The Housing Bubble

The Herald Tribune reports from Florida. “Mark Brivik, a real estate investor who made a living buying, fixing up and selling houses on Longboat Key and other parts of Southwest Florida, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. Brivik distinguished himself from other investors during the past two decades by selling houses back and forth to business associates and companies he controlled or had a stake in. In one case, Brivik transferred a house at 549 Lane on Longboat Key back and forth between his corporations and business associates 12 times from 1995 to 2005 before it was finally foreclosed upon by First Priority in November 2007. In the process, Brivik and his partners increased their loans from $405,000 in 1996 to $1.4 million in 2002.”

“‘It’s a sign of the times,’ Brivik said during a brief telephone call this month. ‘A lot of people are filing for bankruptcy. It’s not something you want to do. It’s just something that’s happening.’”

“If the dominant image of the housing boom in Southwest Florida was a home in paradise, an emerging picture of its decline is of residents, out of work and forced from their homes, struggling to find shelter. James Lippincott has lived in Charlotte County for 32 years and had a job at a scrap parts shop until he was laid off in December. Now he sleeps on the floor of a house in foreclosure in North Port. He watched the former resident lock up and figured out how to break in.”

“He leaves in the mornings before 7 to avoid being seen by neighbors. ‘They kept promising my job back when things turned back around but it never came back,’ Lippincott said.”

The St Petersburg Times. “More than 22,700 jobs have been lost since September 2007 in the Tampa Bay area, the hardest-hit area in the state. Annie Lesso lives in a two-story house in the Uptown neighborhood with hardwood floors and a $1,200 mortgage. Earlier this year, she paid off her credit cards and ripped them up.”

Still, even without credit card debt, Lesso is struggling. The sacrifices are starting to pile up. Lesso has sent out nearly 200 resumes. She hasn’t heard back from anyone. ‘ve had two months with nothing,’ she says. ‘This is one of the few places I could come in and apply.’”

“Tanya Giles, the hotel’s human resources manager, nods sympathetically. ‘It has to be really rough out there,’ Giles says. ‘We get 30 people a day.’ Lesso’s jaw drops. ‘Thirty people a day?’”

“In the classroom, under rows of fluorescent ceiling lights, real estate instructor Robert DiBlasi gazes out across 100 chairs. Ninety-four of them are empty. Sandra Castagne worked for condo builders in Chicago for years but never got a license in Florida. Castagne has heard about money to be made selling foreclosed houses. A profitable sideline is short sales. ‘I know the business. I’ve been doing it so long,’ Castagne says. ‘Seems like every home is a short sale.’”

“Over at the Greater Tampa Association of Realtors, president Deborah Farmer is surprised by the new blood pouring into the business. Just last week she inducted 32 agents, most newly licensed, into GTAR. Though that’s far below the 200 monthly inductees of two years ago, she detected no apprehension in the latest crop.”

“‘I looked over at them and said, ‘man, do you know what you’re doing?’ Farmer says. ‘When I got into it 10 years ago, you had to hit the ground running. It was O.J.T. — on the job training. Now things are so slow, they have time to learn.’”

The Cape Coral Daily Breeze. “Carmen Ashby finds herself at this satellite office of the Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board more often than she would like these days. She’s been out of work since June, after being laid off as a furniture sales consultant in Fort Myers. ‘I noticed it was so slow, the number of customers was so few,’ she said. ‘We were waiting three hours between customers. It was ridiculous.’”

“Carmen Ashby’s home is not in foreclosure, though paying the mortgage has proved increasingly difficult in the last few months. Instead, her home acts more like a chain that keeps her tethered to a pole, hoping that things will turn around, that she will find a job in Lee and save the home, the dream, that brought her and her husband to Southwest Florida from Middlesex county, New Jersey. Her husband has since returned to New Jersey.”

“It was a conscious decision, according to Ashby, who might also head back north if things don’t start looking up. Unless the real estate market turns around, she’ll take a considerable loss on her home. ‘It’s getting worse,’ she said. ‘I feel like I made a mistake (coming to Lee county), but my home is keeping me here.’”

The Naples News. “A credit crunch has hit a public-private partnership looking to build an affordable work-force housing project in eastern Collier County. The development is on hold because construction financing can’t be found – anywhere.”

“With so many homes on the market and so many foreclosures, the Naples area has developed ‘a black eye’ nationally and lenders seem to feel that ‘everything down here is kind of jinxed,’ said said Pat McCuan, CEO of MDG Capital Corporation in Naples, the project’s developer.”

“The lack of financing is disappointing, McCuan said. ‘We are not blaming anyone,’ he said. ‘This is an economic tsunami that has hit the entire country.’”

“If Wall Street is the villain, is Main Street the victim? Ponder this: Where did ‘The Street’ get all those mortgages they sliced and diced into financial sludge, slathered in perfume and peddled worldwide? If you said, ‘from people,’ you’re right. But if you said, ‘Well, from right here in Southwest Florida” — bingo!”

“After 15 years of fast real estate money, this rose died. Now, world economies are falling out of a bed that gets higher every day.”

