“It’s All About Pricing, Pricing, Pricing” In California
The LA Times reports form California. “It’s not easy being a seller today, what with homes on the market seemingly everywhere. Should owners underprice or stick with neighborhood comparables? How long should their homes be on the market before they consider lowering the price? It’s all about pricing, pricing, pricing. Not last year’s. Last month’s.”
“That’s the word from sellers and agents across Southern California facing the realities of this fall’s buyer’s market. ‘Pricing is critical,’ said Sean McLin, a Los Angeles-based agent. ‘Buyers start their search from there.’”
“Forget about pricing your home higher with wiggle room for negotiating. The higher the price, the more likely the property will sit on the market gaining white-elephant status. It’s also better to be at the lower end of a neighborhood’s price range than the top.”
“Forial Zaken took agent Larry Heller’s advice to drop the price when her 2,100-square-foot home in Granada Hills received no offers at $929,000 after one month on the market in August. Two price reductions later, it sold for $810,000 a month ago.”
“‘When you’ve done everything to make the house desirable and it’s accessible to buyers, but they aren’t choosing it, then we know what the house is not worth,’ said Syd Leibovitch, a broker (in) Beverly Hills. ‘It’s time to lower the price and make sure you out-compete others in the marketplace.’”
The Fresno Bee. “Home builders are cutting back because sales have dropped off dramatically. ‘It’s simple math,” said Mitch Covington, president of the Building Industry Association of the San Joaquin Valley. ‘If you are down to building 80 homes from 300, you only need half the people.’”
“Home builders have excess inventory because many would-be buyers cancelled contracts, either because they could not sell their existing houses, got cold feet or were investors who pulled back when activity slowed, builders say. In October, 13% of new home sales in Fresno County fell through, according to Hanley Wood.”
“‘Everyone is cutting back,’ said Alan Newman, VP of Beazer Homes in Fresno. As a result, Beazer laid off 12 employees in Fresno, or 25% of its corporate staff, Newman said. Two other national builders, D.R. Horton and Centex, are among those that cut staff.”
“‘The market is terrible,’ said Steve Lutton, regional VP of Lennar Homes, a nationwide company that builds in Fresno under the Cambridge banner. ‘Buyers were standing in line a year and a half ago. Now you have to find the buyers. You have to aggressively market your homes.’”
The Press Democrat. “Pacific Lumber Co. on Friday terminated 90 employees, citing declines in timber harvests and lumber prices. Brian Connors, an 18-year employee who was laid off, said he wasn’t surprised. ‘We could see the writing on the wall. Lumber sales were down, housing starts were down,’ he said.”
The Union Tribune. “San Diego County’s leading economic indicators declined for the seventh month in a row in October, dragged down by the continuing decline in home building and a rise in unemployment filings, according to a report released by the University of San Diego.”
“The biggest hurdle in the coming year, said USD economist Alan Gin, is the continuing decline in the local real estate market.”
“‘The weak housing market will hurt the local economy in three areas: slow or negative job growth in construction and real estate-related jobs, weaker consumer spending due to lower home equity and a reverse wealth effect, people feeling poorer as the values of their homes decline, and more homes lost to foreclosures,’ Gin said.”
“One sign of the real estate weakness is that residential building permits declined in October for the third month in a row. Only 259 single-family units were authorized in October, the lowest number since November 1994.”
“The decline in housing permits is reflected by layoffs at construction and real estate firms. Since hitting a peak in June, construction firms have shed 3,400 workers. In October, there were 1,400 fewer construction workers than there had been the previous year, the first year-to-year decline since June 1994.”
“Real estate and credit remediation firms have dropped 400 workers in the past two months. Stan Sexton, a real estate broker in La Mesa, said that more job losses are in the offing. ‘It’s still a little early for the job losses,’ Sexton said. ‘The blood is not in the streets yet. You’ll see more job losses in February or March, when the agents have to pay their annual dues.’”
“Gin warned that the national economy will also be hurt by the real estate slowdown in coming months. ‘Policymakers, particularly at the Federal Reserve, find themselves in a quandary trying to balance concerns about inflation with worries about the impact of a rapidly slumping national housing market,’ he said.”
The Press Enterprise. “Inventories of unsold condominiums began climbing nationwide during the past year, causing a glut of unsold units in formerly hot markets. Developers have quickly shifted gears and started either canceling condo projects or converting the planned units to rental apartments.”
