The Housing Bubble

It’s desk clearing time for this blogger. “From the Miami River to Midtown, downtown Miami condos are hot commodities among international buyers, brokers say, not least because renters are lining up to lease them. In new condo buildings, many of which still have developer units on offer, ’sales are very good,’ said Jeff Morr, founder and CEO of Majestic Properties. He said HSBC Bank recently took back 532 units at Midtown Miami. ‘They haven’t discussed what they are doing with them,’ Mr. Morr said, ‘but they are occupied by renters, and I imagine they will come to market in two or three years at about $300 a foot and will sell immediately.’”

“While prices are rising in some buildings, he said, they’re still only about half of preconstruction prices, ’so the values are tremendous. Besides South American buyers, we’re also seeing a lot of Europeans. Miami real estate is becoming a commodity like gold and stocks.’”

“While nobody knows how much distressed inventory banks may be holding, Realtors aren’t worried that they will dump large numbers of units on the market at one time. ‘It’s not to their benefit to flood the market, because that would drive prices down,’ said Carlos Villanueva, district sales manager for The Keyes Co.”

“The area has sprung to life thanks to ‘hip restaurants, great restaurants and clubs,’ said Rita Regev, broker associate at Optimar International Realty. Some developers are once again offering incentives to Realtors, she said, as they did pre-recession, she said, ‘and they’re starting to stage elaborate broker parties again.’ The shadow inventory of bank-held units ‘is all conjecture,’ said Regev. ‘The only reality is right now.’”

“The Petrinos are ready to move. There’s just one problem: Their house is still for sale. As many other homeowners in the St. Cloud area have experienced, selling a house is a waiting game that all comes down to money. ‘It’s not going as well as we hoped,’ Petrino said. She and her husband are moving to Montana. ‘It’s frustrating that it hasn’t sold yet.’”

“Before leaving for Montana, they cut the price of their home a second time, lowering the price $10,000 less than what they bought it for two years ago. Petrino said she hopes they won’t have to drop the price of her house again before it sells. ‘I don’t know if we’d go much lower,’ she said. ‘Fingers crossed, I guess.’”

“St. Cloud homeowner Doris Anderson said she doesn’t like the idea of selling her house for less than she bought it for a few years ago. So far, she and her husband have dropped the price 2.5 percent, but their house has been on the market for a year. ‘I’m not giving my house away,’ Anderson said.”

“Overall, said Minnesota Association of Realtors President Russ Portele, St. Cloud is fairly representative of trends across the state and country. ‘We’ll probably never get back to the ’04 and ’05 level of sales because that was a bubble,’ Portele said. ‘This is the market today. This is the real market.’”

“Andy Wiederhorn, the controversial executive whose mercurial business career made him a multimillionaire and landed him in prison, has put his sprawling West Hills mansion on the market. The 2008 recession brought a bitter new reality. Wiederhorn nearly lost the home to foreclosure in 2010 after defaulting on one of the multiple mortgages.”

“Wiederhorn figures he will take a beating on the sale. He’s asking $5.7 million for the property, barely half what he’s invested in the place. ‘The market really is that bad,’ Wiederhorn said. ‘It’s about half what it once was at the high-end.’”

“Mediation has been touted as a key strategy to stop foreclosures. But if Maryland is any indication, the programs are not working. As of May 31, just 56 homeowners have gotten a modification of their loan. Louis Boney lives in a small, white frame house on a quiet, grassy street in Clinton, Md. When his home fell into foreclosure, he thought the mediation process might help. But he hit unexpected pitfalls.”

“‘For me, the mediation process, I think, was a gimmick,’ Boney said. ‘In my opinion, they came there just to go through the formalities. They just want to foreclose.’”

“California cities and regions held seven of the nation’s top 10 slots for foreclosure activity in the first half of 2011, according to RealtyTrac. Norman Cox, a regional manager/broker with Coldwell Bank Town & Country in Covina, figures foreclosures will be around for a while. ‘We’ll continue to see them because there are more properties that have yet to be foreclosed and there is no one to buy them,’ he said. ‘People have to have jobs to support a mortgage. I think we’ll see a larger number of units sold, but at lower prices.’”