“We didn’t heed our parents’ words: ‘If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.’ We changed homes like shirts. Once a coined term, ‘flipping’ became a real-estate strategy. There can’t be a bright light bulb out there who didn’t know that the power might go off someday. And it did.”

“Building got so hectic that inspectors were allowed four inspections an hour, including travel time. Do you think these harried inspectors missed anything?”

“Foreclosures have hit apartments that converted to condos and working class neighborhoods the hardest. Golden Gate Estates has seen 1,074 final judgments in mortgage foreclosure this year and there’s been another 392 in Golden Gate. Ross McIntosh, founder of The Bidder’s Broker in Naples, said entire subdivisions are getting foreclosed on including Marbella Lakes off Livingston Road in Collier County.”

“‘I’ve lost my affection for auctions,’ he said. ‘We are beginning to see motivated sellers. We don’t need to go to the auction to get the auction price anymore.’”

NBC Los Angeles. “Marriage counselors and divorce lawyers nationwide say more distressed couples are putting off divorce because the cost of splitting up is prohibitive in a time of stagnant salaries, plummeting home values and rising unemployment. In South Florida, where the condominium-heavy Miami area has been described as ground zero of the mortgage crisis, Miami-Dade County reported an 18 percent drop in divorce filings from January to May, compared to the same period last year.”

“‘What the judicial officers are telling us is that people who do come in are saying they can’t afford the cost of splitting up and going into two households — they can barely pay for the one,’ said Scott L. Rubin, a marital and family lawyer in Miami.”

“‘The housing market is down, it’s hard to sell, and when you can sell, you’re selling it at a depressed price, so a lot of people are deciding … ‘It’s not worth it to do it (at) this time. Let’s stay together. Let’s try to work through our problems and hope that the economy will spring back,’ Rubin said.”

The New York Times. “The housing crisis has kept thousands of older Americans who need support and care from moving into retirement communities or assisted-living centers, effectively stranding them in their own homes. Ruth Scher put her two-bedroom condominium in Delray Beach, Fla., on the market last year, but no one has made an offer. Ms. Scher hoped to move to a retirement community in Cornwall, N.Y., where she has friends. But in the year her home sat on the market, she could not even find a broker willing to sell the property, she said. She finally de-listed her condominium.”

“‘They tell you, ‘We’re sorry, we can’t get any people to come and look,’ Ms. Scher said. ‘If I can’t sell here, I can’t go nowhere.’”

The Sun Sentinel. “South Florida’s home prices have gone south, but mortgage fraud hasn’t. Law enforcement and corporate officials alike are bracing for a new wave of cases as the market falters. When the housing bubble burst and criminals could no longer profit by reselling properties at ever-greater prices, they simply walked away. An April FBI report warns the depressed housing market provides ‘an ideal climate’ to create more victims.”

“After falling behind on their mortgage, Henry Gribensk and his wife received a flood of mailers promising help with foreclosure. One, from a company called Florida Housing Council, seemed promising, Gribensk said. The company’s owner went to their Loxahatchee home with a stack of documents, which the couple hastily signed, thinking Moussa would help them restore their credit and avoid foreclosure. Instead, the contract transferred their property to a trust, making the Gribensks renters and subject to eviction, they allege in a lawsuit.”

“‘Somehow he got his name on the deed,’ said Gribensk, maintenance manager for two Palm Beach condominiums. ‘It’s not even our house right now.’”

The Orlando Sentinel. “County property appraisers in Seminole, Orange, Osceola, Volusia and Lake reported 155,835 vacant residential lots this year. Most are lots in new subdivisions approved during the peak of the housing boom in late 2005 and early 2006.”

“‘Right now there is a glut of vacant lots on the market,’ said Frank Royce, Lake’s deputy county property appraiser. ‘I think there are enough lots platted out there that we would not, in my opinion, see them all developed within our lifetimes.’”

“Anthony Crocco, Central Florida director for MetroStudy, said the Metro Orlando area has at least an 82-month backlog of vacant residential lots. ‘The problem is that there is so much inventory — including resale and foreclosure — of homes,’ Crocco said. ‘The buyers stopped suddenly in late 2005, but the developers and the builders just couldn’t cut the [construction] process quick enough.’”

“When Todd Vandre moved in to his spacious two-story home in early 2007, construction workers were busy building other homes in the subdivision. Today, 69 of the subdivision’s 571 planned single-family residences and town homes have been finished.”

“‘Right now, I’m willing to wait [for more new homes],’ he said. ‘But what happens when we want to move? . . . So far it’s not so bad. It’s quiet and we have more privacy. . . . But I worry about the resale value sometimes, if I ever do decide to sell.’”

“Kerri Day and her husband live in Osceola County’s Turtle Creek subdivision, where they bought a home last year. Their house is among 53 completed out of 456 lots in the subdivision. However, only about 17 houses in Turtle Creek are occupied. The builder, Levitt and Sons, stopped new-home construction and filed for bankruptcy protection a year ago, citing falling prices and an overabundance of new homes.”

Now Day’s new home is surrounded by grassy lots and empty streets. Day fears if she puts her house on the market now, it would not sell for near the $450,000 she paid. ‘I hate it here,’ she said. ‘We have no neighbors. . . . It’s like we’re living in Jurassic Park. . . . It’s very weird.’”