The Housing Bubble

The Emporia Gazette reports from Kansas. “There seems to be a lot of homes for sale these days in Emporia. ‘We have probably the most inventory for this time of year that we’ve had in the last 10 years,’ said Maurice Schmidt, (who) has been in the real-estate business for 30 years. ‘Is this a crisis?’ Schmidt said. ‘Absolutely not.’”

“Schmidt said he personally believes that people in the Midwest are reading and watching national media. ‘It’s kinda like they think ‘Gosh, real estate activity is down on the coast…why isn’t it here?’’ Schmidt said. ‘And maybe there’s a little nervousness if you will.’”

The News Leader from Missouri. “According to data supplied by the Springfield Urban Neighborhoods Alliance, Greene County is experiencing a dramatic spike in home foreclosures. For the most recent 12-month period, August 2006 to July 2007, there were 635 foreclosures, a 40 percent increase over the same period a year ago.”

“‘The housing market has always been cyclical, but what is unprecedented this time is the whole subprime issue and how the nature of lending has changed,’ said Brian Fogle of Great Southern Bank. ‘People are not losing jobs.’”

“‘We lowered so many barriers that we put a lot of folks in homes who should not be in the homes,’ Fogle said. ‘There’s a fine line between what’s enough and what’s too much.’”

“This is a stark contrast to the euphoria of just a few years ago when the barriers to homeownership seemed to melt away and many families saw their American Dream come true. ‘A lot of that was a good thing,’ said Fogle. ‘Our homeownership peaked in 2005 at 69.4 percent.’”

“Said Tonya Collister, of Consumer Credit Counseling Services of Springfield: ‘The industry should have known … you can’t put anybody in a home.’”

“Asked whether there is a silver lining amid this flood of foreclosures, Collister paused and said: ‘In the long run, the economics may come back to an even keel. On the local level, I can’t think of a silver lining.’”

The Rockford Register Star from Illinois. “The free-flowing, easy credit days of 2003 to mid-2006 opened the door to homeownership for millions of people who could not dream of qualifying for mortgages before.”

“To people such as Tim Hoffman, who makes his living managing about 60 single-family rental homes in Rockford, it was something entirely different. He called it ‘the perfect storm.’”

“The vast number of first-time buyers pushed home prices — and tax assessments and tax bills for everyone else — to record levels and left rental property owners with a dwindling pool of tenants to choose from.”

“‘If I was renting a house for $500 a month and that tenant bought a house, I couldn’t find anybody to qualify for $500,’ Hoffman said. ‘And there was this huge glut of rentals on the market, guys in the same situation. I had the option of letting it sit empty or dropping it to $450.’”

“But the good times for iffy borrowers and overeager lenders couldn’t last. And landlords may be the one segment of the economy benefiting from the sudden tightening of credit that’s keeping many from homes they can no longer afford.”

“‘I am seeing an upswing of applications from people who have lost their houses. It’s not like it was four or five years ago, but things are getting a bit better,’ said Hoffman.”

“The Census Bureau, through its ongoing American Community Survey, released this week 2005 housing stats for areas of more than 65,000. According to the survey, the number of owner-occupied housing units in Winnebago County increased 4.5 percent from 2000, but the number of renter-occupied units fell 6.1 percent and the number of vacant units nearly doubled from 6,424 to 12,302.”

“Landlords weren’t making up for the increased vacancies through rents either. The median rents grew from $514 in 2000 to $585 in 2005, an annual increase of 2.8 percent, which barely outpaced the annual rate of inflation of 2.6 percent.”

“‘When I first got into this, my criteria was XYZ and I wasn’t going to rent to someone who didn’t meet the criteria,’ he said. ‘As banks dropped their lending criteria, I had to lower my criteria to X, Y and Z or I was going to have houses sitting empty. You can have some, but too many and you go broke. Now you are seeing more evictions.’”

“Vince Miosi owns two rental houses and nearly a dozen apartment buildings. To fill apartments he did have to cut deals on security deposits because competition for good renters was so fierce.”

“‘That’s really tough on landlords,” said Miosi, who has been a landlord since 1986, the past 11 years in the Rockford area. Miosi, who like Hoffman is on the board of directors for the Rockford Apartment Association, said he stood up at a meeting and implored landlords to cut back on incentives like lower security deposits or offering the first month free before everyone went broke.”

