Maybe People Are Just Excited And In Denial
The Gazette Extra reports from Wisconsin. “Picture what happens to a loose football at the 50-yard line. That’s the scene that Realtors and mortgage lenders say they’re now experiencing in the Janesville housing market. The Rock County housing sector has been on the rise over the last year. But in the last three months, it has strapped itself into a rocket and is ramping up faster and climbing higher than at any time in recent history. Perhaps more significant is the skyrocketing average sale price. Average prices jumped from $129,000 in the second quarter of 2015 to $151,600 in the second quarter this year. That’s $1,000 more than the average sale price for a Rock County home in mid-2007, when home sales here and throughout the U.S. reached a historic high-water mark.”
“In the last three months, Rock County home sale prices have vaulted from an average of $141,000 in April to $148,000 in May. And in June, typically the heart of home-selling season, the average price rocketed up to $162,000. That’s led buyers to pivot away from toe-dipping the market. Instead, they’re increasingly willing to dive into bidding wars with a half-dozen or more prospective buyers competing for a single listing, said Mary Ellen Mackey, a Realtor with the Realty Group of South Central Wisconsin.”
“To win bidding showdowns, Mackey said, some homebuyers have to shell out more money. ‘I think buyers are aware of a lack of supply, and they’re feeling a bit more pressure to grab a house before the peak market has even fewer housing options for them. It’s one thing that’s led to multiple offers on properties, and you’re seeing prices and what people end up paying jump above what you’d think of normal price standards,’ she said. ‘Some buyers are really pushing their limits competing, and sometimes they’re spending more than what they intended going in.’”
“And even as average prices now mirror the housing market peak of a decade ago, Chris Collins, a mortgage lender at Summit Credit Union in Janesville said he’s heard no comparisons of the current market to the housing bubble of 2007. ‘Maybe people are just excited to see the improvements and everyone is in denial or something,’ Collins said. ‘But ‘bubble’ is not a word I’ve heard anyone say.’”
Fox 17 in Michigan. ” As the summer heated up, the housing market has, too. According to housing market experts, those looking to buy a home are seeing historically low inventory, increasing prices, a 12-month wait for new construction, and record low interest rates. And they say they’ve never experienced a housing market like this in Grand Rapids. This is a far cry from where we were just a few years ago, says Tom Cronkright, CEO of Sun Title. ‘Something could literally list today at 4:00 p.m. and under contract tomorrow at noon,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember a time we had inventory move this fast.’”
“As for buyers, ‘In this market, you just have to be patient,’ said Amanda DeLong with Patriot Realty. ‘You have to realize you will most likely be asking over asking price, and you won’t have a ton of negotiating power in regards to the inspection process. You might have to go through that offer process numerous times before you find one that gets accepted for you.’”
The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio. “The central Ohio housing market is booming, with homes selling in record time at record prices. But a close look at figures released July 21 tells a tale of two very different housing markets: a terrific market for homes up to $300,000, where enormous demand allows sellers to name their price, and a buyer’s market for homes with higher asking prices.”
“David Gill, a Berkshire Hathaway agent, got a clear taste of the demand last month when he listed a home in Merion Village. Even though Merion Village has become popular, Gill worried that the home might be too much on the fringe of the village to command a lot of interest. His concerns evaporated when he started fielding calls before the home was even on the market from passers-by who learned it might be coming up for sale. He listed the home for $229,900. By the end of the first day, after multiple showings, Gill had three serious offers in hand. The sellers accepted the highest one, for $235,000.”
“‘It’s crazy, it really is,’ Gill said.”
“Just north of Merion Village, it’s a different story. Five homes are for sale on prestigious Schiller Park ranging from $994,000 to $2.59 million. Some have been on the market for years, and all have dropped their asking price. Theresa and Dale Marquart are learning the hard way that the market for expensive homes is small. The couple has been trying to sell their Tartan Fields home for a year.”
“The 5,441-square-foot home is in immaculate condition and loaded — five bedrooms, 5 1/2 bathrooms, three-car garage, a deck and a patio next to lush landscaping. But the Marquarts haven’t gotten any traction on the home. They recently dropped the asking price for the third time, to $819,900, down from a starting price of $889,900. Their agent had warned them that the market cooled as prices rose, but the process remains ‘very frustrating,’ said Theresa Marquart. ‘Your friends and family say, and all you hear about, is that this is such a hot market. Well, it is if you’re selling a house under $300,000. But not for others.’”
