Bits Bucket And Craigslist Finds For June 29, 2006
Please post your off-topic ideas, links and Craigslist finds here!
The Housing Bubble
Examining the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole.
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If the housing bubble was a movie…
Raiders of the Lost Equity. Starring Joe Sixpack and Sally Boobjob. A group of teenage mortgage brokers put a neighborhood under siege armed with Helocs and Neg ARMs. By the time people start realizing what is happening, the neighborhood is littered with Hummers, Escalades, flat screen TVs and exotic vacations. Homeowners are left upside down, chained with debt, but with inflated egos and mammary glands. The raider brokers escape unnoticed. Rated: Low IQ (warning, viewing this may alter your perception of economic reality and make you feel richer than you really are).
Would probably get an Academy Award as well. David Lereah to get bit part nomination for acting in a supporting — well you get the picture. Watts and some other f-ups at Anderson also nominated.
By the way,how could we forget Appleton-Young as the neighborhood bimbo. No nomination for her.She’s not acting, she really believes her B.S.
Yup, You’re right about “Simpleton-Young” she really believes!
Will someone please recommend Suzanne for a part. She could really use the money, and I’m afraid she might try to come back!
She could do script research. That would ensure accuracy.
To add poser realism to the set, the Escalades and LX470’s will roll with and “MV” and Black Dog stickers on the rear glass, and ski containers on the roof — even in the summer (our New England friends will recognize this).
O puhleeze - the black dog is a crappy destination and everyone knows that MV is only ok AFTER all the tourists leave.
Very funny.
One scene, would be a giant Remax balloon floating over the neighborhood. Suddenly, storms gather and the balloon comes bursts and crashing down. The RE agent falls through the roof and lands in the house of REPO man.
David
http://bubblemeter.blogspot.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ulrichp/1362599/
Oh, the Huge Manatee!
Is it possible that the brokers are actually Predators in disguise?
Or a remake of Krakatoa, East of Java, where the RE bubble burst is a giant volcano that erupts, vomiting massive plumes of unemployed realtors high into the stratosphere, where they circle the globe, blocking out the sun and plunging the earth into darkness for a decade.
The hard crash landing of the real estate markets around the globe is produces the loudest sound ever heard on the planet…
LOL. The Children of the Corn ran screaming from the horror of this nuclear-winter Suburbistan….
http://lasvegas.craigslist.org/rfs/176615155.html
Instant Equity is just lying all over the place in Henderson and Las Vegas.
um, I’ll take the equity on rye…oh, and hold the house
Moqui - LOL.
One of the guys who started eBay lives in Henderson….. (random thought of the day)
could that house look any emptier?
of all the new worlds from real estate bubblespeak we’ve gotten, “instant equity” may just be my favorite.
Buy your next home with 10-20% instant equity. I’ll get you access to the hottest deals in the valley through my personal investors program.
I hope Cynthia is one of those realtors who will be prosecuted for gross criminal conspiracy and fraud. This statement is about as fraudulent as it gets. It is really hard to believe that the Realtor clowns are acting this bold. Well, I guess it’s not. Scumbags.
Went walking last night. Seven new houses sporting ‘For sale’ signs within a one block area.Unfortunately in another area I saw a RE car driving slowly down the street followed by a beat up ‘80 something van (7:30 in the evening. They both stopped in front of a house for sale and out jumped mom, dad, and four kids. Another house selling in the $600-$700K range and a subsidized minimum wage buyer. The neighbors are gonna love it. Next will come three or four cars, basketball hoop, toys in the yard, and yellow grass. Just keep the game going.
Re: Went walking last night…..
We’re seeing the same thing in far NW San Antonio - and I visualized it EXACTLY the same way you did. It’s coming…the cars, the primary colored playscapes - in the front yard. Makes the gnomes of recent history look chic. And this IS a nice neighborhood……but change is in the wind.
Costco has Escalade golf carts for $14,000 to park in front of your house on the green.
