Local Market Observations
What do you see in your housing market this weekend? Foreclosures? “Flagler County had a big spike in foreclosures last month, causing it to have the state’s highest ratio of foreclosure properties compared with total number of homes. Foreclosure activity in Flagler jumped more than 215 percent month-over-month in June. Some real estate observers say the rise in activity could be the beginning of the unloading of a ’shadow inventory’ of foreclosed homes that had been building, despite a decline in foreclosures the previous three months.”
“Scott Nieminen, the immediate past-president of the Flagler County Association of Realtors, said he doesn’t buy that this is the start of a shadow inventory, and that the market has been fairly consistent throughout. But he and other area real estate agents said it’s still too soon to tell. ‘I don’t really think there’s a shadow inventory,’ said Nieminen. He said the June increase is likely a normal fluctuation in the foreclosure process. ‘I think only time will tell at this point — is there or isn’t there?’ he said.”
“The Chicago area now has the nation’s largest inventory of foreclosed homes because it is harder to unload troubled properties here than in most other metropolitan areas. The Chicago metropolitan area had 118,776 homes in May 2011 that were either owned by banks or were in the process of being taken over by lenders, according to RealtyTrac.”
“‘I think it’s the banks; they are not willing to lower prices,’ said John Bouman, president of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, an advocacy organization for low-income people. ‘So these properties just sit there empty because they don’t want to sell it at a lower price and lose the money they have in it.’”
“Bouman, who lives in Maywood, said the situation has affected him personally. The house across the street from him has been vacant for more than a year, he said, and he knows of two prospective buyers who inquired about the property but couldn’t get satisfactory answers from the bank. Bouman said he and his wife had thought about selling their house and moving to a condominium in Chicago, but the glut of foreclosures had depressed prices so much that he couldn’t get enough money for his house to afford one.”
“‘Sometimes I think that it’s hard to find anyone at the banks who can make a decision,’ said Bouman, ’so these properties just sit there.’”
Sales information? “Georgia’s vacation home market has taken the same beating as sales of primary homes in metro Atlanta, with some believing it’s even worse. ‘I’ve never seen it this bad before,’ said Roger Ardston of Woodstock, who sells mountain real estate, owns a cabin near Blue Ridge and runs Blue Ridge Lodge Cabin Rentals. ‘I would like to say it’s getting better. But I don’t see it. Most of [the cabins] we have seen have been on market for 18 months to two years and have not sold.’”
“Bill Keim, a founder of Signature Properties Group on St. Simons Island, estimated half of sales there now are foreclosures. ‘Right now, second homes and investment property sales particularly are pretty close to nonexistent,’ he said.”
Development News? “The Memphis development company Makowsky Ringel Greenberg made a strategic plan for creating The Laurels condominiums, committed to it, secured financing and had it substantially built when the uh-oh moment struck CEO Michael Greenberg in October 2008. Watching the stock market plummet and hearing the bailout talk, Greenberg recalled, ‘I remember saying to my wife, ‘This is bad.”’
“The roof was already keeping dry the 40-home, four-story building at the northeast corner of Central and Highland. The first luxury units would be ready for sale in just nine months. And all of a sudden, the real estate world as we knew it disappeared. ‘Once you start, it’s a train leaving the station. You can’t stop,’ Greenberg said of the $13.2 million project. ‘We are selling for significantly less than we got in it.’”
“While many other developers have either been forced into foreclosure or just walked away, Makowsky Ringel Greenberg decided not to give up, to protect both its reputation and the investments of The Laurels residents. ‘Do you sit there and try to wait it out, which the bank would never let you do anyway,’ Greenberg said. ‘Or do you do what you’ve got to do to move it and get people in the building?’”
I live in a block ‘hood, so I’ll do a visual here of the square surrounding me:
N
Nice lady - Abandoned (no action) - Occupied (don’t know by who)
Crazy guy - My House - Abandoned
Abandoned (nobody knows the story) - Renters (4 adults, 4 cars) - For Sale (looks abandoned)
S
So only about 1/3 of my area s occupied by stable, medium-to-long term residents.
So I had my brother do a drive through at the development were there is a short/reo/unknown status house we’re looking at in Queensbury NY. My instructions to bro were specific. Look at site grading, check for above grade utilities, cell towers, high lines, water/power/sanitary utility hooches in backyards, condition of asphalt(heaves, settlement, etc).
He came back and said that the site/civil looks good. One never knows because it’s all covered up and buried but you can make some assumptions as to the diligence of the site/civil work contractor after the fact.
He then says these are high end houses(unusual for what I refer to as dumb-a$$ country) and there are other houses in the same development for sale that he likes more. So I zill-dow the development and began looking. WTF……. The sale history on these houses indicates that nothing higher end is selling. Higher end for this area is 300k+. They’re chasing the market down in a big way, DOM is measured in the years on these higher end houses. Folks…. the tax bill on these places is stunning. Absolutely stunning. $10-15k/year in property taxes and the local wages are around 20-25k.
