The Housing Bubble

The Sun Sentinel reports from Florida. “Broward County’s three-month run of home price increases ended in September, the Florida Realtors said. ‘Housing affordability conditions are very favorable right now,’ Florida Realtors President Patricia Fitzgerald said in a statement. ‘However, financially qualified buyers are still being denied home loans because of overly restrictive lending requirements, and that’s a significant obstacle to the housing recovery.’”

From KOMO News. “Dixie Mitchell wasn’t looking for a free ride, but rather just some help. Neighbors, family, and strangers, armed with with protest signs and petitions, joined Mitchell’s fight to save her home of 44 years ‘I want to stay in my house,’ Mitchell said. ‘I know I made the loan, but I didn’t expect I’d have cancer, my husband would have cancer.’”

“Mitchell, who lives on social security, says she never wanted a free ride. Ocwen Financial offered Dixie a 2-percent fixed rate for the life of the loan — a payment she and her disabled husband say they can handle. ‘The loan is gonna be $1,700 a month,’ she said. ‘I was paying $1,900 before it went up, and then it went up to $2,400, and went up to $2,568. And that’s where I couldn’t go no further.’”

The Palm Beach Post. “Reducing mortgage debt for some homeowners is an option Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is willing to consider as part of the nationwide settlement agreement with banks. More than 1.9 million mortgages in Florida are underwater, including 141,070 in Palm Beach County, according to a CoreLogic report.”

“The March letter she wrote with the three other attorneys general warned that lowering a homeowner’s debt could encourage people to stop making loan payments and create a ‘moral hazard.’ Bondi’s deputy communications director, Jennifer Davis, reiterated that concern Tuesday. ‘The important thing is to ensure that principal reduction not cause further harm to Florida’s housing market by encouraging people to default on their mortgages,’ she said.”

The Tampa Tribune. “When Courtney Leaver moved into her dream home in Connerton in 2007, she bought into the whole ‘new town’ concept. She thought she was getting Westchase in the heart of Pasco County. ‘It’s been just the opposite,’ she said.”

“For the second time, the Connerton project has shut down. As originally planned, Connerton was supposed to have more than 8,000 homes, 1.7 million square feet of retail, and 1.4 million square feet of office and government space. To date, 256 homes have been built – six in the last year. There are no active builders in the community. Leaver, like other homeowners who bought their homes before the market crash, thought by now the project would be flush with retail shops, cafes and thriving neighborhoods. Instead, most of the community is a desert of undeveloped lots and beautifully landscaped, empty streets.”

“She said most of her friends short-sold their homes and moved elsewhere. Leaver and her husband considered doing the same. ‘We worked too hard for what we have to walk away from it,’ she said.”

“She still hopes Connerton becomes the new town she was promised. ‘I have a feeling we’ll be long gone before it does,’ she said. ‘This is not the neighborhood I bought into. This was going to be a community where people knew each other and cared about each other, but there’s been so much turnover, it just hasn’t happened.’”

From the BBC. “Two US senators have proposed a plan to offer visas for foreigners buying homes worth $500,000 or more. Some 31% of all international housing buyers choose Florida. The idea has also been supported by billionaire investor Warren Buffett. ‘If you wanted to change your immigration policy so that you let 500,000 families in but they have to have a significant net worth and everything, you’d solve things very quickly,’ Mr Buffett told PBS’s Charlie Rose in August.”

The News Chief. “The visitor — at some point in the process of pitching this program they became ‘visitors,’ not ‘foreigners’ — would have to spend at least $250,000 on a primary residence and a total altogether of $500,000 on residential property. The home purchases has to be an all-cash deal, no mortgage or equity loans. Considering the predatory lending practices that have come to light among our leading financial institutions, this is probably a wise precaution for protecting gullible foreigners, er, visitors.”

“As Emma Lazarus so famously said on the base of the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse from your teeming shore … and I have a great three bedroom, 2 1/2 bath split-level to show you.’”

The News Press. “Home prices spiked up 17 percent in Lee County in September compared to a year earlier, even as the flood of distressed sales ebbed. The inventory of unsold homes has also contributed to a stronger market, said Denny Grimes of Denny Grimes & Co: only 800 houses under $100,000 are available for sale now, down from 4,200 three years ago.”

“Real estate agent Cheryl Turner of John R. Wood Realtors in Naples said the stronger prices there are due to an increased confidence by would-be retirees that the worst is over for the national economy and the local real estate market. ‘What I’m seeing is people in their 50s, but thinking when they’re ready to retire the markets going to have recovered,’ she said. ‘They’re still in a position to pay for it while the market is down. They can get a foot in the door before the market recovers.’”