“‘You’ve heard of buyer’s markets, this was a renter’s market,’ Miosi said. ‘I’d get calls and the first thing a guy would ask is how many months’ free rent am I offering.’”

“The tenants who stayed with Miosi were affected as well because, he said, when he had a lot of vacancies he ‘didn’t have the cash flow to make improvements to the properties.’”

The Daily Herald from Illinois. “Tall grass. Homes in disrepair. For-sale signs clustered in a single neighborhood. Suburban leaders say they are concerned when they see these things, red flags that foreclosure is looming, or that it has already happened.”

“Round Lake Mayor Bill Gentes’ village had 60 foreclosures in 2006, according to data on the six-county Chicago area compiled by the Woodstock Institute. Last year was the first year town-by-town data was collected.”

“‘The American dream is homeownership,’ Gentes said. ‘It’s not foreclosure.’”

“Gentes said he’s concerned about one Round Lake subdivision now marked by abandoned homes, clusters of for-sale signs and other signs of distress. Problems at the four-year-old Lakewood Grove subdivision stem in part from individual investors who bought a number of homes with the idea of unloading them for a quick profit, Gentes said. He said 10 to 15 homes have been abandoned at Lakewood Grove.”

“Some investors purchased houses and used a rent-to-own concept to lure occupants with poor or shaky credit. Gentes said the downfall came when the owners dramatically hiked the monthly payments because of higher taxes, sending the residents fleeing and leaving empty homes.”

“Carpentersville had 212 foreclosures or 30.26 per 1,000 owner-occupied units in 2006. ‘I certainly see it as a problem for all communities where people are on the bubble or the bubble has burst beneath them,’ said Carpentersville Village President Bill Sarto.”

The Chicago Tribune from Illinois. “In an ideal market, families with an annual median income of $69,800 should be able to afford a median-price, single-family home, but in DuPage County that’s only about half the wages needed to buy that $360,000 house, according to a new report.”

“At best, that income could support a home priced at $200,000, according to an official at the DuPage Homeownership Center. And few of those homes are available in DuPage, real estate agents say. The DuPage median income is only 55 percent of what’s needed to buy a median-price house in the county, the report states.”

“‘The conventional wisdom is that a family earning the median income for a given area should be able to afford the median-priced home in that area,’ said said Dru Bergman, executive director of the Homeownership Center. ‘An index of 100 would mean that the market is in balance. Clearly in DuPage, with an index of just 55, housing prices are far outpacing the incomes of many working families.’”

“And indexes from previous years indicate a worsening situation, the report states. Last year’s index was 59, and in 2005 it was 63.”

The New York Times on Ohio. “Tami and Charles Eggleston never took out a risky mortgage, never borrowed more than they could afford and never missed a monthly payment on their neat, three-bedroom colonial in the Cleveland suburbs. But that hasn’t prevented them from getting caught in the undertow of the subprime mortgage mess now submerging this town.”

“Over the last 18 months, the Egglestons have watched one house after another on their street end up foreclosed and vacant. Although lawns are still tidy and empty homes are not boarded up and stripped as they are in inner-city Cleveland, the Egglestons say Maple Heights no longer feels safe after dark.”

“In May 2006, they put their home on the market in order to move closer to Mrs. Eggleston’s parents in another middle-class Cleveland suburb, Richmond Heights.”

“They have had no takers. Although they lowered the asking price to $99,000 from $109,000, no one has even come to look at it in more than six weeks.”

“‘My heart panics every time I drive down the street and I see another for-sale sign,’ says Mrs. Eggleston, pointing past the placards in front of her porch to others that dot surrounding yards like lawn furniture. ‘Some people on the street couldn’t pay, so they just left. The competition to sell is just ridiculous.’”

“Analysts also say that the fallout from mortgages gone bad is spreading well beyond borrowers now in default. It has begun to engulf middle-class communities like Maple Heights, where nearly 10 percent of the houses — or 910 properties — have been seized by banks in the last two years.”

“Many of these loans were made in 2005 and early 2006, when standards were at their most lax and cities like this were blanketed with aggressive pitches from mortgage providers.”

“‘I don’t think we’ve hit bottom,’ says Michael G. Ciaravino, the mayor of Maple Heights. ‘My fear is that foreclosure rates could go to double where they are today.’”