There aren’t a lot of condo buyers left in Las Vegas, and apparently a good chunk of those brave or deluded souls haven’t gotten the memo that your odds of "fast condo flipping for fun and profit" are not as good as your odds in the casinos.  It’s tough to be a condo reseller these days. Hubble Smith reported in yesterday’s Review Journal: [Hat tip Judge!] Industry insiders are saying that many high-rise condos are being put back on the market for resale and, like single-family detached homes, they’re not selling.One luxury condo broker said he walked he floors at…
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This one sounds like a disaster in the making- Cottonwood Estates, a luxury home development by Coe-bilt, Inc. currently has 50 lots, 12 completed sales and 13 preforeclosures. The housing downturn has been rough for private Arizona homebuilders.  Two builders, Turner Dunn and AmericaBuilt, have already filed for bankruptcy.   Another homebuilder that appears to be in trouble is Coe-bilt Inc., a private builder of luxury homes in Phoenix and Prescott.  Their Cottonwood Estates development is located off of Bethany Home Road, east of Perryville Road.  This area, like so many on the edges of the Phoenix, has been hurt by…
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HousingDoom has asked this question before, and we’re going to keep on asking it- WHAT HAPPENS TO THE DATA ON THE COMPUTERS OF DEFUNCT LENDERS? Yesterday the following notice appeared in the Arizona Republic.  The property of the now defunct Eagle First Mortgage is being auctioned off:[no link available, hat tip L!] NOTICE OF PUBLIC AUCTION: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 @ 10:00am at: 5060 N. 19th Avenue, Suite 101, Phoenix, Arizona. Preview at 9:00am. The following property (miscellaneous office furniture & equipment) belonging to Eagle First Mortgage will be sold at public auction to satisfy liens per A.R.S. 33-361 (D)…
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It’s a quiet holiday Monday at Doom Castle, and most of us are out enjoying the nice weather, baseball, stock car racing, anything but housing and mortgage finance.  We’ll just be in and out, but the Reply window is always open.  As soon as something interesting pops up this week, we’d love to hear about it. The markets will be in full flight again on Tuesday, and perhaps the S&P record will fall in the next few days.  Who knows what the story of this next week will be?

Once upon a time, according to Northwest News Channel 8, 33 year-old bagholder Shane Lovett decided he wasn’t just mad about losing his Oregon home to foreclosure, he was going to get even: Lovett bought a home on SE Wildcat Mountain Drive in Eagle Creek a few years ago. In January the house went into foreclosure. Neighbors told police that Lovett was extremely distraught over the the situation. He apparently told several [people] that he had put the animals [three pigs] inside the house over a week ago and even joked about the fact that they did not have any…
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If this one is legit, it’s a new one on me—- I’m generally a little skeptical about the stuff I find on Craigslist, but I have to admit, I’m curious about an ad in the Las Vegas Craigslist with the headline: $465950 No Payments For Three Years! The ad also indicates that the closing costs are paid, and that the interest rate is fixed for one year.  [Although I guess those nasty resets can't plague you for another two.]  This Summerlin property is apparently listed on the MLS, through a Re/Max agent. One year is not unheard of, but this…
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Here’s how Judy Lowe, President of the Tucson Association of Realtors (TAR) described April home sales in Tucson: We are seeing some movement in total unit sales and sales volume, but like our other indicators, it is slight. Both decreased slightly in April, reversing a rising trend we’ve seen since the beginning of the year. Unit sales totaled 1,280 in April, down only 73 units since March 2007, so not a significant decrease. It is not unusual for April sales to be down a bit from March, in fact, in six of the past twelve years, sales have been down…
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I must confess though, it’s hard to say which one is scarier.  [Hat tip to E.S. for sending these to us!]First is a news piece from Sacramento, showing the record number of foreclosures.  The second is on the lack of reality in A&E’s reality show, "Flip this House." Enjoy- or whatever. If that one hasn’t made you ill yet, try this one:

Homes aren’t selling, and consequently they are starting to stack up in the aisles around here.  According to Marketwatch: Existing home sales fell 2.6% in April to 5.99 million units on a seasonally adjusted annual basis, the slowest sales pace in four years, the National Association of Realtors said. The fall in April sales was larger than expected. Economists had forecast that sales would dip a slight 0.2% to 6.11 million units. On a year-on-year basis, existing home sales were down 10.7%. The median national sales price was down 0.8% year on year to $220,900 in April. Inventories of unsold…
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It’s Op-Ed Friday, and here’s your chance to meet Ted Truitt, real estate’s sleaziest realtor.  At least he would be, if he weren’t the creation of the Virginia Association of Realtors.  You really ought to watch the video and take the Tedst.  [When you take the Tedst, Ted gives his approval for the slimy answers, or gets slimed for the ethical ones.]

First the spin from Marketwatch: U.S. stocks rallied on Thursday, as the market cheered an unexpected surge in new home sales, along with signs of a pick-up in business spending, which helped offset concerns about homebuilder Toll Brothers and a warning on Chinese stocks from former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Now the data from the Census Bureau: Sales of new one-family houses in April 2007 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 981,000, according to estimates released jointly today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is 16.2 percent (±13.0%) above the…
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Doomers will recall that we have been covering H.R. 1427, the GSE reform bill, in posts on May 12th (note especially comment #5 under that post) and May 18th. Special attention has been paid to the Bean-Neugebauer amendment, a bi-partisan effort to water down any new regulator’s ability to monitor systemic risk arising from the activities of Fannie, Freddie, or the Federal Home Loan Banks. The House has just passed the bill with B-N intact, but the debate appears to be heading underground. The present post collects sources where a variety of commentators and stakeholders weigh in on this important…
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Much has been made of presidential hopeful John Edwards $400 haircut.  Poor WaMu is having a much bigger haircut on the sale of this Scottsdale home- try a figure of $320,000: [Hat tip M!  Broker has been removed from ad at his request] M dug up some additional information for us:

Yesterday was a holiday up here in Canada, so the Bank of Canada’s 3 Month US Dollar vs Loonie chart didn’t get updated. The currency was still traded, and at one point the Dollar (vs the Loonie) was down over 3/4 of a cent [1] from Friday’s close. This got some of the gold bugs [2] [3] started. As well, hedge fund moves in the palladium market [4] [5] seemed to get yet another obscure commodity bubbling away. When diverse commodities are all going up, it starts to look like it’s really the value of the currency heading down. A…
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From yesterday’s Inner City Press.[1] The newest nominee to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, which is under fire for inaction leading to the subprime lending and foreclosure crisis, comes from a notorious subprime lender, Capital One. Larry Allan Klane, whose nomination was announced on May 15, before that worked at Deutsche Bank, an institution whose involvement with lenders sued for predatory lending such as New York’s Delta Funding has, like Capital One’s record, been an issue considered but not acted on by the Fed. Capital One’s corporate marketing of HELOC products would seem to have been just a bit aggressive…
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