Condo excess has become rental excess in downtown Phoenix.  The biggest symbol of “condo mania” downtown is 44 Monroe.  44 Monroe is the tallest condo tower in the state of Arizona and the third largest building in the state.  Built too late for boom, it was finished in Fall 2008 and the developer went into bankruptcy in 2009.  Wikipedia said before completion. The building will feature seven floors of above-ground parking and 196 residential units, ranging in size from 780 to 4,800 square feet (450 m2). Residential unit prices range from $480,000 to $3.2 million. The units didn’t go for anything…
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2010 will be one for Arizona’s history books- and not in a good way.  Record foreclosures, stubbornly high unemployment and falling home prices made for a grim picture: [Hat tip M.R.!] PHOENIX – Arizona closed out 2010 with a record number of home foreclosures, marking the third straight year of staggering growth for bank repossessions. From January through November, 65,911 Arizona homeowners lost their houses to the mortgage holder, 12 percent more than were taken in all of record-setting 2009, according to foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc. Banks and loan companies were on track to take thousands more homes in…
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Who says that just because you’re dead you can’t keep on working?  In what is certainly the most blatant case of robo-signing I’ve seen to date, one company had a woman signing hundreds of documents- for thirteen years after her death.  [Hat tip Freedoms Phoenix.] How, may you ask, can a woman who has been dead since 1995 sign documents more than a decade later? Normally, one would hazard to guess that stamps with her signature on them were still in use (this is more common than you would think in foreclosure land). That would be plenty troubling. But this…
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HousingDoom’s “Understatement of the Year Award” has to go to the Arizona Association of Realtors for this statement in their January Arizona Outlook : [Thanks L!] The underlying fundamentals for Arizona are somewhat weaker than is the case nationally, measured in terms of unemployment, distressed property, homeowner equity and commercial space availability. They offered as evidence the following chart:

Are you tired of taxpayers being asked to pay for all of the housing/banking bailout programs?  How’s this for a new idea in bailout financing? Wall Street banks are on pace to pay out some $143 billion in compensation for 2010, just shy of their record year of 2007. But given the widespread layoffs of mid-level employees as a result of the financial crisis, average compensation set a record. At the top six banks, compensation rose 10 percent over 2007. By spending just half of that money elsewhere, the banks could modify the loans of every homeowner with an underwater…
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Remember all those bad lenders that hired those “robo-signing” law firms?  Fannie and Freddie were not above hiring these firms and according to the Washington Post, they were at the forefront of the “fast and easy” foreclosure: Fannie and Freddie, the largest mortgage companies, shaped the practices being challenged in courtrooms around the country. They picked law firms that could foreclose fast and paid them based on how many foreclosures they could process. Speed was essential because delays cost the companies money – and, after they were taken over by the government two years ago, meant losses for taxpayers, too….
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Today’s headline from CNBC was New Home Sales Rise But Less Than Expected.  Here’s the “news” according to them: New U.S. single-family home sales rose in November but to a lower- than- expected rate , a government report showed on Thursday, highlighting the weakness in the housing market even as the broader economic recovery gains momentum. The Commerce Department said sales increased 5.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted 290,000 unit annual rate after a downwardly revised 275,000 unit pace in October. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast new home sales rising to a 300,000 unit pace in November from a…
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Here’s a question for you.  If a lender gives a borrower a mortgage and the monthly payment on the loan is more than triple the borrower’s income, if the house goes into foreclosure, is it the borrower’s fault, or the lenders? Consider the story of Katherine Christensen of Gilbert, AZ. [Thanks L!] She had bought the house with her husband in 1999 and completely renovated it, adding hardwood floors, faux-painted walls, a swimming pool in the back surrounded by palms and ficus trees. When the couple divorced in 2001, she kept the house and paid it off. Then, in 2006,…
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Foreclosures have dropped, but look for a correcting spike in the new future.  Fewer foreclosures aren’t signalling the illusive “housing recovery”, but are a result of the slowdown caused by the “Robo-signing Scandal”. The robo-signing moratoriums were responsible for the lion’s share of the decrease in November filings, said Rick Sharga, spokesman for RealtyTrac. “I wish the report was actually good news,” he said. “But it’s just an artificial drop. For most borrowers in foreclosure, it will be a temporary reprieve.” As evidence, Sharga pointed out that in judicial foreclosure states, ones where courts are involved and where banks are…
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This quote was just too funny.  Anyone who gets out at all is liable to get a laugh from this statement by Sam Zell, the billionaire CRE pumping man: [Thanks L!] Real estate is all about supply and demand.  We haven’t built anything in this country since July ‘07. We’re not building anything right now. “If there is no new supply, then the catastrophe that everybody was expecting isn’t going to happen,” Zell, 69, said in a telephone interview. “Commercial real estate is not suffering and is in fact getting better,” said Zell, the founder of Equity Office Properties Trust,…
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Just when it seems that that the housing market couldn’t look much worse, rising interest rates are threatening a comatose housing market: A slump in government-backed mortgage bonds that’s sent yields to the highest level since May is threatening a recovery in the U.S. housing market, which had been bolstered by record-low borrowing costs. Yields on Fannie Mae-guaranteed securities that most affect loan rates jumped as high as 4.21 percent yesterday, an increase of 1 percentage point from an all-time low in October, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. They ended New York trading at 4.1 percent. Higher loan rates…
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Fewer homeowners are underwater.  That’s because more foreclosures means that more properties belong to the bank. [Thanks L!] NEW YORK – The number of homeowners who owe more than their houses are worth fell for the third straight quarter this summer. About 10.8 million households, or 22.5 percent of all mortgaged homes, were underwater in the July-September quarter, housing data firm CoreLogic said Monday. That’s down from 23 percent, or 11 million households, in the second quarter. But the decline came mainly because more homes had fallen into foreclosure and not because home prices had increased. The ranks of underwater…
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Readers may remember that in October I posted on attorney David Stern, who’s office achieved Guiness record type efficiency in processing foreclosures- bypassing such pesky details as actually checking documents or verifying facts before foreclosure.  Stern is out of the business now, and is leaving a disaster in his wake: [Thanks L!] Scores of Palm Beach County homes were sold to investors at foreclosure auction this month for as low as $200 following the collapse of the David J. Stern law firm and ensuing confusion as thousands of its cases are reassigned. It’s yet another muddle for the already overwhelmed…
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For all of you “cash out refi” folks who borrowed more against your house than you could possibly repay, don’t worry.  The Obama administration is trying to come to your rescue: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in talks with Obama administration officials to join fledgling government programs aimed at reducing loan balances of mortgages where borrowers owe more than their homes are worth, according to people familiar with the situation. An agreement with the two government-owned mortgage giants to write down so-called underwater loans could reduce the threat to the U.S. housing market from the glut of homeowners believed…
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No job, no mortgage payment- no problem. In North Carolina there is now a program that allows unemployed homeowners to receive zero percent loans to make the payments: [Hat tip Freedom's Phoenix] Both economists and lending institutions maintain that keeping people struggling to pay mortgages in their homes is preferable to eviction. A new federally funded initiative targeting five states hard-hit by the recession, including North Carolina, is designed to do just that. The program, which comes under the North Carolina Foreclosure Prevention Fund, allows eligible homeowners to receive up to $36,000 in zero-interest loans over 10 years. Residents of…
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