The Herald Tribune. “Sarasota-Bradenton and all but four other major markets in Florida saw sharp increases in home sales during September from the same month a year earlier. The only communities that saw a decline in sales were Charlotte County-North Port, Orlando, Melbourne and Lakeland, the data show. Of those, Charlotte County-North Port saw the steepest: a 9 percent drop from a year ago. But that had more to do with a shortage of inventory than lack of demand.”

“‘We have had so many foreclosures in the North Port area, and banks simply are not releasing them,’ said Paula Brill, owner of Exit Realty Welcome Home in Port Charlotte. ‘Our inventories are way down. They are 40 percent lower than in September 2010 and that is helping to stabilize prices.’”

The Ledger. “Polk County home prices increased in September, marking the area’s first gain in more than four years. However, real estate observers say the price gains don’t quite reflect a housing market rebound. So what’s behind September’s uptick? Fewer foreclosure sales. ‘There’s just not as many cheap sales going on. Prices overall really aren’t increasing,’ said Peter Murphy, president of the Home Encounter real estate firm in Tampa.”

“‘We are seeing multiple offers on properties and there’s not enough inventory, because the banks are so far behind,’ said Chris McLaughlin, owner of the Keller Williams Realty franchises in Polk. ‘One of those (foreclosures) hits the market, they’ve got five or six offers coming in.’”

From Ocala.com. “Sales of existing single-family homes in Marion County got a solid boost during September, jumping 13 percent from a year ago, according to a report released by Florida Realtors. Home values over the same period, however, continued their downward march.”

“Florida Realtors attributed the overall dip in prices to the sales of foreclosed homes, which tend to sell for less than other houses. ‘One positive trend we can take from this is that we are seeing increased home sales,’ said Realtor Duke Rountree of Fort McCoy, VP of the Ocala-Marion County Realtors Association. ‘The inventory is much smaller.’”

“But Rountree said the continued decline in values is troubling. ‘I wish I had a crystal ball, but hopefully by the end of this year, we can start seeing some appreciation’ in values, he said. ‘That would be a nice change.’”

“Key to making that happen, Rountree noted, would be for banks to loosen the reins on lending. Perhaps more critical than that, according to Rountree, is getting more residents of a county with nearly 13 percent unemployment back to work. ‘We need jobs in Marion County,’ Rountree said. ‘You can’t buy a home if you don’t have a job.’”

The Chicago Tribune. “His detractors used to call him ‘Gloom-and-Doom Jack McCabe.’ They were his colleagues who scoffed, back in 2004, when McCabe, a housing industry consultant, began to speak publicly about his conviction that the Florida market was heading for a big fall.”

“This was a time when investors and homebuyers were so giddy over real estate that they literally were camping out for days to be the first to put down deposits on to-be-built high-rises. Miami-Dade home prices shot up 137 percent from 2002 to 2006. Palm Beach County homes vaulted 173 percent in that period. In Fort Myers, they skyrocketed 50 percent in a single year, 2007, according to McCabe.”

“Q: Did you get a lot of grief when you said the popping of the bubble was imminent? A: I first started talking about it in the media down here in April 2004, and the discussion went national in a Fortune magazine article in September 2004. I talked about how Miami was overbuilt and prices were going to fall. When things started going south, homebuilders and Realtors said it was my fault that the market crashed because the perception was making it the reality. But I said to them, it was you who built too much stuff and kept selling it to investors and gave them teaser-rate loans at 1 percent interest and with 100 percent financing.”

“At first, all the talk directed at me was negative, but I would have people come to me after speaking engagements and say, I agree with you, but they didn’t want to say it in public. They were afraid they were going to stop the gravy train.”

The Sun Times. “Marco Island residential builders say that while housing starts haven’t rebounded to pre-economic collapse levels, some new homes are rising from the ground and an upswing in renovations and remodeling is helping to keep their companies solvent. Remodeling has also become a staple for luxury home builder Kevin Williams Construction. Williams said activity for his company has actually slowed in 2011, as compared to 2010, as luxury homes construction continues to decline.”

“‘I think the prices of homes on the island have come down to the point where people are buying them and they have to remodel them,’ Williams added. ‘It’s (the housing market) definitely changed and I don’t think we’ll see that kind of boom again because I think we all know that it was unrealistic.’”

“Andy Delgado of Andrew Hunter Homes tells a markedly different tale than other builders. Business this year is almost double that of 2010, said Delgado. ‘We think the reason we’re busy is we’re making it affordable for someone on the island to build a new home,’ Delgado said.”