“Bob Patterson, vice president in the Ontario office of CB Richard Ellis, said the condo conversion market died in Inland Southern California earlier this year and it is possible that units in buildings that were not sold out will become rentals.”
‘If you are down to building 80 homes from 300, you only need half the people.’”
That’s some interesting math.
They’re not counting the illegals…
your also down selling raw materials…
“declines in timber harvests and lumber prices”
Lumber down 50% year to date.
cost of construction way down compared to 2 years ago..
That’s what I’m counting on, if I can convince my wife that we want to build instead of buy existing. In my next life, won’t be no committees.
Gotta pad the office.
“If you are down to building 80 homes from 300, you only need half the people.”
Man obviously had previous management career in Government.
Not everything is linear. That’s the whole reason why economics of scale favor high-volume manufacturing.
If you’ve got one mechanic and one body guy restoring two cars a month, you can’t lay off one of them when the demand drops 50%…
“‘The weak housing market will hurt the local economy in three areas: slow or negative job growth in construction and real estate-related jobs, weaker consumer spending due to lower home equity and a reverse wealth effect, people feeling poorer as the values of their homes decline, and more homes lost to foreclosures,’ Gin said.”
Oh….only those three areas? Whew! Jeez!…and I thought it was something serious. (sarcasm off)
California better pray for the San Andreas to finally snap and send them tumbling into the sea. It would be a prettier and more noble end than what those poor bastards have in store for them in ‘07 & ‘08.
From the article………..
“But USD economist Alan Gin, who compiles the monthly index of economic indicators, sees a silver lining in the decline.
The 0.1 percent slippage in the index in October was the smallest decline in seven months. And improvement in local stock prices, consumer confidence and the national economy suggests that the outlook may be bottoming out – although Gin still projects a slowdown through at least the first half of 2007.”
Another freaking idiot economist, the downturn will be just starting to get into full swing by the first half 2007.
O’boy…….why do I bother to respond to this sh*t
“And improvement in local stock prices, consumer confidence and the national economy suggests that the outlook may be bottoming out ”
Hahahaha! “Improvement in the national economy”. Good one!
“California better pray for the San Andreas to finally snap and send them tumbling into the sea. It would be a prettier and more noble end than what those poor bast@rds have in store for them in ‘07 & ‘08.”
Imploder begs to differ. Imploder has to admit he prefers financial meltdown over tumbling into sea, and he shall pray accordingly.
I’m a contractor praying for an 8 on the richter scale…and lord, I promise I won’t piss it all away this time.
Very many won’t get that. But that was funny as hell.
I would prefer regular small earthquakes to scare everyone out. I’ll accept just enough damange to keep a few contractors employed, but no 8.0…
Neil
‘ would prefer regular small earthquakes to scare everyone out’
I remember running into two people who were so terrified after the 94 Northridge quake that they were moving back to Oklahoma, which has 1/27th the population of California and where a single tornado a few years back killed more people than all the earthquakes in CA since 1970.
Just California? We have a national bubble.
“One sign of the real estate weakness is that residential building permits declined in October for the third month in a row. Only 259 single-family units were authorized in October, the lowest number since November 1994. The decline in housing permits is reflected by layoffs at construction and real estate firms. Since hitting a peak in June, construction firms have shed 3,400 workers. In October, there were 1,400 fewer construction workers than there had been the previous year, the first year-to-year decline since June 1994.”
Southern CA was in the middle of a brutal recession in 1994 which lasted longer than the early-90s recession did in the rest of the country. So I would say the need to go back that far in time to find a comparable rate of residential permitting is a very ominous sign.
Excellent point Stucco;….
However they figure their math, it won’t matter. Half of zero still means no buyers.
“Forial Zaken took agent Larry Heller’s advice to drop the price when her 2,100-square-foot home in Granada Hills received no offers at $929,000 after one month on the market in August. Two price reductions later, it sold for $810,000 a month ago.”
Holy cow! It’s been 12 years since I lived in Granada HIlls. Nonetheless, is it that pricey. It was nice, but I don’t remember being almost 1M nice. Anyway, good luck to that buyer. Geez, you got about a 12% discount! Zaken is still laughing all the way to the bank and probably sleeping better, too! Not so much for the buyer, though.
The public records show that Forial bought a house in Granada Hills on 07/20/2001 for $380,000. However, they are not showing the sale yet (I was checking to see if the buyer put any money down).
I cant believe that someone got that much in Granada Hills,(not that great of a area ), by holding for that short amount of time . This housing market is nuts . The house is only 2100 sq feet .
