The Housing Bubble

It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “While Harvard has not escaped price adjustments on its real estate values, the foreclosure rate continues to remain relatively low in comparison to its neighboring communities in northern Worcester County, according to local real estate brokers. ‘The houses that have gone under agreement have had fairly dramatic price adjustments, some were more dramatic than others,’ said Rhonda Sprague, owner of Harvard Realty. ‘Most were sold for less than the asking price. But it is a market driven by price.’”

“Home values in Harvard and its surrounding communities were previously rising at a rapid rate, leaving sellers to believe their homes would continue to appreciate at 10 percent, resulting in a shocking adjustment in 2004 when appreciation dramatically stopped, said Eileen Fitzpatrick, a Harvard Realtor in Bolton.”

“‘There have been price reductions in Harvard by as much as a couple hundred thousand dollars,’ said Fitzpatrick. ‘Currently there is a home on the market originally listed at $1.6 million and is now listed at $1.2 million. All these houses are almost $300,000 less than they used to be.’”

“Real estate experts say housing prices peaked in 2006 post-Katrina, and New Orleans-area homebuyers will see more bargains on the market this year.”

“‘There was an artificial spike in sales after Katrina,’ said developers Matt Schwartz. ‘Now the sector that remains strong and will remain strong is the work force sector, the sector we are serving of people who are taking the jobs that will be created as the city recovers.’”

“The Houston area’s housing market continued to weaken in January as sales fell to their lowest level in three years and home prices dipped. Single-family home sales in the Houston area fell 12 percent last month compared with a year earlier, the Houston Association of Realtors reported.”

“While the decline wasn’t as severe as December’s 16.5 percent drop, home prices slid to their lowest level since January 2006.”

“Alfredo Bonfante’s real estate agent has suggested he drop the $210,000 asking price on his four-bedroom, 2,100-square-foot home in The Woodlands. In four months, Bonfante hasn’t gotten any offers. He thinks it’s because new homes nearby are selling for as little as $5,000 more than what he’s asking.”

“‘They’re giving all stainless-steel appliances, and instead of carpet they’re giving tile,’ said Bonfante, whose house is only about two years old.”

“Maxine Bates, president of the Norman Board of Realtors, told city leaders that the national hysteria over slowing home sales and a mortgage meltdown is comparable to Orson Welles’ infamous broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. The fictional broadcast panicked thousands of radio listeners into believing that Martians had landed on Earth.”

“‘This is not the case in Oklahoma, in metro Oklahoma City and more specifically here in Norman,’ Bates said. ‘Real, reasonable, manageable, sustainable growth — that’s Norman.’”

“In Norman, fourth quarter average sales prices were $157,517, with the Oklahoma City metro coming in at $153,196, according to statistics compiled by the Oklahoma Association of Realtors. Average sales prices for Oklahoma in the fourth quarter of 2007 were $121,492, up from 2006 at $115,332; 2005, $109,568; 2004, $100,409; and 2003, $94,570.”

“But Bates said the mortgage industry has taken a big hit. ‘Who could ever have thought it was a good idea to give a $500,000 loan to a farm worker making $14,000 a year or a 25-year loan to a 102-year-old man,’ she asked. ‘Well, someone did. In many markets there was a real estate bubble and it has burst with incredible force.’”

“Not long ago, it wasn’t uncommon for homes to sell for more than the asking price. Two or more buyers would make full-price offers, and one of them would bid up the price in order to secure the sale. Those days might be gone, at least for now, said Sheila Tom, president of the Black Hills Board of Realtors.”

“So is it a buyers market? ‘I’d have to say yes … in a way,’ Tom said. ‘There has been negotiation going on that is favorable to buyers, but sellers are not taking just anything.’”

“‘It has gotten slower in the past few months. I think a lot of that is attributed to a big oversupply of new construction for a while, but it’s being reabsorbed,’ said Gil Raben of Raben Real Estate.”

“‘We had a period when we’d have two or three offers,’ Raben said. ‘Now, we’re pretty close to the asking price — but you’ve got to be realistic.’”

“Local buyers seem a bit reluctant to take the plunge, according to Tom. They’re waiting for interest rates to fall. They’re waiting for prices to come down. They are waiting to see what happens to the economy.”

“‘Don’t wait too long,’ she said. ‘You might miss it.’”

