I wasn’t going to mention it, but since half a dozen people have sent me the link- An AP article by Adam Geller appeared in a number of publications yesterday.  The article was about the Villages in Queen Creek- a development of KB and Richmond American homes that has been hit hard by foreclosures. Geller called me last month and asked me to recommend a neighborhood for him to look at.  M and I met him for lunch, then took the day and drove him out to Queen Creek and toured several neighborhoods.  We showed him the abandoned homes, the…
Read more…

What can I say?  I had a late night in Las Vegas, and woke up this morning thinking, "Is it Friday? Shouldn’t I have a post up?" [Honest, I spent most of the day looking at housing!] The answer is yes and yes, but I’m still a little cross-eyed. Cover for me, will you while I grab some orange juice?  I could especially use your links, stories, comments etc. while I try and wake up.

Not all neighborhoods currently being developed will reach build out.  We’ve seen homes from two developments in Pinal County go on the auction block when their developments no longer were feasible for the developer.  This is a situation that can create difficulties for buyers, particularly those who are some of the early "pioneers" in a neighborhood: [Hat tip L!] As home sales fall and builders scale back new construction, buyers risk ending up in a dead-end or delayed development. Building stoppages can happen in both boom and bust real estate cycles, for different reasons. No matter what the market climate,…
Read more…

Yesterday Astrozombie asked the following great question:  With Phoenix RE taxes due this month it would be interesting to see how people feel about investing in tax liens. I’m not talking about buying property, but essentially buying the lien from Maricopa county.These are auctioned off and the auction starts at a 16% return. There have to be a lot of houses that will fail to pay taxes this year…. The question that I would ask is where in line does the tax lien fall in getting paid if there is a foreclosure?   My answer would have looked something like,…
Read more…

From today’s Arizona Daily Star:  [Hat tip to MR!] A bankruptcy judge tried to auction off some of First Magnus Financial Corp.’s assets Tuesday, but only one bidder showed up, and the judge put the sale on hold. The failed mortgage lender intended to either sell about $8.5 million in construction loans and 29 foreclosed properties to Colorado-based Summit Investment Management LLC for about $6.4 million, or sell the assets at auction. Judge James Marlar expressed reservations about the price of the proposed sale to Summit, which he said might be too low for both the loans and the 29…
Read more…

Last Friday we reported that 97 homes from the now defunct Turner Dunn are scheduled to go on the auction block October 14th.  We have a new one to report from Pinal County- this time it is the Live Oak Ranch community in Arizona City that will be auctioned off on October 3rd: [Thank you L!] The home sales have been handled by Hawkins and Associates.  Two days ago their website said of this development: [Pulled from cache]

The NAR released it’s Pending Home Sales Report today at 10:00 am Eastern Time.  I however, started working on it at 7:00 EST with the working title of Pending Home Sales Hit All Time Low, and as you can see, I didn’t have to change the title.  According to Marketwatch this morning: The pending home sales index fell 6.5% in August after dropping a revised 10.7% in July, the National Association of Realtors reported Tuesday. The index is at its lowest level since its inception in 2001. Pending home sales are down 21.5% compared with a year ago and is…
Read more…

Long-time Doomers will remember that I originally didn’t set out to start a website. I was researching what one ought to pay for a house in my hometown of Gilbert, AZ, and had come to the conclusion that overbuilding and speculation was going to drive prices down. My son said, "You ought to put your research on a website."  I did that- then with John’s help I kind of got distracted by the national market, mortgage lenders and the global economy.  I still however, do keep an eye on Gilbert home prices, although I don’t post on them much any more.  I thought I’d take…
Read more…

Maybe Winston Smith’s thought-a-day pad turned up "Don’t be Evil." Doomer V sends that this sensitive story [1] has been Google-search embargoed. Well, news-search comes up empty, and general search hits but the single intrepid commenter SoupDogs on a WSJ board. (Your mileage may vary, those are the results as of Sunday afternoon, Phoenix time.) Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s own search engine works just fine. To be fair, it’s not just Google. We get similar results for MSN news & web, Yahoo news & web, and AOL news & web. Doom noticed a similar thing happening a while ago with the regular…
Read more…

I was wandering around the Broker Outpost site, and ran across a thread called Bye Bye S Class Mercedes, along with an interesting discussion on a lawsuit between  an agent and the  now bankrupt First Magnus.  There seems to be a question of who’s defrauding whom: