas.
Plenty of high paying jobs in SD, especially in engineering and life sciences. But you are right, home prices are waaay out of whack, and SD employers give no income adjustment as do employers in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
We get paid in “Sunshine Dollars” as a recruiter friend puts it.
(Sales of U.S. existing homes fell for the sixth month in a row in September as median sales prices fell for the second straight month, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday.)
Ah, but real estate is local. And the NAR metro area data for 3Q will be out in a few weeks, just in time for the Christmas shopping season.
it may be local but it will spread to other countries eventually
OT: obscure market stuff:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/25/news/economy/homesales/index.htm?source=yahoo_quote
“Home prices fall for a second straight month
Existing home sales drop more than expected, median prices decline.”
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B1CC0D065%2D3980%2D4AD4%2D83E1%2DDD2C8E6B92A8%7D&source=blq%2Fyhoo&dist=yhoo&siteid=yhoo
“Centex Corp. said late Tuesday that fiscal second-quarter net income dropped 59% from a year earlier as home builders struggle to adjust to the housing slowdown after years of higher sales and prices.”
“net orders fell 28% from the previous year on record cancellations and the inability of some buyers to sell their existing homes.”
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7b2C454029-4F7B-4208-8C28-4196ABB71BAC%7d&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo
“Brookfield Homes Corp. (BHS) after Tuesday’s closing bell reported third-quarter net earnings of $27.6 million, or $1.03 a share, down 27% from $37.8 million, or $1.20 a share, during the year-ago period. The Fairfax, Va.-based home builder posted revenue of $176.2 million vs. $267.7 million. Brookfield said the decrease in housing revenue was primarily due to 137 fewer units closed during the quarter compared with a year ago”
OT Richmond Fed Report
The Richmond Fed Report (RFR) was issued yesterday. The results were bearish and support a slow down in the economy. Recall last month after the dismal Philadelphia Fed Report (PFR) the Market was inspired by the more upbeat RFR. This month the PFR continued it bearish trend and was followed by a bearish RFR. I didn’t see any coverage of the Richmond Report in the mass media yesterday. The Richmond manufacturing and service sector reports can be found at the Richmond Fed’s website:
http://tinyurl.com/y3tesl
I saw this yesterday and agree w/ you on the importance. Tomorrows report on third quarter productivity may come in between 1.25 and 1.5%. Significantly lower than the street estimates.
it’s so hard to connect the dots………….
“The report doesn’t specify what kind of jobs are growing on the Strand, but, statewide, the largest increase has been in construction - which is likely the case in Myrtle Beach, said Tom Maeser, president of the Fortune Academy of Real Estate. ‘It’s a dilemma if your high job growth is due to construction [jobs],’ Maeser said.”
Existing home sales report awful and includes commentary from that idiot Learah that this is the trough.
He should stick to writing comic books. He is good at that.
Whether it’s California or North Carolina, a specuvestor is a specuvestor. They’re all gonna get burned. Maybe the Carolina specuvestors will just have first and second degree burns. The California ones will be crispy and charcoal colored.
“The worst is behind us as far as a market correction — this is likely the trough for sales,” said David Lereah, the Realtors’ chief economist. “When consumers recognize that home sales are stabilizing, we’ll see the buyers who’ve been on the sidelines get back into the market.”
However, analysts said that the weakness in housing could last for several more months with a real upturn in sales not occurring until next spring.
Wow! Several more months and then it is back to the boom days. Why are these people allowed to lie like this to the public?
back in bible days, a prophet who was found to be false received capital punishment.
haven’t we gotten past the false part yet?
Here’s the clip on foreclosures from last night’s NBC Nightly News-
http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?g=03918390-5BBA-4DDE-8DCC-96E941543C2C&f=00&fg=email
“Myrtle Beach’s strong job growth makes it less vulnerable to a housing bubble despite 60 percent appreciation in the past five years, a new report says. ‘…because employment gains have been so strong in the region, it provides enough of an offset…if there was a home price decline…’ said Ivana Rupcic, economist for RBC Financial Group.”
Are you sure about your soft landing contention Rupic, its different here b/c of job gains? A 20-30 percent price decline could prove very depressing to construction and homeowners and lead to less spending, IMO.
“But Butch Brindel, CEO of the Piedmont Regional Association of Realtors, said the figure is an anomaly and home sales are strong in the region near rapidly growing Charlotte. ‘Everybody’s talking about the housing bubble bursting,’ he said. ‘The bubble’s not bursting here.”
Of course not BubbleMan™, you’re market is insulated from all regional and national macroeconomic influences; moreover, Floridians and Northeners are not migrating to your market so that has absolutely no impact on local prices. I would offer you some Florida swamp land but we’re sold out!
Any potential Buyers have the gratefully Hit the Garden Gate at 98(mph) and they aren’t lQQKING Back leaving the Dreamhome Loser’s Dazed, Confused and TRAPPED !
“Happy Halloween 2006 Suzanne !”
“Prices are adjusting to the realities of the market .”
After years where “going with your gut” was the trendy decision-making paradigm, I’ve noticed that the word “reality” is making a big comeback, not just in terms of housing, but everywhere in our culture.
What are you, some kind of librul?
So the Sarasota-Bradenton Band of Brothers is about to split up. Sort of a metaphor for modern marriage. Hung together in the good times, but now, we can squeeze a little advantage for ourselves without you folks along and, well, it’s been nice but…you understand.
To be fair, the Sarasota brokers may have gotten so rich that they want to build their own offices and forego the economies of scale they were enjoying as contiguous neighbors to Bradenton. Reminds me a bit of the two guys and a bear joke — “I just have to outrun you.”
I’ve seem other maneuverings that accomplish the same smoke screen about inventories — one is to change MLS services and use double listings to start, only slowly pruning the duplicates.
What are double listings?
What goes up eventually comes back down. Many realtors are themselves investors. They are just buying time and also trying to convince the suckers that NOW is a great time to buy.
“The worst is behind us as far as a market correction — this is likely the trough for sales,” said David Lereah, the Realtors’ chief economist. “When consumers recognize that home sales are stabilizing, we’ll see the buyers who’ve been on the sidelines get back into the market.”
Somebody please save that one for posterity… When this whole thing melts down, he’s going to get that quote shoved up his posterior.
Oops, yeah, I better get off the Sidelines in a great big hurry, especially when I can rent two houses (maine & florida) for the price of buying one!
“Myrtle Beach’s strong job growth makes it less vulnerable to a housing bubble despite 60 percent appreciation in the past five years, a new report says. ‘There has been home price appreciation but because employment gains have been so strong in the region, it provides enough of an offset that if there was a home price decline, it’s likely consumers would be able to weather it,’ said Ivana Rupcic, economist for RBC Financial Group.”
Not only is a lot of this growth in construction, but the rest of the jobs are service and tourist related. I am sure their incomes have increased by 60% in the past five years? What a joke! I really hope this economist doesn’t believe what he is saying. If he does, he should be fired. If he doesn’t, he should also be fired.