From CCTV America on Illinois. “Despite a housing recovery across most of the United States, some areas continue to struggle. House prices have not gone up as high and as fast everywhere, leaving millions of homeowners underwater or owing more on their properties than what they paid. Homeowner Donna Roop said there is a lot on her mind these days. Two years ago, she lost her lucrative job of 20 years as a sales rep at AT&T and is now struggling to keep her home.”
“Now, at age 53 and with a college education, she works part-time as a pool attendant earning just over $8 an hour. To make matters worse, her house is underwater. In 2003, she said she paid $130,000. Now her house is worth around $70,000. Even she were to sell it, she would still owe the bank thousands of dollars. ‘It’s been devastating,’ Roop said. ‘Put a lot of work into the house, money, had a lot of plans, and always wanted to have my own house. What do you do? No one is willing to help you — nobody.’”
“But Roop is not alone. Data from Zillow, a housing research firm, shows that despite the housing recovery since the 2008 crash, 12.7 percent of all properties with a mortgage remain underwater. Markets in the nation’s former industrial heartland are doing especially bad, with nearly a quarter of all underwater mortgages. Chicago has now displaced Las Vegas as the city with the highest rate of negative equity, 20.3 percent.”
“Matt Laricy, managing broker of Americorp Real Estate in Chicago, said stagnant wages and higher property taxes are hitting low-income areas the hardest. ‘The south and the west side of the city [Chicago] seem to only keep getting worse — more and foreclosures coming up over there even though the market is turning, compared to the downtown market that seems to be booming,’ Laricy said.”
“Roop’s bank refused to modify her loan four times. She’s now facing court proceedings, where, unable to afford an attorney, she’ll represent herself. ‘I thought there was help out there, and there isn’t,’ Roop said.”
Did you see the news Ben, about Vancouver levying a 15% tax on foreign homebuyers, even in the “sale pending” stages?
Great timing….
They’ll all just take their illegal Chinese money to Toronto and other cities. Or get their friends and family who just qualified for Canadian residency to buy on their behalf.
Vancouver 15% Tax on Foreign Investors
Washington and CA should adopt this. It is only Yuan!
Winnipeg or bust!
Montebello, CA Housing Prices Crater 6% YoY
http://www.zillow.com/montebello-ca/home-values/
they’ll be solly
invest in 22151
Cheer up my friend and remember….. Nothing accelerates the economy and creates jobs like falling prices to dramatically lower and more affordable levels.Nothing.
Irvine, CA Housing Prices Crater 16% YoY
http://www.zillow.com/irvine-ca-92620/home-values/
12.7% of homes under mortgage still underwater? But how can that be? Everyone tells me how their house appreciated $xx,000 in such a short matter of time despite rotting walls, pipes, and roofs ??
I thought home appreciation was as guaranteed as the DOW and SP500 going to infinity
The number of underwater mortgages is likely far higher considering there is little to no demand at current prices.
Remember….. I can ask $50k for my used Chevy pickup but where is the buyer at that price?
So it is with all depreciating assets like housing.
Janesville is pure middle American town. Also where the huge GM plant closed in 2008 after almost 90 years.
Once again, I find it odd that house prices in a political battleground part of the country are ramping up sharply at this point in time. Who, or what, is buying these houses?
Price per sq ft cratered 7% yoy in Rock County not to mention housing demand fell 12% county wide.
http://www.zillow.com/rock-county-wi/home-values/
I wonder if GM moved their operations to Canada or Mexico. How nice of them after taking billions from the US taxpayer…
“Governments known to stifle dissent with imprisonment and beatings or otherwise abuse their power are buying cheap, off-the-shelf surveillance software that can monitor the phone conversations and track the movements of thousands of their citizens, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Such so-called “lawful intercept” software has been available for years to Western police and spy agencies and is now easily obtained by governments that routinely violate basic rights — outside a short blacklist that includes Syria and North Korea. For less than the price of a military helicopter, a country with little technical know-how can buy powerful surveillance gear.
Domestic spy operations rely upon companies like the Israeli-American firm Verint Systems, which has customers in more than 180 countries. Verint has also supplied U.S. law-enforcement agencies, including those that target drug traffickers in Mexico and Colombia.