I just talked to my brother who told me he built a spec. house and sold it in Jan of 2006 . He was pissed off because he said he felt he could of made more money on the deal .
At that point I had to explain to my brother what a lucky man he was that he was able to sell at all. He admitted that he had some friends that are now stuck with some spec.houses for sale that don’t seem to be selling .
I advised him to just not get back into building for years because of the risk . Who knows what he will do .
Granada Hills is “the Beverly Hills of the valley” according to a contractor who lives there. I tried my hardest not to laugh, honest.
Dwr ,look at what surrounds Granada Hills . Wow ,hard to believe .
I guess that makes North Hills the Holmby Hills of the Valley” somebody better tell Hef. He needs to move the Playboy Mansion ASAP.
Good strategy — then it becomes the Horny Hills.
“Sweetest tasting turd in the toilet!”
Just to add this: at $810K I would have bought in the Carolinas somewhere non-coastal, banked the difference and used some of the interest to pay insurance and taxes. Then go get a job as a video store manager. Then again, I forgot, the buyer probably used a toxic loan to pay for this mess. I mean come on, what are the chances the buyer had 160K to put down? My bad!
Enough already. I know it’s late on a Saturday but you people are driving me crazy with this “buy in the Carolinas” crap I see all the time. Everybody acts like the Carolinas are Nirvana for anybody that cashed out huge in real estate. I expect the Carolinas to have 50 million people living in them by the end of 2008.
I will let you in on a little secret. The Carolinas are not paradise. In many places they are not even very livable. Charlotte is a wannabe city completely dependent upon Bank of America. Raleigh and Durham could make you die with boredom. The summers are hot and long. Try Charleston in August. Brutal!
The people in South Carolina, and many parts of North Carolina are backwards.
The Carolinas are filling up with all the Yankee transplant trash. They bring with them their snobby attitudes and “me-first” manners. And any coastal area in the Carolinas is still susceptible to hurricanes.
Please quit telling everybody to buy in the Carolinas. It is not paradise. Have some imagination and find a place that isn’t filled with swarms of transplants. How about West Virginia or Kentucky? Be original for once.
NYCityBoy — good advice. I recommend Pennsylvania — the more affordable areas to the west. Good move. Here in the South, a Filly Cheese Steak involves horse meat, which is tough and offends many of the pilgrims (it is good quality, actually, but you win that race or you don’t). Snobby attitudes and “me-first” absence-of-manners do not work well down here — you’re certainly correct about that. Folks can disappear. Local folks don’t seem to.
“NYCityBoy — good advice. I recommend Pennsylvania — the more affordable areas to the west.”
Nothing to see here.
Instead, I recommend that everybody give West Virginia a whirl.
I’d take West Virginia over the traffic nightmare that Charlotte has become. They are overbuilding the infrastructure to the highest degree. Or you could live on Lake Norman like a zillion other people. That area is now so congested it’s brutal. And the final nail in Charlotte’s commuter coffin has to be 485. That was a bright move.
But the football stadium is fantastic. Truly, it is a beautiful place to watch a game with the world’s most boring crowd.
$1600 / sqft , i t must go up !!!!http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Mumbai_flat_sold_for_a_record_Rs_73000sq_ft/articleshow/690256.cms
one more try as a
link http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Mumbai_flat_sold_for_a_record_Rs_73000sq_ft/articleshow/690256.cms
my html keyboard is broken today.
If this does not show that the bubble is global i do not know what will.
link http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Mumbai_flat_sold_for_a_record_Rs_73000sq_ft/articleshow/690256.cms
You can’t get squat for a rupee anymore.
Its funny, in a little over a year what a change in the market, a change being acknowledged by the mainstream media whores.
also funny in the way these buyers locked up all the debit for lifetimes and yet, just in a year, such a change in the economy.
Morons, Yo’moma is not going to get you out of this mess from your sheltered life.
You’ll see more job losses in February or March, when the agents have to pay their annual dues.’”
How much can the realtor dues be to create more job losses? Hang in there guys it can only get better from here (lol)!
I know prices are falling but so is inventory. In my area we went from 7000 houses listed to just over 6100 in a matter of a few weeks. No doubt people pulling the house off the market before the holidays.
I cant wait to see what happens after football season.
Bob you are gonna’ see one mother lode of homes next spring. Just think you will have: people who put their homes up for sale first time, pulled off (but claiming “first” lisings) homes, foreclosures, walways, auctions, existing inventory, and all the crap that is being built or ground is just broken on. At this point the country shoiuld just give everyone a home. It is going to get brutal out there.