Speaking of Escalades. GM is having a “72 hour sale” coming up during which they will finance ANYONE for 0%. This is noteable in that GM has previously stated they would no longer offer such aggressive incentives — the employee pricing thing was a major disaster in terms of resale value, etc. I’m guessing that the take rate on Escalades and Hummers has probably plunged in the last few months with the dolts who buy these things getting strong-ARM’d between rising rates and skyrocketing fuel prices. Still, the prospect of the dumb and dumber being able to slide into a new ’scade regardless of their trashed credit history means we will probably see a fresh wave of pimple-faced high-school dropouts and bubblehead blondes cruising the streets in new rides. The repo man cometh.
Walked the nearest McMansion street last night with fam & dog. Seems like quite a few over there have shiney new boats. Funny how when one gets one…..no sailboats either. I’d wager no one’s reading our blog on that street. Or maybe it’s different here—no economic slowdown in sight.
Realtor friend told me this a.m. things are still slow even in entry level homes now. Things are still selling in all price points except maybe lakefront but volume is quite low. (We’re in a small town of about 6k)
Still no low-balling going on which leaves me totally perplexed. The 2 houses that we had shared our price point with are still unsold. One has never budged on their price and the other has dropped $30,000 (13%). I don’t know the story on the family who is consistently dropping (their location is not so good) but the family who isn’t budging needs to move out of state for a new job.
One neighbor’s home asking $30,000 more than the “new job out of state” family sold on Mother’s Day. It was on the market less than a week. Family doing drive by’s called the selling agent and she only showed them the one home. People were from out of town. My agent friend thought the home was overpriced so was puzzled why they jumped so fast. Just goes to show there are still greater fools out there.
Shelley Grandy (the woman trying to sell her house in Sterling, VA) in the thread below, paid 160k in 1996. She also owns another townhouse nearby. I guess she is an “investor” not a “speculator.”
Just sharing ;).
For the Florida folks. Watch this animation. It’s VERY interesting
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/hurricane/ap/
That’s pretty good.
Great animation. Thanks for sharing.
They could enhance it by adding an “equity bar” next to it, showing the money you invested in your overpriced beachfront shrinking with each rise in the wind speed…
NARRATOR: The 20s was a decade of all sorts of fast money schemes. Three years earlier, everyone was buying Florida real estate. As prices of land skyrocketed, more people jumped in, hoping to make a killing. Then, overnight, the boom turned to bust and investors lost everything.
GROUCHO MARX: ["The Cocoanuts"] Florida, folks. Sunshine, sunshine. Perpetual sunshine all the year around. Let’s get the auction started before we get a tornado. Right this way. Step forward, everybody.
NARRATOR: In May, the Marx Brothers were before the cameras with their first film, The Cocoanuts. Its subject? The Florida land boom. Now, in 1929, the gullibility of those naive speculators was something to laugh about.
GROUCHO MARX: Eight hundred wonderful residences will be built right here. Why, they’re as good up, better. You can have any kind of a home you want to. You can get even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco. Now is the time to buy while the new boom is on. Remember that old saying, “A new boom sweeps clean.” And don’t forget the guarantee.
NARRATOR: Groucho Marx would film these scenes and then rush to his broker to put more of his savings into the booming market, on margin, of course.
ARTHUR MARX, Son of Groucho Marx: Max Gordon, a Broadway producer, was also heavily in the market and Gordon could never get over the fact that the market was going up and up and up all the time. And he said to my father, “How long has this been going on, Groucho?” And my father said, “I don’t know, but my broker down in Great Neck tells me that it’s because there’s a worldwide market for American goods and it’s never going to go down, that the market’ll just keep going up and up and up.”
NARRATOR: May 1929. Stock prices were going up and up. With so much money to be made, people were borrowing more money than ever before to buy stocks. Market leaders like William Durant, far from being worried, were ecstatic. Off on his annual visit to Europe, he announced that everything would be fine as long as we all continued to believe. “Confidence — not halfway confidence, but 100-percent confidence — is the real basis for our prosperity.”