The scope and sophistication of Verint’s products is made clear in confidential documents obtained by The Associated Press in Peru. They mirror on a small scale U.S. and British surveillance programs catalogued in 2013 that showed how the U.S. government collected phone records of millions not suspected of any crime.
The documents, including training manuals, contracts, invoices and emails, expose in greater detail than previously seen the inner workings of a highly secretive industry. Verint, and companies like it, disclose little about their surveillance products and who buys them.
In Peru, the nation’s domestic intelligence agency spent a mere $22 million on a Verint package just months before its activities ground to a halt in a domestic spying scandal. The AP independently confirmed sales in countries including Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.”
http://www.denverpost.com/2016/08/03/snapping-up-cheap-spy-tools-nations-monitoring-everyone-2/
This why we need an EMP event, the sooner the better. I wouldn’t like it, I’d probably be one of those who would perish as a result, but the planet has to exist and heal for future generations.
I wonder how successful these domestic spying programs would be if we, as Americans, just disconnected digitally? We make it so easy.
Credit transactions for everything, GPS always on the phone, social media “check ins”, purely digital communication via text or other messaging…
If people switched back to cash and got off social media, that alone would put a huge dent in traceability, yes?
Totally agree, and I personally try to pay cash and don’t use social media.
Unfortunately, our phone systems are digital too now, so face-to-face conversations (and hand-written letters) are the only way to communicate outside of these mechanisms.
And the USPS was testing that pilot program of scanning your mail and delivering it digitally…so theres that. So long old school leter privacy
So here’s an interesting article about one of the most contemptible worms on the planet lashing out against Trump. His war against his own citizens using terrorists is beyond insane.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-03/revolted-french-president-lashes-out-donald-trump-his-excesses-are-sickening
Don’t think of left and right as being linear. Think of a circle, with a mid-point at the top, and leftward and rightward movements diverging on opposite arcs away from the top mid point. Each hits the midpoints of their respective arcs, where they are totally opposite from each other. Then they keep moving on their respectivs arcs, toward the bottom mid point of the circle, where they eventually meet.
That is what you see happening in France, Germany and Sweden. Extreme leftism travelling that arc to meet the extreme right of Islam.
Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that somehow, these “terrorists” never seem to attack government officials. Just regular citizens at work, at play or at worship. And that should tell people something, but they don’t seem to be getting the message, even though it’s being shouted at them.
Authoritarianism vs freedom is the last binary structure.
And authoritarianism comes in more flavors than Baskin Robbins…
Ain’t it da trute.
Once you adjust your thinking to the circular paradigm rather than linear, it puts a whole different slant on things.
Worst recovery in post-war era largely explained by cuts in government spending
In a story in the Wall Street Journal last Friday, reporter Eric Morath notes that the recovery from the Great Recession has been historically slow. “In terms of average annual growth,” he writes, “the pace of this expansion has been by far the weakest of any since 1949.” Missing from this story is the fact that our historically weak recovery has been accompanied by historically deep cuts in government spending. The figure below compares the strength of expansion for each recovery since 1949 with changes in government spending (it includes data on the strength of each expansion, as reported by Morath). You can see that almost every other recovery was accompanied by an increase in federal, state, and local government spending.
During a recession, changes in government spending have a “multiplier effect” on output and income: each dollar of additional spending increases—and each dollar cut spending decreases—GDP by much more than one dollar. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 was the worst on record since the Great Depression of the 1930s, in terms of both total decline in real GDP, and total increase in the unemployment rate between the previous peak and the beginning of the subsequent recovery. The economy was in a very deep hole in 2009, and had we spent the way we did after previous recessions, we would have experienced substantial increase in GDP since then. Instead, cuts in government spending over the last eight years have had a pernicious, negative impact on output and income, as well as on jobs and wages, which depend on the level of spending in the economy. If it weren’t for these cuts, the economy would likely be fully recovered by now, and the expansion would have equaled or exceeded the Bush recovery.
http://www.epi.org/blog/worst-recovery-in-post-war-era-largely-explained-by-cuts-in-government-spending/
Irrelevant.
Trump suggested that Americans should pull their 401(k) funds out of the stock market.
Yeah, and I’d like to see his public disclosures within the next couple of weeks for trading. I know most of his portfolio is real estate, but you cant tell me he is completely out of the market. It seems awfully convenient he’s preaching the same words as Goldie Sacks. History proves if you did the opposite of GS (short gold, pull out of NASDAQ, etc), you performed much better.