I guess you live in Rhode Island.
This ones for you .
http://www.commonwealthauction.com/commonwealth/auctions.asp?location=3
Just wait til February-April. I have no idea where these homeowners (really renters) are going to live once they lose their house. Most of the Multifamilys have been turned into condos along with the commercial buildings.
sold back to mortgagee- are these for real ?
As real as it gets. There are actually three main auction firms and that is only one of them. Considering the size of this state things aren’t looking to good. FYI the auctions are held right on the door steps of the property. Usually you can catch the owner peeking through the window while the auction is going off. It really is pretty sad. Until the last 3 months 99% of them were cancelled. That’s not the story today, as you can see for yourself.
What does “Sold back to mortgagee” mean?
Chip, the mortgagee is the lender. “Sold back” means they now have the title and are holding the house as a REO.
Thanks, Win.
The number of ZipRealty listings in my area at the start of Dec is probably 10% higher than around the start of May. To still be 10% higher now than the start of May probably means that next spring is going to see a big increase in supply in our area.
Seeing the same big pullback up in Seattle. A lot will be riding on the “spring buying season”….
“‘The market is terrible,’ said Steve Lutton, regional VP of Lennar Homes, a nationwide company that builds in Fresno under the Cambridge banner. ‘Buyers were standing in line a year and a half ago. Now you have to find the buyers. You have to aggressively market your homes.’”
LOL, the market better be terrible.. The cost of buying a new house from you is through the roof. I remember just a few years back before the housing bubble started in Fresno, it was a cheap and affordable.. Now the prices has gone up from 200k for a 2xxx sq ft house to 400k + in just a little under 3 years. Now call me insane but I never knew Fresno’s job sector was that great!! I mean come on.. the average income here is around 35k! Since when did we all started making 100k +??
100k of income isn’t even enough.
810 in granada hills? another gf
“Know when to lower the price. If a house sits on the market more than six weeks without much buyer interest, it’s time for a few changes. Spruce it up. Stage it. Add nice furniture and remove the clutter — and lower the price.”
Or just skip to the chase and lower the price. It is probably more cost effective to quickly lower the price when prices are trending down than to sink time and money into adding nice furniture, staging and sprucing it up. By the time you get done with the sprucing-up effort, prices may have dropped by enough to completely offset whatever gain in market value your efforts have produced.
“it’s time for a few changes. Spruce it up. Stage it. Add nice furniture ”
Difficult for sellers who find themselves with no cash.
Positive reactions to staging is about feeling you deserve something rather than finding a house that is really the best value. I’ve wondered if buyers will begin to “see the light” as this thing moves forward.
all posters should reference where they are from, pls.
You’re new here. Stick around every day and you’ll know.
Sometimes I am amazed that people actually believed that real estate would continue to go up without any regard to the cap it would have because of affordability .
The fact that the future demand was explained by saying rich baby boomers would be the market is just nuts .
I guess the real estate industry had all the answers during the mania . It really is a shame that the market got hyped up like this .
No, here’s the list of things to do. Stop spending money on all those HWY 99 freeway billboards with kids laying in green grass, laughing and playing with thier parents smiling “ear to ear”. The parents in your homes are not smiling no more. They’re about to get real angry when you lower the price by 34% on the excess inventory on the next block. Think I’m kidding? Look at his article from the Modesto Bee We paid 37 percent more than what our home is worth now.
Lower the price
i am in glendale, ca
i hate the word staging. i cant believe that anything like that does anything. my mom who has seemed to time the market just right since she first bought her house 40 years ago and kept trading up. she actually told me to not buy anything last year. we were talking last night and she really thinks that in march that the housing will make some kind of better turnaround. i told her the stuff i read here and the stuff i see at my job (civil engr) and she still thinks there is some positive. are there any good blogs that talk about the opposite of the bubble busting with real facts to back it up? she said she wants to buy another piece of property because she doesnt have a big chunk of her money invested in anything. so my question, is there any chance that somehow the real estate market can make some turnaround or not just crash?
she also said how last time in california that the banks that had problems were just bought out by the bigger banks and the only people actually affected from the crash were the normal people. the only problem for me is that my job sector from what i understand basically closed shop. i am 27 so i have only worked during this crazy time period of massive development. but i do try to ask the older people at my work who went through the 90’s crash.
Anything is possible, that’s the nature of life. No one “knows” what will happen.
For a site that reps the thing will get better in march, I would try the NAR site. I’m sure they have their “stats” to back that belief up.