Astrologer Evangeline Adams was now putting out a newsletter. Her 100,000 subscribers learned how the Zodiac could influence stock prices. Her advice for the coming summer: buy.
BEN KAROL, Newspaper Delivery Boy, 1929: They thought this was a ride that was never going to end, just goes on and on and on and every day, they got more money and they’re counting up their paper profits. And they’re selling and buying and buying and selling and they’re doing great.
TOM McCORMICK, Stock Sales Clerk, 1929: Geez, I’d go to get a shoeshine and they’d say, “How’s the market?” You’d go to the barber to get a haircut, “How is the market?” Everybody was in the market.
(From “The Crash of 1929″
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/crash/filmmore/pt.html)
So was this where you got the handle, “Get Stucco?”
Yup.
“Get stucco”……that is so cool - I had wondered.
Look up John Law as well, I got a laugh out of that one once I finally figured it out.
I do what I can!
You get stucco… Oh, can you get stuck-o!
Oh, forgot to mention, she’s reduced the price since that article was written. The place is an architectural disaster IMO.
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rfs/176678461.html
Gawd, that’s ugly. 400K for that? I don’t think so. It’s probably Heloc’d up the wazoo to pay for her boob jobs and facelifts.
Unfortunately, you see a lot of that in DC — shoddy construction, hastily built townhomes, in some good locations in the DC suburbs. People paid good money for some of these places, and now only a year later they’re seeing the mortar crumble out from the walls and the gutters rust.
“this very large brick townhome is a commuter’s dream”
A commuter’s dream? Yeah, maybe if you dream about commuting, but who does that?
Maybe they are just trying to out-do Ford? We just bought a Ford with 0% financing. (And $1000 cash back, but really that’s just a negotiating tool on the price…) FWIW, the dealership was *dead* on Friday night and Sunday.
There is something that I’m seeing here in orange county that just blows my mind. Often in the older condo complexes there will be several units for sale all priced similarly. Some are ex-rentals owned by realtors. As you can imagine, they are vacant, have no upgrades and are in disrepair. Yet these greedy fools price their units the same as the well maintained and upgraded ones. Who do they think they are kidding? You can walk down 4 doors to the same model with $50k in upgrades, yet they are priced the same. When the nicer ones aren’t even selling, it makes me wonder just what is going on in their minds. Are they even trying to sell the place? Or are they just hoping to win the idiot lottery?
That may be true.
I just have to question why any bear would be looking at condos right now in OC.
I appreciate that you are doing it and reporting back, so I don’t have to.
Many realtors aren’t the sharpest tool in the shed and don’t have a high opinion of the home buying public, which is why they are pulling the move you describe above.
This guy is stuck in a time warp. He thinks its 2003.
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rfs/176509035.html
I like the part where he says: “I’d really like to close this segment of my life.” As in, this condo is strangling me!!
“I’m offering this deal if…”
He forgot “and you have to feed the squirrels”.
At least he’s not asking for oral sex.
Anyone hear Robert Reich’s commentary on Markeptlace (NPR) last night whining about just buying a house and how the Fed needs to be careful about how much they raise interest rates, impilcations for economy, housing jobs, blah, blah, blah? I wish BB would hit all these people trying to tell him what to do with interest rates with 50 bps today!
OT - I like listening to Marketplace, but must they have Robert Reich on giving his commentary every other day? Surely there are other “economists” they can bring in to vary the tone a little.
Reich is obviously a better self-promoter than economist…
Reich isn’t an economist. He’s a lawyer.
That’s true — he’s a lawyer. But he got formal economics training from his Hollywood pals.
Funny, then, how he enjoys pretending he knows more about economics than economists do…
At least Marketplace had him talking about “markets” in that segment, as opposed to the subsequent story about foster kids, which had little to do with any kind of market news. Sigh.