I’m not an advocate for the casino “market” by any means, but such drastic measures make him sound like an alarmist fool.
I was looking for the reference, haven’t found it yet, but Trump did this same thing years ago just ahead of a crash. He has every right to be “alarmist”. Especially considering the pre-electoral crash patterns of recent years. He who panics first, panics best.
My memory is a little fuzzy on this, but I think we’ve had some posters on this blog who sold and went to cash in 2008.
BTW, a story that’s being reported but not as widely is yet another republican party “rift” over Trump, for not endorsing Paul Ryan and John McCain. He threw Ryan’s words right back at him “I’m not there yet”, lol. Hope he sticks to his guns on this one.
I’m waiting to see if Pence decides to drop off the ticket. Wouldn’t surprise me much.
It makes me cackle to imagine Ryan’s boo boo face when he heard he’d been snubbed.
I also absolutely loved the crying baby episode. “You can get the baby out of here”
Awww YISSSSS!
Heh, Ryan. I think Trump is backing Nehlen, Ryan’s primary challenger. Not a bad idea, if Trump gets in, he needs Ryan out of the way, because Ryan will try to impeach him about 10 minutes after he takes office.
I will lose all respect for Trump if he backs the globalist crap weasel Paul Ryan.
Without a doubt this credit fueled market is due for a crash, especially after reaching new highs. Cant go up forever. I think the powers that be wont let that happen until after the election…
Remember how China stopped their crash?
They didn’t
“National Team” is on it. Like our PPT.
And prices fell anyways.
“but such drastic measures make him sound like an alarmist fool.”
That’s his voter base. I don’t think it hurts him at all.
We’ll probably know within the next few weeks if he was right or not.
And say, where’s my photo of the cool mountain trout stream?
Google idea Lola.
I liked Boise. Not too big, but lots to do. Good people, clean, low COL, great river, mtn biking, skiing nearby.
The resort towns like Ketchum and Jackson, WY are great too, but $$$$ and only service jobs.
Where’s the pic of that river?
What is the site used to post images?
Wailuku, Hawaii Housing Prices Crater 13% YoY As Housing Demand Evaporates
http://www.zillow.com/wailuku-hi/home-values/
what % of homes were underwater in the 60’s
before big gov really got into the mort biz
“The Deals Are Collapsing - Vancouver’s Housing Bubble Has Burst”
http://zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-03/deals-are-collapsing-vancouvers-housing-bubble-has-just-burst
In the very early stages but just starting to get legs as we’re observing cratering demand and prices throughout North America
There is a new story about Obama sending $400 m to Iran.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1
How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish
Got Solar?
Why would anyone get into a bidding war for a home, or pay over asking price? I’ve been looking for a home for quite a while, but I won’t pay more than asking price for anything, nor will I get into a bidding war. It’s not worth it, because then, when the market crashes again, and it will you’ll end up being upside down.
I live in a suburb of Kansas City and homes are ridiculously overpriced. A home who’s county appraised value was $212,000, was listed and sold for $295,000 in less than a day.
How many pallets and cargo planes would you need to deliver a $400 million cash payment (in Euros and Swiss Francs) to Iran?
Tense: Obama Administration Refuses To Give Details About Cash Payment To Iran; “Why Is That Relevant?”
Posted By Tim Hains
On Date August 3, 2016
Obama administration spokesman Josh Earnest snaps at CBS reporter Margaret Brennan, asking: “Why is that relevant?” when questioned about the $400 million cash payment (in Euros and Swiss Francs) to Iran. Earnest faced more than 20 minutes of questions about the suspicious nature of this payment Wednesday after details were reported by the Wall Street Journal.
$12bn in cash to Iraq
how about $12 B that Bush sent and lost for a while?
Ransom?
” a terrific market for homes up to $300,000, where enormous demand allows sellers to name their price””
… as long as that price is 300k or less.
‘Some buyers are really pushing their limits competing, and sometimes they’re spending more than what they intended going in.’
It’s like watching an episode of Storage Wars, but the prize is 30 years of debt.
Southwest Hills(Portland), OR Housing Prices Plummet 20% YoY As Housing Correction Expands
http://www.zillow.com/southwest-hills-portland-or/home-values/
A good run though.