Yeah. I’m always surprised at how many people make large financial decisions based on what they think will happen (or worse, what they hope will happen) without thinking about what if they’re wrong. The famous investment saying is: “To win the race, I must first finish.”
They call those financial delusions.
Hey neighbor!
Off Doran east of Glendale Bl here…
Glendale! Glendale??
Glendale is flipper hell. Just look at this house (was owned by my in-laws and they sold it).
It’s a standard 1920’s LA style pile of junk. Flat roof, tiles, stucco, the lower class housing you see in LA. When it was sold recently for $740,000 the pool in the back hadn’t been maintained for 30 years and would probably have to be re-plastered.
Was built in 1927
1970 sold for 29,000
10/21/2005 sold for 740,000 obviously to a flipper because 11 months later on 9/21/2006 it sold for, get this
999,000.
I know, I know. You already think us YOs in california are crazy but there you have it, a confirmation.
The only bright side in this is that hopefully it will be the rich who end up holding the bag, the rich who are putting their money into Hedge Funds that invest in these crazy loans.
http://www.zillow.com/HomeDetails.htm?city=Glendale&o=North&state=CA&zprop=20836012
i saw much crazier. up the street i found out that there was a house that was on the market for 1.7mil and it has been sitting there for a long time, maybe a year? it finally got a sold sign on it friday morning. no clue how much it went for, but it was inherited by an architect and redone and i guess some poor soul bought that crap. our neighbor said she saw it and said it was decent, but when you go inside the cabinets could be flexed in your hands, it was so cheaply done. also the driveway was so stupid that i swear you cannot park 2 cars in the garage because of a weird angle with a retaining wall.
well either way people are totally insane to be paying that kind of money for the houses around here. my mom says she could sell the house, but where would she go? our new neighbors are beyond my comprehension. bought for almost 1mil, gut the entire place and redo the entire property and they easily have way too many expensive cars on the street. the craziest part is their garage houses an exotic that is actually modified. where is this magical money coming from???
i am some lowly engineer almost getting into 6digits pay with overtime and cannot even figure out how i could afford a simple under 400k condo. where are all of these jobs that pay so well???
in regards to my last post. i was checked zillow for our neighbors house and saw this.
Sale History
11/15/2006: $1,400,000
05/25/2006: $940,000
11/16/1995: $380,000
there was never a sale sign on this house after it was sold on 5-25-06, who is manipulating what to get what out of this?
“Pricing is critical”
“better to be at the lower end of a neighborhood’s price range than the top.”
“Use your common sense.”
Thanks LA Times for all the help. Without this kind of article, how would any seller know what to do? You stand as a printed beacon of deep knowledge and brilliant intellectual insight, shining your wisdom for the benefit of you fellow citizens.
For at least the past 15 years, the stupidest of big-city dailies. If there are eight articles on the front page, probably six of them are about car chases, apartment fires, or murder trials. Nowadays maybe sob stories of FB’s. Admit I haven’t seen the paper for a while.
No, the times wont put any negative RE pieces on the front page of any section. They bury neg news in the midlle or back. They only put positive RE spin articles on the front.
And what is wrong w/ a car chase? Our local ‘Sizzler’ replays them on the all-you-an-can-eat shrimp night. (very popular in the 909)
Hmmm, all the local news here (in Mobile) are about car crashes on the interstates. Evidently no one here use seat belts (that is always written up) so most people die in the crashes.
Or DUI causes the problem. For fundie country we sure have a lot of drunk drivers.
The big problem on the interstates here is speed. It doesn’t matter how fast you drive (lead foot and all), stay in the right lanes. Else some nut in a pickup doing 25-50 over the limit will wipe you out. Better yet, stay off the interstates.
ABC news at 6 pm tonite, had a segment on Housing.
Ed Leamer was interviewed. He said a 5 year bear market for housing in CA.
Mark Zandi of Moody’s said nationally, there is no bottom yet and the issues that have been created are going to take another year to work out.
VERY BEARISH on ABC national news at 6pm.
Hmm, it almost makes you wonder if WE are wrong. Considering that MSM is usually wrong.
No, the MSM is always late to the game or wrong.
UK effect ?
up 12% this year after an 05 dip
You better believe I’m agonising regularly over the UK situation, seeing as how a couple of years ago I got my mother (we both live in Australia) to sell an English house she inherited.
