T.M., who keeps us abreast of doings in the Tucson market, sent us an article from the Tucson Weekly entitled Finding the Bottom:  How Low Will Tucson Prices Go?  The article was amazingly well balanced, with more information and less spin than usual.  However, the best information was down in the comments.  Ricardo Small, a recently retired appraiser from Tucson, weighed in on lenders and appraisals, as well as the critique on Tucson home prices.  I tried to contact Mr. Small, but the email listed for his appraisal business is no longer good, and he no longer has his website….
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Puzzled about today’s headline?  In the interest of being “fair and balanced”, I thought we’d combine a couple of yesterday’s headlines concerning Freddie Mac’s earnings last quarter. [Hat tip to John and L.] First there’s the news from USA Today: WASHINGTON (AP) — Freddie Mac reported earning $676 million in the January-March quarter, the first time the bailed-out mortgage giant has posted a quarterly gain in nearly two years. The government-controlled company requested no additional federal aid after receiving $13 billion over the past four quarters.CEO Charles Haldeman attributed the net income to cost savings but did not elaborate. Then…
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If you are one of the growing number of Americans who figure that an empty house is a terrible thing to waste, no matter who else owns it, you’ve got lots of company: [Thanks M!] Real estate lawyers say squatting is on the rise across the United States as foreclosures and evictions surge and homes sit unsold for months. “We haven’t seen this kind of level of squatters since the Great Depression. There’s a massive inventory of excessive realty,” said Roy Oppenheim, a real estate lawyer in Florida. Some squatters are rejecting the notion that the home belongs to whoever…
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  Better quality mortgages and lower rates of default are political goals akin to a “balanced budget” or “world peace”.  They are goals that everyone supports in theory, but not necessarily in practice.  One example of this is the divergent views on the Frank-Dodd act and how risk-retention should be dealt with. In a nutshell: Six agencies (the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Federal Housing Finance Agency, Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) are developing a proposed risk retention regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act that…
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Remember when Bob Toll, CEO of Toll Brothers, famously said back in 2006  that housing was “dancing on the bottom”? Analysts have been calling various “bottom dances” ever since.  The most recent appeared in Bloomberg yesterday: “The housing market basically has bottomed, but it’s not going to recover any time soon,” Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at UniCredit Group in New York, said before the report. “The housing market is just treading water.” Granted, the wording is a little different here.  Ordinarily dog paddling and the limbo wouldn’t be considered synonymous, but you get the general idea.  While there are…
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Like all Arizona eighth graders, I took Arizona government. [We won't go into how long ago that was.]  I remember having to learn how a bill progressed through the legislature.  I don’t, however, remember that a bill could proceed like SB 1259 has.  SB 1259′s proposed effect: Provides a chain of ownership during foreclosure proceedings and allows reimbursement of lawyer fees for injunctions or court cases that fail to prove ownership. In other words, lenders would have to be able to actually prove that they owned a mortgage before they could foreclose on a property: You see, the Arizona State…
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Yesterday CNBC decided to seriously discuss an idea we’ve joked about for the past few years– bulldozing excess supply.  Erin discusses this with Rick Santelli and Joe LaVorgna, chief economist with Deutsche Bank: [Hat tip ZeroHedge]   I find it interesting that LaVorgna says that he’d have liked the idea a couple of years ago, but doesn’t really think it’s necessary now that housing has bottomed and things are turning around.  Here’s what he actually said in 2009: The momentum in the economy is moving forward. We are much closer to a housing bottom than many believe. It’s not surprising that…
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ASU Realty Studies has released its most recent report (PDF), authored as always by Dr. Jay Butler.  Butler indicated that foreclosure activity was “only” 38% of the market, as opposed to the 43% posted in February.  Here’s what Butler said about the drop: Because the change is so slight, the fundamental uncertainty remains as to whether the initial months of 2011 represent short-term response in unclogging the pipeline after the moratoriums or a continuation of a market being dominated by foreclosures. For those of you who might also be wondering if the market will remain dominated by foreclosures, you might…
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Many Americans have had to delay retirement and put off moving plans because their homes have lost value, although the trend has moderated recently: “After several difficult years for the professional moving industry, it looks like we may end 2010 on the upswing,” said Linda Bauer Darr, AMSA [American Moving and Storage Assn.] president and CEO. “Although individual shipments were flat for October, they were up about five percent for the entire year.” The tendency is to assume that these problems can be limited to “working Americans”, and not to more affluent Americans. Apparently, this is not the case. ST…
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Flipping foreclosures can be risky, but that’s not the only way to make money off of abandoned or neglected homes:   Given the direction of the housing market, “Asset Preservation” [Gotta love it- that sounds so much classier than "foreclosure sanitation" or the like.] should be a growth industry for awhile.

A big hat tip to L for this very funny ad.  KB Homes is advertising a “secret sale” in Phoenix and warns that overnight camping will not be allowed. My guess is that they’d be thrilled to see overnight campers, but I’m afraid they’ve gone the way of the passenger pigeon.

A lot has been written about all those empty houses out there. We at Doom started noticing them beginning to pile up back in 2006. I was really shocked though when I read the following though: [Thanks L!] American Ghost Towns Of The 21st Century There are several counties in America, each with more than 10,000 homes, which have vacancy rates above 55%. The rate is above 60% in several. Most people who follow unemployment and the housing crisis would expect high vacancy rates in hard-hit states including Nevada, Florida and Arizona. They were among the fastest growing areas from…
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It’s been tough for homebuilders to sell homes when there’s already so many homes on the market.  It’s especially tough having so many foreclosures on the market driving prices down.  National homebuilder Beazer has decided to try a pilot program in Phoenix to deal with some of these issues.  They are purchasing foreclosures, renovating them and renting them out.   Beazer Homes Jumps Into Rental Housing Market: MyFoxPHOENIX.com This is probably a good move Beazer.  It will be interesting to see if other builders follow suit.

Back in 2005, I had an interesting conversation with one of my neighbors in Gilbert, AZ.  She was telling me that she and her husband had changed their investment strategy.  They felt that with the median home price in the area up 30% over the previous year, they had given up on all their other investments, and they were going to “invest” all of their money in their home.  As I recall, the “investing” they were doing at the time was installing a pool and built in barbecue.  I haven’t seen my old neighbors in years, so I can’t tell…
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Earlier this week the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research [AEI] released an article outlining their Principles for reforming the housing market. So many of the solutions we see for “fixing” housing and rather ridiculous, so it was refreshing to see some ideas that make sense.  Here’s the short version of their list: 1. The housing finance market-like other U.S. industries and housing finance systems in most other developed countries-can and should principally function without any direct government financial support. 2. Ensuring mortgage quality, and fostering the accumulation of adequate capital behind housing risk, can create a robust housing…
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