I’m an avid animal lover, and one of the sadder parts of the housing bust for me is how many animals have been abandoned along with the houses.  Las Vegas is especially having a tough time with a large number of “foreclosure kittens”: According to the Las Vegas Sun hundreds of former pets have been roaming the Las Vegas valley in recent years and by some counts this year has turned out twice as many. The Nevada Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has formed a “Feline Foster Force” to help connect cat lovers with deserted pets and…
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Las Vegas still leads the nation in foreclosures.  For most of us, foreclosures are just statistics, but not for these folks:  [Thanks L!]       And the beat goes on. . .  

It looks like the aging former Rat Pack Sahara hotel-casino in Las Vegas is closing (and shuttering) its doors in May 2011. The hotel-casino was purchased back in 2007 (shortly after the bubble had peaked) by Sam Nazarian, a Los Angeles nightclub owner and businessman. Nazarian had promised to make the aging casino more appealing to Las Vegas visitors. According to the L.A. Times: Nazarian, who also owns L.A.-area watering holes MI-6 and Hyde Lounge, purchased the Sahara at the tail end of the two-decade-long Las Vegas building boom. He intended to transform the run-down property into a hot spot…
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The Las Vegas government has announced approval to build an amusement park along the strip. Not content with the usual garish, over-the-top theme prevalent throughout the rest of Sin City, the developer has decided to construct a 500-foot ferris wheel, making it the third-largest wheel of its kind in the world, and the largest one in the western hemisphere. In addition to the Ferris Wheel, it would include six additional rides, a 20,000+ square foot conference center and nearly 150,000 square feet of new retail space. Apparently, it’s not enough to be the gambling mecca of the Northern Hemisphere –…
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Anyone who’s spent any time in the Rustbelt has seen their share of vacant boarded up houses.  As job opportunities diminished, folks pulled up stakes, populations dropped and the market for their houses disappeared.  Cities went into decline. Now a new study by James R. Follain, Ph.D., senior fellow of the Rockefeller Institute of Government says that we have a new type of declining city- the cities that went through the boom and bust of the housing bubble: [Thanks L!] [A]nother type of declining city may also be emerging — places that grew substantially during the housing boom and are now…
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I used to take a lot of heat from Las Vegas housing analysts Larry Murphy and Steven Bottfeld about my bearish predictions for Las Vegas.  Now even Murphy and Bottfeld don’t dare predict a recovery for the next two years. R.L. Brown, a Phoenix housing analyst, has no such reservations.  He remains as bullish as ever about Phoenix real estate and describes a scenario for Phoenix that couldn’t sound brighter if it had come from a fortune cookie: [Thanks L!] “Foreclosures will be flushed thru [sic] the system. Inventories will rebalance. Prices will begin to see upward pressure. Legislation will…
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It should come as a surprise to no one that the housing market is lousy in Las Vegas.  Sure, the median price is up 3.3% over last year, ($140,000) but sales are down 12.7% and listings are up 7.7% (2,819 units sold and 22,624 units listed) so the median rise will undoubtedly be a blip.  The one “bright” spot in housing is the rental market. According to the GLVAR (Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors) 2300 properties rented in August. While the GLVAR has only tracked rentals since January 2006, this is the busiest month that Vegas has seen for…
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Thanks as always to Michael David White, who’s graphs always equal a thousand words: What’s a government to do?  The New York Times said yesterday: Over the last 18 months, the administration has rolled out just about every program it could think of to prop up the ailing housing market, using tax credits, mortgage modification programs, low interest rates, government-backed loans and other assistance intended to keep values up and delinquent borrowers out of foreclosure. The goal was to stabilize the market until a resurgent economy created new households that demanded places to live. . . . Caught in the…
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Consumer attitudes are changing on the “rent vs. buy” debate. When Mr. Twist and I sold in 2005 and moved into a rental, the usual response when we told friends was “Are you guys doing O.K.?” Now the usual response is “You were so smart to get out when you did.” My personal experience is not singular. More and more people are swapping their mortgage for a lease agreement: (Thanks to Keith Jurow for forwarding us his latest. Article first appeared on the Real Estate Channel.) There is a far-reaching change occurring now which threatens housing markets around the country….
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There are some who think it’s time for the central bank to exit the market. Others say such an abrupt end would undo the Fed’s efforts to keep mortgage rates low and instead suggest a gradual wind down of its purchases and an extension of the program into the early months of next year. – Nasdaq1 A year ago last Friday, exactly 7 years and 7 days after 9/11, the US became a command economy. Now, in a "fit of absent-mindedness," key agencies of American financial policy find themselves with side-businesses as Soviet-era economic secretariats, and they don’t quite know…
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If you think that the flippers of homes in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix have been burned you haven’t seen anything.  Check out what has happened to Boston’s Hancock Tower: The I.M. Pei-designed sliver of glass doesn’t seem like a place where several hundred million dollars can vanish in a few months. But that’s exactly what happened at the 62-story building, now under its fourth owner in six years. In January, an aggressive young wheeler-dealer defaulted on a portion of the building’s $1.3 billion mortgage just 24 months after buying it. In March, two firms that had purchased chunks…
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They were frugal and waited for home prices to fall.  They bought a foreclosure- and now they are feeling guilty about it: [Hat tip Mr. Twist] LAS VEGAS — Right about now, Anya Sanko should be enjoying the thrill of being a first-time home buyer. She bided her time, saved her money and jumped into the market in time to snap up a 1,785-square-foot home with a pool for $143,000. Yet Sanko, 37, is having a hard time celebrating. Her parents lost their house in Michigan to foreclosure after her father lost his job, her sister’s home equity has evaporated…
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From Karl Denninger at Market Ticker via Freedom’s Phoenix comes this reasonable question: How about a little honesty from commentators in the mainstream media? "Liquidity conflagrations" happen when people discover they have been lied to. Anyone remember Bear Stearns?  "We’re well capitalized" on CNBC?  "Everything is fine"?  Cramer’s pumping of them on his show as "safe"? Market participants in fact knew everything was not fine.  There were statements flying around (that turned out to be true) that some counter-parties had begun refusing to novate deals with Bear.  It was the discovery of the lie that caused the run on Bear…
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The other key ingredient to the success of any HFT platform is low network latency. The platforms are greatly helped in this regard by the fact that many exchanges will let HFT platforms pay to co-locate their servers with those of the exchange itself, so that the HFT platform can get its order in ahead of the competition. Critics contend that such co-location deals provide avenues for potential front-running of orders, in which an HFT platform gets an advance peek at an incoming order that will move a stock’s price in a specific direction, and then uses that knowledge to…
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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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