Three points, however;
1. The price appreciation in the UK is almost completely confined to the London commuter area and Northern Ireland. The rest of the UK has not seen equivalent changes, and in fact I have within the last week checked direct comparables (same size, same style, same street) in the small town closest to mum’s inheritance, and there is only a 2% or so change since mid-2004. New-build apartments in the nearest big city (Birmingham) appear to have actually fallen in price.
2. Whether by accident or by design, the British authorities are now acknowledging they grossly underestimated the number of Eastern Europeans who came to the UK to work since the enlargement of the EU to 25 nations. This impacts demand, especially rental demand.
3. Throughout the entire UK, and especially around London where a disproportionate number of the new residents want to live, there is a real issue over land zoning. As a result, they just aren’t building enough housing to meet demand. Couple that with a loose credit policy, spice with rising rents, and you have a good recipe for price appreciation.
In fact, I believe there is scope for a horrible crash in the UK. For what you get, prices are insanely expensive over there.
ajh,
I was following the UK bubble in 2003, since the US bubble wasn’t really being discussed much at the time, and saw all the same stories there as we have here, mostly that there is a credit bubble.
I am also dismayed by the UK inflation. There seemed to be going down ahead of us (as well as Australia), and things were looking good until recently. Remember the consumer slowdown there in late 2004/2005, IIRC? It was really looking like the bears were right.
I have no idea where the recent strength is coming from over there, but hope it comes down soon.
No doubt, what’s going on in Europe (also with what NHZ has been saying) is making me very cautious about forecasting here.
You did the right thing WRT your mother’s property, though!
I live in Woodbridge in Irvine and was totally taken when a couple listed a 1500 SQ FT. townhouse for $680,000 built in 1976 for $39,000 by Warmington Homes. Can you believe what people think thing are worth?
“‘The blood is not in the streets yet. You’ll see more job losses in February or March, when the agents have to pay their annual dues.’”
Actually, we WON’T see this, or at least the markets won’t see this. All those real estate agent are independent contractors. They don’t qualify to file unemployment claims and therefore don’t show up in the weekly claims numbers.
I used to work in the KB Home architecture department. KB Home designs all of their houses nationally through their in-house architecture department. They laid off a number of people in June, then about 1/3 of the remaining staff left, then in November they laid off even more. If KB Home corporate thought there was any chance of an uptick in sales nationwide in 2007, they would not be laying people off in their architecture department. Their actions speak louder than words.
This says they are hunkering down for the worst. Now, there is always some home construction… But I could imagine that the staff will get pretty small…
Neil
A great read from the Daily Reckoning …
http://www.dailyreckoning.com/rpt/Housing-Bubble.html
Good read ,thanks
“But USD economist Alan Gin, who compiles the monthly index of economic indicators, sees a silver lining in the decline.
The 0.1 percent slippage in the index in October was the smallest decline in seven months. And improvement in local stock prices, consumer confidence and the national economy suggests that the outlook may be bottoming out – although Gin still projects a slowdown through at least the first half of 2007.”
———————————————————————
The only bottom Ale ‘n Gin can see is the bottom of his empty cocktail glass.
$1 million for a Toluca Lake condo? Christ. What would that have sold for in the 1990s, maybe $200k?
Sometimes I’m glad I left LA.
On the topic of California housing:
Saw part of an episode of “Flip this house” this evening. …. White female buys a house in Watts for $285k. Plans on dropping $30k to fix it up and then flip. Didn’t see the ending, but there was an Hispanic realt-whore explaining how what he does is help people. What do you suppose the median income in Watts is? Did this vulture manage to sell this for a profit? I hope not.
Last time I was in LA, I made an effort to drive out and see the Watts Towers. Worth the drive, but scary neighborhood to say the least. I remembered it from an Art appreciation course. I was facinated by it. The city had to reluctantly zone the towers in. What is kind of cool / strange is that the homes across from the towers are like 60 feet away. I didn’t stop into the museum, time was short. Anyone else visit this wonder? Can’t imagine ANYONE in this area being able to afford this flip-whore’s home.
Have faith in the upcoming crash.
Homes will be built as long as it’s profitable. It’s profitable as long as materials and labor costs are less than the sale price. Builders and construction workers have to eat too. They must keep building.
As long as houses remain overpriced, builders seeing available profits will keep building which will further depress prices until equilibrium is reached. Even if the big builders get cold feet, the small guys can still make a living and will keep building.
The argument about not enough land is ridiculous. Some of the cheapest land prices are in parts of the country that were settled 300 years ago, try upstate New York where you can get 40 acres and a great house for 300k.