Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog

Will Zillow be the new on-line platform for For Sale By Owner (FSBO)? "John Doe" reports [1] from his SoCalBubble blog.

"Man the battlestations, NAR, the fort is under siege from all sides… first the DOJ lawsuit, then the tanking housing market, and then this…

I don’t know if anyone else has posted on Zillow’s new functionalities, but when I stumbled back to their site today, I realized that they have made some changes… and this is how I believe this is a groundbreaking change."

You can navigate to SoCalBubble to read JD’s summary of Zillow’s press release.[2] Several MSM news sources have weighed in, many under this Google News search cluster (24 stories at 8PM MST). I’ll list a few examples below. [3] [4] …

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Fannie’s 2004 10-K

In Episode XI back on October 16th I profiled new Fannie CFO Bob Blakely. He came across as a highly focussed, no nonsense trouble-shooter of industry’s worst accounting fiascos. Well, I guess he’s not just another pretty face. Yesterday he delivered Fannie’s Form 10-K for 2004.

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Luxury homebuilder Toll Brothers, based in Horsham, PA, tried mightily to make lemonade from lemons during their conference call Tuesday– but ended up with Kool-aid.instead.  First the lemons:

The quarter’s numbers were decidedly dreary for Toll compared with a year ago: net income down more than 40%, revenue off 10%, asset writedowns up to $115 million from just $1.4 million, mostly for its real estate holdings. Profits fell 44%, to $173.8 million, or $1.07 per share, from $310.3 million, or $1.84 per share in 2005. The latest period’s results included the pretax property writedowns. Toll, the nation’s biggest builder in the luxury-home category, has been taking losses on properties, and its customers have grown nervous and far more likely to abandon new contracts on houses as prices retreat. Toll signed only $706 million of contracts during the quarter, compared with a record $1.59 billion in the same period of 2005.

Bob Toll, CEO, was tossing in the sugar and mixing, but it wasn’t very convincing.  [Thank you to Seeking Alpha, for the transcript of the TOL conference call.}
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