But yeah, it was strange hearing Reich whine about interest rates going up, and maybe if he were in charge, the boom times would never end, right? But neither would inflation, not only in houses but in everything else. You think we have inflation now? Ha ha! Think back to the late 1970’s! Keep interest rates dead low, and we might end up worse than that. Come to think of it, we might head that way anyway.
What I got out of Reich’s talk was that he thinks the housing economy can’t stand a return to historically average interest rates! Bring back the punch bowl!?! I guess that would be his solution.
yeah, the problem is basically keep rates low and inflation keeps going or push rates higher and reach the housing bubble tipping point.
wouldn’t want that to be my job.
Not only that but let inflation run and the bond market will raise long term interest rates and burst the housing bubble anyway.
The best explanation, unfortunately, would be the old argument that NPR is screamingly liberal and therefore they would prefer to book screamingly liberal guests.
NPR has no interest in “varying the tone”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich
From FatWallet — a worried San Diego condo owner:
http://www.fatwallet.com/t/52/628298/
It is worth comparing the history of 1929’s stock market bubble collapse to the present-day housing bubble correction in progress. Substitute “flippers buying investment property with borrowed money” for “people playing the market with borrowed money”, “hedge funds” for “brokerage pools”, and “bearish economist Robert Shiller” for “bearish economist Roger Babson” to get a sense of why this might be a point in history with relevence for the present day financial market situation.
Also, don’t overlook this rather ominous bit: “Spring: The American economy shows ominous signs of trouble. Steel production is declining, construction is sluggish, car sales are down, and consumers are building up high debts because of easy credit.”
———————————————————————————
1929 Wall Street Timeline
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/crash/timeline/timeline2.html
March 4: President Herbert Hoover is inaugurated. Nicknamed “The Great Engineer,” the former geologist and mining engineer takes office amid booming prosperity. During the campaign, he has promised: “We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”
March 8: Michael J. Meehan begins one of the most successful brokerage pools in Wall Street history. Over the next ten days, he drives the value of R.C.A. stock up almost 50%. In today’s money, his pool will make the colluding investors $100 million.
March 15: Newspapers quote Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon saying there are bargains to be found in the bond market. Wall Street is in the midst of a buying frenzy. As the market rises, some begin to fear it will soon collapse. The Federal Reserve Board meets, but does not make any public statements.
March 25: A mini-crash begins as investors start to sell, revealing the market’s shaky foundations. For the many people playing the market with borrowed money, the day is a disaster, as margin calls wipe out their holdings. While the investors seek to borrow more money, interest rates soar to 20 percent. The New York Daily News calls it a “selling avalanche.”
March 27: Banker Charles Mitchell announces that the National City Bank
(later rechristened Citibank) will provide $25 million in credit to stop the market’s slide. His move stops the panic, and call money declines from 20 to eight percent. Senator and former Treasury Secretary Carter Glass calls for Mitchell to resign from his post on the Federal Reserve Board because of his intervention in the market.
Spring: The American economy shows ominous signs of trouble. Steel production is declining, construction is sluggish, car sales are down, and consumers are building up high debts because of easy credit. Yet the stock market continues its upward momentum, heedless of real economic indicators.
May 14: The N.Y.S.E. opens a new bond room, adding 6,000 feet to the trading floor.
Summer: The market continues to rebound, and stocks hit record levels month after month.
August 17: Michael Meehan’s brokerage firm launches a new service: an office aboard ocean liners, including the Berengaria. This convenience allows transatlantic passengers to buy or sell shares during the weeklong passage between the U.S. and Europe.
September 3: After a surge of optimism, the bull market reaches its peak — the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at 381.17. A newspaper headline trumpets, “Public Demand for Stock Appears Insatiable.”
