For an animal lover like me, it’s heartbreaking to see how many animals are abandoned when their owners go into foreclosure.  It happens more often than you might imagine.  An organization called Lost Our Home Pet Foundation started in Phoenix as a resource for realtors who keep finding abandoned pets in foreclosed homes.  They have taken in 2000 animals in the past four years as well as starting a “pet food bank” to try and help people in difficult financial situations be able to keep their pets.  Now the organization has their own large shelter: [Thanks L!]   It’s heartwarming…
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Perhaps this old Doom friend could have chosen a better graphic on the 20th anniversary of Westray BL/BW (5/9 ’12): “Housing Bottom? Fannie Mae Won’t Seek Tax Dollars” Evidence is mounting that U.S. home prices are finally hitting bottom, and now comes the best news yet: Fannie Mae says that for the first time since 2008, it won’t need money from the Treasury Department to balance its books. The last time we checked the Fed was holding just south of $848 billion of MBS. Brothers and sisters, this thing has a long way to go.

We’ve had a few debates here on how ethical it is for a homeowner to walk away from their home and mortgage.  Homeowners, however, are not the only ones who sometimes find it to their advantage to walk away.  In south Florida, there have been thousands of cases where a lender starts to foreclose– then backs out rather than get stuck with property maintenance: A months-long Sun Sentinel investigation of property code violations involving abandoned homes uncovered case after case in which banks launched foreclosure lawsuits but then stalled or avoided taking ownership. In effect, the banks legally sidestepped responsibility…
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If you’ve read anything at all about housing this year, you’ve read that the housing market is “improving”.  Offered up as evidence is the fact that inventories have been falling across the nation.  Clearly buyers are snapping up properties again, right? Sales have improved in a number of markets — for example in Phoenix sales were down only about 10% YOY in March which is still above the lows of the bust years –  but that’s not the entire picture.  For some reason new listings (not total listings but the ones added during the month) have been dropping for the…
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There’s all kinds of investors these days who see themselves as the latest Donald Trump of foreclosures.  A number of them use “Email blasts” to market their latest “fix-and-flips”.  L graciously pulls some of the more interesting ones out of his spam trap and sends them on to us.  Here’s one of them: So what’s interesting about it?  It’s just another “conventional” sale, right?  Not this baby.  It’s not only flipped– but flopped– and back again.  Check out how often this thing has been foreclosed on: Granted, this isn’t typical.  We’ve seen a fair number of double foreclosures though. Often…
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Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moodys and frequent “talking head” says that housing will start to make a comeback next year.  Why? [Thanks L!] First he likes the prices: “House prices are now low enough relative to incomes that single family housing is about as affordable as its ever been in the data we have going back to World War II,” Zandi says. And then there’s the “fear factor”: Demand to buy homes will also increase when potential buyers get a whiff of rising interest rates. I don’t share Zandi’s optimism.  However “affordable” homes may be, financing remains difficult to…
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For the past couple of years, “foreclosure squatters” have been able to stay in their homes without making a mortgage payment. In the first quarter of this year, the average time between the first missed payment and foreclosure was 370 days. Now that the banks have agreed to the $26 billion dollar settlement though, there are many who believe that “the golden age of foreclosure squatting” has come to an end.   My personal feeling is that it is likely that foreclosures will speed up for homes in more modest price ranges. Sales have been doing very well, so it…
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Every since Robert Toll gave his famous “dancing on the bottom” comment about housing back in 2006, we’ve seen hundreds of articles with sunny predictions of green shoots and market bottoms.  You’d think the media would cease to print them, but bottom articles remain a staple of real estate reports.  Yesterday Reuters proclaimed Home prices close to bottoming, to rise in 2013.  They at least decided to sound somewhat dubious about it: [Thanks L!] (Reuters) – The relentless decline in home prices is nearing an end and prices should rise for the first time in seven years in 2013, but…
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The National Association of Realtors has been known to make some “interesting” claims.  Back in 2006 they launched a campaign which said It’s a great time to buy or sell a home. [I guess they were half right at the time.] This year they are launching another campaign with a Rally to protect the American Dream.  Apparently we should get behind them this time as they fight to save civilization as we know it.  If you thought housing was just about a place to live, read this from the NAR’s website: Our industry is facing a crucial moment. Never before…
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I read Yale economist Robert Shiller’s  Irrational Exuberence  back in 2006.   He wrote it in 2000 and espoused this wacko idea of home prices falling significantly.  Shiller is one of the co-founders of the Case-Shiller index that tracks home prices.  His theories on the housing market have come in and out of favor in the last few years, depending on the current views of the media. I’ve been accused of being a perma-bear, but I’ve thought the single family housing market would correct itself in time, if the government would allow it to.  Shiller, however, in an interview this past…
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Robert Frost said that  home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.  Given the ongoing state of the economy, a lot of folks have have opted to go home.   Retired parents whose investments have taken a hit have moved in with kids, unemployed young adults have moved in with parents, laid off workers have moved in with siblings, and all sorts of other combinations.  According to Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, that means that demand for new housing could skyrocket at any time.  He said in yesterday’s Existing Home…
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If you Google “Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act“, you’ll see all kinds of warnings like this one: [Thanks L!] PHOENIX (CBS5) -If you are underwater in your home and you might be having to short sale soon, like lot of people in the Valley, you’re going to want to hear this. If a federal law doesn’t get extended, you could end up owing thousands of dollars in taxes if you don’t time it just right. Up until now, if you lost your house because of foreclosure or if you had to short sale, you won’t pay taxes on any loan…
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For nearly six years, we’ve been following the Maricopa County [Phoenix area] Home Sales Report done by Dr. Jay Butler, ASU professor emeritus of Realty Studies.  Back in 2008 there was a bit of a scandal when it was shown that Butler’s inclusion of trustee’s sales was skewing the sales numbers.  After that, Butler’s broke sales out into “traditional sales” and “foreclosures”.  It has also not uncommon for listings to indicate whether or not they are a “traditional” sale.  Here’s one example from L’s spam mail: You might think, based on the listing, that this home is sold by an…
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Back in 2005 when real estate had become insane in Phoenix, homes were selling so fast it was not uncommon to hear about “double escrows”.  What’s a double escrow? A double closing is simply two back-to-back closings wherein the proceeds from the second closing is used to fund the first closing. Both closings are done in escrow so that the “middleman” can buy and resell a property for profit without using any of his own cash. Of course, once the insanity was over and the bubble popped, a lot of would-be flippers ended up being known as “bag holders”, the…
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What caused the housing bubble?  In general, the short answer you’ll get to that question is “Alan Greenspan kept interest rates too low for too long”.  I’m not going to argue with that, but I wouldn’t argue with another point made by Matthew O’Brien of the Atlantic, either: Alan Greenspan is still to blame. Just not for the reason most people think. Where the Fed really failed was as a regulator. It could have gone after the predatory lending in the subprime world, if it had wanted to. At least one Fed governor suggested doing so. Greenspan rebuffed him. Counter-factuals…
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