The Housing Bubble

The Missoula Independent reports from Montana. “Celebrated Montana landscape artist, publisher and restaurateur Russell Chatham told the San Francisco Chronicle that he’s left Montana and returned to his home in West Marin in hopes of painting his way out of financial ruin. In short, Chatham made some bad investments in Livingston real estate. ‘I’m probably going to end up with foreclosures, and there’s nothing I can do about it,’ he’s quoted as saying.”

The San Francisco Chronicle. “Nearly 40 years after leaving West Marin to become a Montana landscape painter, Russell Chatham has ended up with an excess of Montana land. A speculative binge has about broken him at age 71, so he’s come home to paint his way out of it. ‘I did what these rich people who were buying paintings from me told me to do, which was to buy land,’ he says. ‘So I took all the money I had and bought land.’”

The Great Falls Tribune in Montana. “It’s a good time to buy or sell a house in the first-time buyer range of less than $200,000, Great Falls real estate brokers say, but a slow time to unload upper end homes in the plus-$300,000 range. Jack and Lorene Sands, a retired couple living in the Belview Palisades area, are putting their executive home on the market for the third spring in a row. It failed to sell the first two years.”

“‘We built it and have loved living in the four-level house with unobstructed views of the river,’ Sands said. ‘It’s big, 3,000 square-foot house that’s great for entertaining. But we’re getting older now — I’m 76 — it’s getting to be too big of a house now that our kids our raised. We’d like to move to a smaller house, on one level if possible.’”

“The couple listed the home at $444,000 originally, which he said might have been a little steep during the recession and have come down to $395,000 now. ‘We’re a little disappointed at the time it’s taken to sell the house,’ said Sands. ‘But we still enjoy living here.’”

The Mail Tribune in Oregon. “East Medford is checkered with lamentable reminders of failed or truncated projects crushed by the weight of the real estate bubble that burst. The collapse, which followed a heady run-up that ranked Jackson County property values among the nation’s fastest growing, cost hundreds of people their homes, robbed investors and speculators of millions of dollars and put regional banks in regulatory hot water.”

“Alex Pawlowski, a former LibertyBank executive and now the business loan development manager for Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development Inc., said there is no turnaround on the horizon. ‘If you are waiting for the real estate market to rebound, it will be a long wait,’ Pawlowski said. ‘When the bottom falls out, the only way for the bank to maintain its position is to ask the borrower to pay more of the loan down. How can they do that in a down market?’”

“California played a major role in the rising real estate market of the early 2000s. ‘That’s dried up because California is in the same holding pattern,’ Pawlowski said. ‘So we’ve gone from tremendous growth back to where we were previously. We saw an unprecedented boom-and-bust cycle. I don’t know of anybody who’s seen anything like this — it’s extraordinary what took place and I don’t see it repeating in my lifetime.’”

“Commercial real estate broker Wade Six likens what happened to local real estate developers to a game of musical chairs. ‘We all knew from 2006 into 2008 that at some point the music was going to stop,’ Six said. ‘Based on the trajectory (from earlier in the decade), developers were making the correct moves as long as things stayed the way they were. Then the music stopped and it was like someone put a new record on the machine and said ‘dance to this.’”

“‘The paradigm that existed several years ago is no more and isn’t coming back soon, if ever,’ Six said. The $400,000 homes that made many a development loan pencil out are no longer attracting buyers. ‘In those cases,’ Six said, ‘it almost takes a change of ownership to recalibrate the value and to create new value.’”

“The day of reckoning is once again at hand for hundreds of Jackson County property owners. Federal scrutiny, political pressure and legal proceedings combined to slow foreclosure rates to a relative trickle during the past year. Now, with agencies and politicians apparently satisfied, moratoriums have ended and many of the same property owners whose foreclosure activity was put on hold, are once again on the docket to see their homes sold on the courthouse steps.”

“The word filtering down to her through various government agency sources is that the latest cycle of increased foreclosures will be a long one. ‘That’s what the big boys tell me,’ said Diana Yates of Action Realty, which handles sales of foreclosures in the area for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.”

“The single-family residences, townhouses and smaller multiple-family dwellings Yates will market were typically bought for 3.5 percent down. The owners simply over-extended themselves and bought too much house or couldn’t handle adjustable-rate mortgage payments. ‘They are working-class people who got caught up in a bad market,’ Yates said. ‘Some got 100 percent loans they couldn’t afford and a lot of them got into a house knowing they couldn’t stay in it long term. They have held on as long as they can.’”