September 5: Bearish economist Roger Babson gives a speech, saying, “Sooner or later, a crash is coming, and it may be terrific.” He has been delivering this message for two years, but for the first time, investors listen. The market takes a severe dip, which will be called the “Babson Break.” The next day, prices will stabilize, but the collapse has begun.
Mid-September: The market fluctuates wildly up and down.
October 24: “Black Thursday.” The economic bubble finally bursts. Stock prices fall sharply on a day of heavy liquidation. Ticker tape runs four hours later than normal at a volume of 12.9 million shares. Headlines will report the market’s paper loss at $5 billion. A pool of bankers act to stem the drop by putting more money into the market, and President Hoover reassures Americans that U.S. business is sound. Within a few days, a headline will read, “Brokers Believe Worst is Over and Recommend Buying of Real Bargains.”
October 28: “Black Monday.” The stock market falls 22.6%, the highest one-day decline in U.S. history. The crash triggers similar declines in markets around the world.
October 29: “Black Tuesday.” Panic sets in as investors all try to sell their stocks at once. Over 16 million shares of stock are sold, setting a record — and the market records over $14 billion in paper losses. Stock tickers cannot keep up with the heavy trading volume. At the end of the day, the market is down 33 points, more than 12.8%. Some of the nation’s financial elite, including General Motors’ William C. Durant and the Rockefeller family, show confidence by buying stocks, but their efforts fail to stem the tide.
November 23: After weeks in freefall, the market hits its bottom and stabilizes. The New York Times reports, “Regular Schedule to be Resumed, but Trading Will Be Suspended Last Half of Week; Business Nearly Normal.” The market’s daily volume is at 3 million shares with “orderly although irregular” prices.
1931
January 7: A report released by the Committee for Unemployment Relief states that over four million Americans are unemployed.
1932
July 8: The Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its lowest point of the Great Depression, closing at 41.22, down 89 percent from its peak in 1929.
It took three years for stocks to hit the low after the 1929 crash, and I predict it will take at least that long for real estate price to bottom out after the August 2005 peak. Then another twelve years for the dust to settle. (The stock market did not make a real turnaround until after 1945 — check out the Price/Earnings ratio graph early in Shiller’s “Irrational Exuberance” for the evidence on this.)
Accounts I’ve read about late 1929 indicate that it took time for the American encomy as a whole to take the body blow. People viewed the stock market crash as a New York thing. Even traders thought in early 1930 that things were looking up, and the market rallied with decent volume until about April. Sometime in the summer of 1930 was when it became nationally apparent that things were really tanking.
My grandfather told me once that his memories of growing up on a farm in Illinois the 1920’s were worse than of the 1930’s. Agricultural prices were so low in the 1920’s that his family and neighbors were poorer.
History is getting ready to repeat itself, and of course the “experts” are as clueness now as they were in 1929. Here are some real gems from the Pompous Prognosticators of 1929 - 1933. Read it and weep.
http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_01/seymour062001.html
Plunge protection needed for Toll Brothers. High profile public company stocks are not supposed to hit new 52-week lows on FOMC meeting days, are they?
http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/quotes.asp?symb=TOL&siteid=mktw
Pulte is also at a new 52-week low today. At this point, I am starting to seriously doubt the existence of the plunge protection team…
http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/quotes.asp?symb=phm&vc=&siteid=mktw&dist=dropmenu
The existance?….or the competency?
Sooner or later, fundamentals will swamp out the effect of any and all attempts to manipulate the market. It happened in 1929, and it will happen again this time, sad to say…
http://tinyurl.com/n49cp
Major synchronized intervention took place after the 2:15 Fed rate hike announcement. The degree of correlation that shows up across this basket of stocks is frankly somewhat alarming.
Well,well.well. The PPT finally arrived. At 2:15 the housing stocks began to rise sharply. All of them. Amazing. The precision of the PPT is breathtaking. Not just some of them at 2:15! No, all of them. Not just some at 2:15 and others at 2:20. Nope. All at once. And boy did they take off!
