They said it couldn’t happen, but now we’re seeing foreclosure auctions in Manhattan.  Not everyone is happy about it:   Note the warning at the end of the video- there’s apparently no guarantee that the title is free and clear.  Foreclosure auctions are not for the unwary.

Housing Doom is pleased to present the third installment of our unauthorized annotated transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s March 17, 2009 seminar "The Deflating Bubble, Part V: Forecast and Policy Recommendations for the Next Six Months." [1] This is the presentation by Tom Zimmerman [scroll down]. The event site has several resources, including both an audio and a video recording of the 2 hour proceedings. There is a brief summary, but as yet no official transcript. Zimmerman’s presentation makes use of a slide deck.[2] Highlights   … Because this does not get better as each time you turn around,…
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There’s been a lot of talk about how to reduce the inventory of empty and foreclosed homes.  One of the solutions is to use them for something else.  How’s this idea from FEMA- let’s use these homes as hurricane shelters: Trying to make the best of a bad situation, federal officials might use foreclosed homes as temporary housing for hurricane evacuees in Florida as soon as this summer. But the idea is still in its infancy and many questions remain unanswered, including whether the banks that own the foreclosed homes would agree to such a plan. "It makes all the…
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Brad and his merry band of readers at the CFR are having a lively discussion [1] on whether Chinese public opinion might turn against their government’s massive holdings of US debt. But meanwhile, this week’s Reuters report [2] documented a redoubling of the surge of foreign central banks into Treasury Debt. The report was, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.[3] Here is Doom’s updated CSV version of the agencies and treasuries foreign central bank holdings data set.[4]   Speaking of redoubling, the cenbanks’ large $15.757 billion treasuries buy was almost precisely twice…
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It’s Friday, and Angelo Mozilo, former CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp and iconic symbol of the excesses of the lending industry, is now under investigation by the SEC.  Apparently Mozilo didn’t see the need to warn investors that it was tougher to get a library card than a loan from Countrywide.  The company  wasn’t the kind of place he wanted to keep in his portfolio though: [Thanks to all who sent in this story!] “While hiding his hand from investors, Mozilo was actively taking his own chips off the table” SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami told journalists in Washington. “Concealed…
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"It’s always a good time to invest in real estate litigation" I remember reading an  advertisement a few years back that said, "And it’s backed by real estate, so you know it’s safe!" The world has changed since then, as demonstrated by this article forwarded to me by our admin: Richard W. Fields says he has come up with a win-win financial strategy for the downturn. He is investing in lawsuits. …. “It’s always a good time to invest in litigation,” Mr. Fields said, though he added that the weak economy helped. “When the recession started to bite, the phones…
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Are you having trouble selling your home? Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner feels your pain- he can’t unload his place either: [Thanks M!] After reducing the price on his house in a tony New York City suburb to less than he paid for it, Geithner still couldn’t sell and recently rented it out instead, according to real estate agents familiar with the deal. Geithner put his five-bedroom Tudor near leafy Larchmont on the market for $1.635 million in February, after heading to Washington for his job as the nation’s top economic official. A few weeks after the asking price was dropped…
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Housing Doom is pleased to present the second installment of our unauthorized annotated transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s March 17, 2009 seminar "The Deflating Bubble, Part V: Forecast and Policy Recommendations for the Next Six Months." [1] This is the presentation by AEI Fellow Desmond Lachman. The event site has several resources, including both an audio and a video recording of the 2 hour proceedings. There is a brief summary, but as yet no official transcript. Lachman’s presentation makes use of a slide deck.[2] He also contributed a copy of some recent Congressional testimony he gave [3] on these…
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Congratulations, twist, on the occasion of Doom’s 3rd anniversary.  I’ve been here off and on since almost the beginning, and hope to hang around on the sidebar and with the occasional (mostly non-opinionated) post for a long time to come. We and our housing blogger colleagues have had some luck recently playing at being minor Prophets of Housing Doom, but our efforts are nothing in comparison to earlier masters like the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973).  In 1967 he wrote one masterpiece titled "City Without Walls" [1] that reads more clearly now than it ever did 42 years ago: ……
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This is from Auden’s 1976 Collected.[1] City Without Walls by W. H. Auden 1967 . . . ‘Those fantastic forms, fang-sharp, bone-bare, that in Byzantine painting were a shorthand for the Unbounded beyond the Pale, unpoliced spaces where dragons dwelt and demons roamed, ‘colonized only by ex-worldlings, penitent sophists and sodomites, are visual facts in the foreground now, real structures of steel and glass: hermits, perforce, are all to-day, ‘with numbered caves in enormous jails, hotels designed to deteriorate their glum already-corrupted guests, factories in which the functional Hobbesian Man is mass-produced. ‘A key to the street each convict has,…
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Three years ago today HousingDoom was launched with this less than hard hitting post.   Doom started out as a project of myself and our admin, and we took a lot of heat for our rather pessimistic name.  [How could housing be "doomed"?] It is somewhat ironic that when I look back at my predictions over the past few years, I have found that more often than not, I have been overly optimistic. John came on board a few weeks after our inception, and we were joined by M and L shortly after that. Over the years our unofficial staff has…
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The other shoe was bound to drop.  Plummeting real estate prices in Las Vegas aren’t limited just to the residential market: Foreclosure problems that destroyed residential real estate in 2008 are set to hit the commercial real estate market even harder this year, analysts are warning. Commercial property values have fallen 30 percent to 40 percent from their peak a couple of years ago and the market is fraught with peril. Loan defaults have soared. Financing has dried up. Rising vacancy rates combined with declining rents are weakening cash flow. "For Lease" signs hang at almost every shopping center and…
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