Now to me, it really seems the Housing Crime Syndicate operators are doing everything they can to obscure the fact that the only activity is at the very lower price registers. I don’t see how the median is holding up when the bulk of transactions are sub-$125k.
I don’t know who the owners of these supposed shorts are. I’m beginning to believe that they’re owned by local Housing Crime Syndicate operators (developers, local NAR office investors, etc) and really not shorts.
Those taxes are outrageous. Who can afford that? The county/state would bring in more revenue by reducing the tax rate so that a working person might actually make a purchase and start paying the taxes.
“Who can afford that?”
Very few. And who can afford the house price? Very few. And those who can are from the outside and isn’t that the assumption everywhere? *Still* to this day, it goes something like this; “Nobody around here will buy these houses. The buyers are people from _____ who are loaded”.
Now how does that work again? If every towns housing inventory in the country is overpriced to the point that no locals can afford them and requires people from _____ in order to sell, where do these outside buyers come from?
I live on a dead-end street off a main road. On this street, there are two houses for rent, one house for sale, and one house that has been sitting vacant for a year, neither for rent or for sale. This is in Richmond, Virginia.
Houses are for sale everywhere. There are 2 apparent vacant foreclosures (with signs on the door/windows) on my route to work, which is 4 miles from my house. There are for-sale signs and lender-owned signs everywhere. Lots of houses for sale AND rent at the same time.
700 Bofa auctions scheduled to be repo-ed this fall? Wonder if the market can handle that given our dire local unemployment rate. Will Bofa postpone some of these as they did before; knowing that robo-signing is behind them (hopefully), and there is a crop of homes waiting to make the list anew, as they have not had a trustee sale in a year.
They did change servicers on my wife. BAC to Bank of America, N.A. Then they sent another letter stating that if my wife did not dispute her debt then it would be assumed to be good debt.
She has already asked for the note; and she will be disputing the debt in an attempt to get more time in our free-for-now home! After all it was originated it was re-sold several times without proper procedures being followed. And it was shoddily originated; with no income given it sure seemed to be dodgy; then that company was sold to Countrywide and that was then sold to BofA. Given BofAs 8.5 billion dollar settlement with investors regarding crappily made mortgages maybe there is something wrong with wife’s mortgage and its subsequent allonges-reassignments that circumvented state law.
After all; why else should they change the servicer from BAC to Bank of America, N.A.; then say that bit about not disputing the debt makes it a valid debt? Why not dispute it? If it was recorded incorrectly some judges take issue with that. Maybe it just buys her some more time in the home?
Oh yeah, lots of homes in our hood are either being sold short or foreclosing as values have halved from 400k to 200K(or 150!). They are largely for sale; vacant. A few are being enjoyed by their owners as we are on a golf resort. New owners next door just bought theirs for 200k and are loving life thus far. Too bad wife paid double. Not something a few more shifts at the grocery store will solve; or even a raise at her lunch lady job!
This house was listed @ $297k and I put in an offer of $235k about 7 months ago. The Realtor presented it to the owner and their response was. “That`s not realistic” there was no counter offer. Well they have dropped the price a whopping $8k but it is still sitting for 313 days and counting.
MLS ID 353939
8942 Se Ceres St Hobe Sound, FL 33455
Beds:3 Bed
Baths:2 Bath
House Size: 2,520 Sq Ft
Year Built 2003
Price/sqft $115
Days on site 313 days
Nice place Jethrolio. Not worth the fantasy asking price though. The EFS looks like Dryvit. Is it?
“The EFS looks like Dryvit. Is it?”
EFS exterior finish system?
I don`t know what EFS is. But that house is CBS construction. Concrete block and stucco with HardiePlank on the front and metal roof. I walked through it and it was pretty well built. Local builder not anything like those Centex / Lennar cra@p shacks that were thrown up all over the place during the boom years. But you`re right, it`s not worth the fantasy asking price.
Block? Different story. That’s a nice place if it’s block.
Dryvit system is a faux stucco ext finish system. Polystyrene insulation/fiberglass mess/synthetic troweled on non-portland finish.
I knew what Dryvit was, they used to use that garbage on strip malls down here in the 80`s. Problem was when somebody ran there Publix shopping cart into it, it looked like it got hit by a car. Didn’t hold up very well in the hurricanes either. That stuff went the same route as the polybutylene plumbing, which even after all the law suits to replace it is still bursting in houses where the owner pocketed the insurance check, never replaced the plastic garbage with copper and sold it to a victim.
But what does EFS stand for?
95050-95054…..
Inventory has been fairly stable for most of the year…Prices are about the same as they were in 2007 or maybe 3-5% less…Some pocket area’s have actually been flat since 2007 or maybe even a slight up-tick…In these pocket area’s, house’s are sold within weeks @ $500-$600 per foot…
Its a disconnect though…Other area’s just a few miles away are having much difficulty…Lots of short-sales..
Within 5 blocks of where we live two foreclosures have sold in the last month. Both to out of town folks moving here, one from Ohio and one from N.Carolina. Both houses had price reductions and were on the market for roughly a year.
Plenty more to go around here a ton of new for sale signs have been popping up.