Look at the charts of the homebuilder stocks. Pretty amazing, eh?
Do you think it has anything to do with the end of the quarter and the fact that some mutual funds are heavily invested in homebuilder stocks?
No, no,no. It is merely a coincidence, I am sure.
http://tinyurl.com/ovpm8
The whole bunch of ‘em peaked and started going down around 10:45, when Nasdaq et al were starting a sharp rise. It’s the first mid-day divergence I’ve seen between the HB’s and the rest of the market in many many days. An astonishing increase in volume as it started rolling, too, at least in KBH for example.
Analysis of Freddie Mac’s weekly mortgage survey started hitting the business sites around 12:30. I can’t imagine that the drop to that point was due to a leak, especially because the entire report always has pretty much the same information as the stuff from yd’s Mortgage Application Survey.
Time to close out my short. HB’s are down three percent from highs earlier today and that’s about as much as they ever move during the day. I wrote the other day that stuff easing into its lows for the day right before FOMC usually means it goes up hard right after the meeting ends.
About interest rates.
You keep hearing that mortgage rates are at an all time low.
Look at this chart.
http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/academic/agec217/deboer/graphs/intratels.JPG
The truth is that the early 80s was an anomaly. If we take out that unprecedented period as an outlier, than we see that rates rarely go over 8%.
At the soon to be 5.5%, mortgage rates will be higher than historical averages and should push prices lower.
The NAR bs about rates being good for buyers is a load of crap. (as is almost everything they say.)
those are treasury bond rates, not mortgage rates or fed fund rates.
I realize that. But mortgage rates rise and fall with intersest rates. My point is still valid.
http://mortgage-x.com/images/graph/tx408.gif
From Miami’s Craigslist, a condo owner trying to rent their unit. They have placed slightly different ads 28 times in the past six weeks.
http://miami.craigslist.org/cgi-bin/search?areaID=20&subAreaID=0&query=%28786%29+663-4224&catAbbreviation=apa&minAsk=&maxAsk=15000&bedrooms=
You can see the sweat dripping….
Please post if the link does not work.
I see that he’s tried everything but reducing his price. He cut it from $3,200 to $3,100 then put it back up. Not much of a renter base at $3,200, I’d think. At $2,000 he could probably move it. Nice-looking condo, from the photos.
I feel sorry for the poor guy. i hope he learns a lesson and is more prudent from now on.
I like how they constantly lower and raise then relower and reraise the rental price. What kind of pricing strategy is that?
Great properties can be found in Aventura, but probably >50% owned by investors facing “full-crash” combined with hurricane season, ugly picture imvho.
There are 726 homes for sale in Wilkes-Barre. I wonder how they’re holding up with all the flooding.
Underwater for sure.
You can feel the desperation starting here in the OC. Yesterday, my doorbell rang and when I went to answer, I was surprised to see a Realtor from an open house my wife and I had visited the week before. Never had a Realtor actually come to my house to “follow up” before. I politely told him that we’re going to wait another year to see how the “bubble” ….I mean “market” goes.
I went on a walk through my neighborhood last night and came across a house that is for rent for $1,500 / month (1300 sq ft, three bedroom). When I got home, I pulled the house up on Zillow to check for a recent sales price. The house was purchased in May of ‘04 for $343,000. I wonder how long the owners will carry this negative cash flow property before trying to sell, or if it will become a bank repo. If it does rent out, I doubt the renters will be able to stay very long.
“If it does rent out, I doubt the renters will be able to stay very long.”
That’s an excellent point, one not lost on intelligent renters. When we were looking to rent, we went to the tax records to learn what each owner paid. The closer to the top an owner bought (or re-fi’d into), the greater likelihood he won’t be able to handle the cash flow for as long as you might want to rent, all other thibngs being equal.
It’s been a few years since I sat in a macro course, but I vaguely recall the notion that 2.5% was roughly the sustainable long-term rate of GDP growth. Growth rates much higher than that tend to signal that the Fed has been spiking the punchbowl too much, and that inflation will soon rear its ugly head unless the punchbowl is soon removed. Is this still the case, or have we entered a New Era, where a 5.6% GDP growth rate is “no big deal”?
http://tinyurl.com/jdquh
Details
“Consumer spending was the main engine of growth in the quarter, rising at a 5.1% pace, the fastest since the third quarter of 2003. Consumer spending contributed 3.5 percentage points to growth. Spending on durable goods rose 20.3% after dropping by 16.6% in the fourth quarter.”
Negative Savings Rate + Unsustainable GDP growth led by consumer spending = D%%p sh!t.
Not everyone seems so sure that the Fed is done…
http://people.brandeis.edu/~cecchett/pdf/inf_current.htm
Getstucco’s earlier post sparked my curosity about Groucho Marx. Apparently, although he was spoofing the Florida Land Boom in Cocoanuts, he really did lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in Florida real estate investments a few years earlier when the Great Miami Hurricane hit in 1926. He also claimed to have lost $800,000 in the stock market in 1929. That’s around 9 million in today’s dollars. Poof!
I have a biography of G Marx that has this tale. Once after he had lost the money on stocks, he found himself invited to the gallery at the NYSE. Once there he broke into a loud song; it was an apt tune which I forget the name of. The whole stock exchange got quiet, stopped trading and listened. When he finished he walked away. Quite a character.
Here’s a craigslist find in Santa Monica:
http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/sub/176368945.html
Synopsis: An FB with the 3 bedroom condo is trying to rent out one of their bedrooms for $1550/month. For this, you get an on-street parking permit (if you can find a space), no pets but you have to tolerate their cat, and you must be “someone who is intelligent and has something interesting to say”. Single occupancy only, of course. Good Karma required.
NB: you can rent a rather nice one bedroom apartment in Santa Monica for this price.
I think this is going to be a reason why rents drop. When the FB with an adjusting mortgage starts losing his/her mind, rooms for rent will start popping up like crazy which will displace some of those who might otherwise rent a studio or 1BR, which will depress rental prices. Obviously, not at those rates though.
I’m moving in with a friend in a month. I have a one bedroom apartment, but I’m moving in with a friend for 1/2 the rent I’m paying now, and sharing a 2,000 sq ft home. (My apartment is 700 sq feet right now)
Another craigslist find in SM:
http://losangeles.craigslist.org/sfv/apa/175691210.html
Synopsis: An “investor” bought this 3/2 1400 sq ft SFH for $1,300,000 less than 3 months ago. After quickly throwing in some granite countertops and bathroom marble, it’s for rent @4000/month. You can: “Rent | Rent to buy | Ask for our 0 down bad credit hostory loan program!”[sic].
The assessed value is $226,650. The location is six blocks from the west end of the airport runway, and two blocks from Santa Monica College. No doubt one could sublet the garage to parking-starved students who can’t park anywhere close to school.
I might lowball this wanker just for fun.
Is anyone else wondering (like I am) whether the big Wall Street builder executives backdated their options? (I have no evidence, except that if “everyone else” was doing it, why wouldn’t Robert Toll and friends have done it?)
———————————————————————————
Apple investigating backdating of stock options
By Rex Crum, MarketWatch
Last Update: 5:21 PM ET Jun 29, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - Apple Computer Inc. said late Thursday it has launched an internal probe of executive stock options granted over a four-year period, including a grant to Chief Executive Steve Jobs that was later cancelled.
The company said a special committee of its outside directors has hired independent counsel to perform the investigation and inform federal securities regulators of any details that are discovered.
http://tinyurl.com/md6bl
FYI the Suzanne video returns (for those wondering who Suzanne is, and why she ‘researched this’):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubsd-tWYmZw
Free 2006 Jeep Grand Cherokee!!!! (with purchase of ridiculously overpriced townhouse)
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/rfs/177056134.html