Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog

There was a sobering post on the Yahoo Finance boards [note: this link crashed my Netscape 8.1.2, IE was OK, JM] early this morning.  Under the heading Foreclosures of Biblical Proportions it said:

Look at my little county of DuPage, in Illinois.  I have never seen so many of my neighbors in foreclosure.  I have never seen so many FOR SALE signs either.  Week by week, it gets worse. Sheriff Sales are now big time, liquidations by banks will probably start next quarter. It is just awesome, growing exponentially, and you know what ? WAMU is very well represented on the Sheriff Foreclosure Sale List, in a country where they have very little market penetration. That really sends a BIG message on how well they underwrote the loans.

A link is provided to the DuPage County Foreclosure Sales.  I tried counting the number of properties, and gave up around one hundred.  Guessing from how far my scroll arrow moved, there are over 300.
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Yesterday I ran across the weekly Tucson Real Estate Newsletter of Reid Sossong.  Sossong is a real estate broker in Tucson, Arizona, who keeps a real estate journal on his site.  This journal does a great job chronicling the fall of Tucson real estate, along with the usual excuses for the market.  Here are some excerpts:

1-15-06 Home sales decreased 3.3% in December 2005 compared to December 2004. I guess this means the market is leveling and the big bubble bursting may not happen.

1-19-06 The housing starts for December fell around 10%. What does this mean? You could read all kinds of things into the number. My take is that it is another confirmation the market is leveling. The main issue is interest rates going higher, then the market could really slow down.

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