“From HCMC’s suburbs to the heart of the Mekong Delta, land is in high demand everywhere, giving rise to exorbitant prices that keep spiraling further up.”

“A stately house stands near the people’s committee office in Long An Province’s Long Hau Commune. The house owner, known as Sau, is a well-known land dealer in the area. As your correspondents drop in on her door, saying they are on the lookout for some land, Sau exclaims, ‘You’re too late! There is nothing left now!’”

“She had just helped sell a 30m by 80m plot fronting a road for VND1.5 billion ($94,000). ‘A boat owner in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 7 bought it, did some work on it, and is now offering it at five times the price.’”

“Long Hau Commune’s agriculture chief, Nguyen Thanh Loi, said 1,000 square meters of farmland had cost around VND850,000 not long ago because it was unsuitable for growing rice. By early last year, the price of the same land had risen to VND25 million. ‘Prices have steadily gone up ever since,’ he said.”

“But actually finding someone ready to part with their property needs luck since most have stopped selling in anticipation of foreign investors coming to offer higher prices.”

“It’s partially covered in plastic sheeting and even the estate agent trying to sell it admits it’s ‘dilapidated.’ But this rundown shed in a top Welsh property hotspot has gone on the market for £150,000. The building’s dimensions are just 18ft by 15ft, though it does have water and electricity supplies.”

“Though based in the plush beach resort of Abersoch, in Gwynedd, the shed does not boast the kind of dramatic sea views that have seen similar properties marketed for up to £500,000. But estate agents Beresford Adams say that despite the absence of a stunning panorama, the shed has already attracted three bids in excess of the £150,000 asking price.”

“A spokesperson even hinted a bidding war could drive up the price to around £175,000 before a deal is reached.”

“‘The thing that caught my eye is that there is no view of the sea or beach and we have only seen those kind of higher prices for beach huts in the South of England,’ said Adams.”

“Some experts have said that house price falls in Northern Ireland were inevitable given how high prices had gone. Alan Bridle, of the Bank of Ireland, said: ‘In the last five years, maybe slightly longer, Northern Ireland and Belfast have gone from housing as one of the most affordable, to one of the least affordable.’”

“‘But it hasn’t been a normal market. It is not moving up by the people looking to buy housing just to have a roof over their heads, there was a strong element of residential investment,’ Bridle said.”

“Things in Rhode Island that drive folks crazy: Housing prices. Even a fixer-upper here will cost you hundreds of thousands.”

“I remember going to a top-end suburb of Cleveland — Shaker Heights — and was shocked to find houses are half what they’d cost here. A homeowner there from New England told me people in her neighborhood get to travel and dine out more than here because, as she put it, ‘we don’t kill ourselves to get into a house.’ People in Rhode Island do.”

“The street has never much cared for Wachovia’s 2006 purchase of Golden West Financial for $24 billion. Still, Herb and Marion Sandler, the husband and wife team behind Golden West, were legendary for their rigorous underwriting standards.”

“Herb remains a vociferous defender of his loans and says that if anything, his borrowers are suffering from the lax standards of other lenders in the form of rising foreclosures in their neighborhoods. ‘The answer to what went wrong was wild, irrational, volume-driven loans by people who didn’t give a damn about economics,’ he said.”

“The media and government’s knee-jerk reaction to the subprime mortgage mess is that the poor consumer is being taken advantage of, and the culprit must be found and things made right.”

“In reality, it is the consumer who is most at fault, with government oversight being complicit, and attempts to bail them out of their predicament will, in fact, only make things worse.”

“If we think that the government can possibly be a substitute for a skeptical, discriminating consumer, then we are grossly overestimating the power and benevolence of government.”

“Let’s take TV advertising as an example: The government has laws about truth in advertising. These laws are supposed to ensure that manufacturers do not make false claims about their products. In spite of this government oversight, does anyone think that the ads on TV are completely honest and truthful?”

“It is only under the cloak of government monitoring that their advertising has the illusion of credibility. Remove the cloak, and the emperor has no clothes. Consumers become skeptics, and the power now shifts from the seller to the wary consumer, and the burden of proof is now on the seller to warrant his product.”

“Thus it is with the subprime debacle. The problem was not the lack of government oversight, but with the illusion of government oversight. Remove the illusion, and you solve the problem.”