“One of the most unusually unique property auctions is coming to Port Townsend this Friday: A million dollar property available for $300,000. ‘We are selling it at the request of the lender but the borrower still owns it, and by doing that we are able to save the lender from taking it back from the borrower,’ said Paul Thomas of Northwest Auctions, who is also president of the Washington Auctioneer’s Association. ‘It reduces the size of their haircut by 18 percent, but they are still going to take a haircut.’ The borrower, meanwhile, gets to walk away from the project ‘done and finished and exhausted,’ but avoiding a protracted foreclosure case.”

“Thomas got into the real estate auction business about six years ago. The marketplace has turned entirely, he said, because now there are so few bidders for the prices some owners still want. ‘These days were are turning down probably 19 out of 20 auction candidates because sellers can’t afford to sell at the auction prices. If the seller is not realistic and not willing to accept a low reserve, it makes no sense going ahead with a sale,’ Thomas noted.”

“Foreclosures have tainted the marketplace, and Thomas does not see any end in sight. ‘We’re seeing a lot of banks basically dumping houses onto the market and getting very, very steep discounts and that affects everyone,’ Thomas said. ‘It is a downward spiral with no end because the more banks foreclose and sell property below market value, the lower everyone’s values are and the more foreclosures happen because more people are under water.’”

“There was a time when putting 20 percent down on a house was the accepted norm for most buyers. A proposal to move back toward that standard in the wake of the housing meltdown, however, has produced an odd-bedfellow coalition of Democrats and Republicans, consumer advocates and bankers who fear that would leave homebuyers unable to afford loans and sellers unable to find buyers. ‘It will put the final nail in the housing market,’ predicted U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.”

“Others, however, note that 10 to 20 percent down payments and conservative debt-to-income ratios once were widely accepted, and the housing market grew. ‘If we had kept 20 or even 10 percent down as a standard, I don’t think any of this would have happened in the market,’ said Jim Grissett, adjunct real estate professor at Emory University.”

“He admits to being a little old school — expecting as earlier generations did that people who buy a house should save for it, and that banks should retain some of the risk on loans they write. He also noted that falling home prices mean a 20 percent down payment is not as much as it was at the height of the boom. ‘If you can’t come up with that, maybe you shouldn’t be buying to begin with,’ he said.”

“Australian house prices have moved from being affordable to severely unaffordable in the past 10 years - and Sydney is still the least affordable capital city, a new study shows. The study found median house prices in Australia grew 147 per cent between 2001 and 2011 to $417,000, while median after-tax incomes only increased 50 per cent to $57,000.”

“This pushed the price-to-income ratio - the number of years’ worth of income needed to buy a typical dwelling outright - from an affordable 4.7 to a severely unaffordable 7.3. The report considers a dwelling just affordable if it costs no more than five times household income. A typical Sydney home with a price of $510,000 costs about 8.4 times the average annual household income. Even though Sydney experienced the least growth in housing prices through the past decade - a mere 83 per cent compared with 222 per cent in Perth - it is still suffering the effects of the late 1990s boom, the report shows.”

“Mr Phillips said it was no longer just capital cities that faced affordability issues with regional house prices in the Northern Territory, Tasmania, Victoria and NSW outstripping growth in the capital cities. He said home owners had experienced 10 years of increased housing value. ‘They’re sitting pretty. Those renting, or who have recently purchased, face very steep prices. It’s a story of the haves and the have-nots,’ he said.”

“More than 460,000 Arizona units were vacant in 2010, a 61 percent increase over the previous decade, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The vacancy rate — 16.3 percent of all housing in the state — comes after a decade that saw a recession, major job losses and home foreclosures. But the magnitude of the vacancies still caught some experts by surprise.”

“‘That’s staggering,’ said Paul Hickman, president and CEO of the Arizona Bankers Association. ‘It’s stark verification that we cannot emerge from this economic crisis until we move through this inventory.’”

“Maricopa County alone accounted for 49 percent of the vacancies in the state in 2010, according to the Census. Hickman said it’s largely because of ‘the one-dimensional’ housing economy that has dominated the state for the past decade. ‘This recession has hurt us more than the Great Depression,’ he said. ‘Our economy was young back then. We were just barely a state. But being centered on housing really hurt us.’”