The Mercer Island Reporter in Washington. “Prices are still lower here for homes and condominiums, but the good news is that activity is holding steady. Prices on single family Island homes fell by more than 40 percent last month from February 2010, but more homes sold or are about to be sold at the end of February 2011, according to the latest statistics from the Northwest MLS.”

“But the number of homes that are bank-owned or in foreclosure is higher than before. Here on the Island, principal managing broker of Coldwell Banker Bain, EJ Bowlds, said that there are 39 homes in some state of foreclosure. Thirteen of those are bank-owned and have yet to be listed, and six are going to auction between now and the middle of May. In most cases, the seller owes more on the house than what it is worth.”

“‘Another 20 maybe have gone to auction, but the county records haven’t caught up with them yet,’ Bowlds said.”

“Bowlds said an internal company report stated that up to eight percent of Mercer Island homes on the market are distressed. Only one bank-owned property on Mercer Island is listed now.”

“The ‘2010 Year in Review’ report from Windermere Real Estate states that ‘bank-owned homes made up only 10 percent of all homes closed (23 of 220) on the Island for the year. Short sales and bank-owned properties did account for 40 percent of all condos sold on the Island in 2010 (16 out of 40 units, or 40 percent), the highest level in the region.”

From KXLY 4. “RealityTrac said one in every 793 Houses in Spokane County received a foreclosure notice in April. That’s more that 160 homes foreclosed in just one month. In Kootenai County, the rate is more than twice as high, with one home in every 320 foreclosed in April. However, not all of those foreclosures will stick. ‘Cases are popping up all over the country that are questioning the validity of foreclosures being conducted under the MERS system,’ said Attorney Jeff Crandall.”

“He is now working with a couple that lost their home on Hauser Lake. 53 year old Ed Brock said they were 2 1/2 years into their loan when they wanted to refinance. Their loan was sold several times, and in the process of trying to track down who owned it, they fell behind on payments. ‘We ended up losing our retirement house. It was the first and only house we ever bought,’ said Brock.”

The Coeur d’Alene Press in Idaho. “For Cynthia Griffin, the court victory is a small step in what has been a long fight. Nevertheless, for the first time in months, the stress of not knowing if she and husband Matthew Griffin will lose their home is gone. That burden was erased thanks to a First District judge ruling this week that the lending company which claimed it owned the mortgage on the home didn’t follow the proper steps to obtain it, so didn’t have the legal right to foreclose on the Coeur d’Alene couple’s house.”

“But the Griffins’ attorneys, Jeff Crandall and Regina McCrea, think the order could affect thousands of Idaho homeowners who have already foreclosed or are in the process of doing so. The attorneys estimated around 50 percent of mortgages have been filed with MERS in the state, so the effects could be far-reaching in Idaho. They called the electronic process a step the banking world skipped in order to avoid paying filing fees at the county records department.”

“‘It’s what led to the financial collapse,’ Crandall said of the lack of oversight in the sub-prime mortgage loan world.”

‘It’s crazy,’ Cynthia Griffin said. ‘I think people should check their mortgages and see who really owns it. It’s a real relief right now. It makes me feel better that I don’t have something like that looming over my head. But it’s not a solution.’”

“With apologies to Charles Dickens, this is the tale of two markets, the buyer’s market and the seller’s market, for it is both. For sellers this means selling at today’s prices will likely mean taking a loss if they bought after 2003, while buyers will find prices sharply discounted from the feeding frenzy days of 2005 and 2006 with interest rates remarkably low.”

“The problem isn’t that the conditions aren’t ripe for buyers, which makes it a good market for many sellers. Buyers see very plainly that prices are far below the recent bubble period. Sellers however, are not always as astute. Mom always said the older you get the faster time goes, so to many of these equity rich sellers, 2005 seems like yesterday. Most are reluctant, even resistant, to the reality that the home they have so many fond memories of, is worth significantly less than a couple years ago, before they were ready to sell.”

“Memories cannot be sold. They do not stay with the home, they live in your head and in your heart. A house without a family is only a house or, as the recently departed George Carlin said, ‘A house is just a big box where you keep your stuff.’”

“It is no secret that these boxes are more affordable now than last year, even cheaper than the year before and significantly cheaper than the year before that. Rather than dwell upon what your home was worth in 2006, if you want to sell it, remember what it was worth when you bought it. No doubt you will find you are making a handsome profit on your box, even after you take the memories with you.”