Reserved Parking For "The Lovely Wife"...TLW...ROAR!

Blog Boy...

Our market has surely been violated...

Can we say "jail time"? :)

TLW...ROAR!

Good point Bryant.  Gotta love those speculators.  'Occupancy Fraud' isn't talked about as much as perhaps it should be.  All these articles passing the buck and rarely have I seen that mentioned.  Hmmm....

Liar Liar pants on fire!

Also I bet there are lenders who just turn the other cheek on the short.

Boy, That's a lot of house for $149,900...Five years inventory is also a lot of houses.  It looks like there's going to be a lot more great deals...just not for the investors aka fraudulent buyers. 

Five years inventory is a lot of homes.  It sounds like it is a good time to be buying a home in your area though. 

Weird how things come in 5's these days.  5 years inventory...5 years jail time?? 

Same thing here.  I look at a lot of foreclosures and many are or were owned by real estate agent "investors" who thought they could buy and resell quickly and pocket a quick profit.  Most of them listed too high when the homes were finished.  They could have gotten out with reasonably priced new homes.  Their competition would have been the builder.  But, they just wanted too much.

Oh well.  Most of them are foreclosed now.  Or, on the way.

Well, it sounds like a good time to buy a retirement home in Florida, Poinciana, that is. Amazing what you get there. 

5 year inventory - ouch!  Things will change... someday....

Many so-called investors are really just speculators because they don't know what they are doing. I'm sure many communities are in the same situation. What a shame.

Bryant - I assume that your market, like ours, has an oversupply of rentals as well, since the pool has been expanded by many homes that haven't sold. On a $150,000 house there - what would the rental income be? If someone is looking for positive cash flow with 20% down, it isn't happening in our market.

You know with all of your reporting of the deals there it got me thinking.  My mom is close to retirement age but is the type to never stop working.  She's always complaining about having no deductions because her mortgage is paid off.  Maybe if I promise to take care of her in her old age I'll convince her to buy a home there and then we'll have a place to vacation in the winter!

BB, I'm glad to see that the FAR is so up on things.

You couldn't duplicate that house in San Diego for that price if the lot was free.

Bill Roberts

And you bet "the Lender could very well go after them for fraud" they will. The sad part is I have to fight this one all alone because the FBI is too busy. But guess what? The guy begged and begged and wrote letters and had friends write letters. His mistake? He came back for another loan, I sent his RESPA package to his "primary residence" and it was returned "Undeliverable: House Vacant". Then he had the cojones to threaten my loan officer for daring to question why his RESPA was returned ... oh, ya baby. BRING IT TO DADDY! I always say, "If you scream or threaten or 'take a tone' with any of my staff members I will find the fraud." Took me less than 15 minutes to find it and then I found some more. Scammers and scumbags definitely have a lot to do with the problems in our industry today. Not "speculators" but scammers. There's nothing wrong with legitimate speculation.

5 years of inventory! Holy crap! And I thought we had it bad with 2.5 years of inventory. And we have similar investor stories. A lot of south Florida buyers thought our prices were great. But they were comparing apples to oranges. It doesn't work that way.

BB-Truth be told there were many ingredients in the big pot of disaster stew.  The speculators are definitely a main ingredient.  I think if we check the recipe carfully, we'll find that the key ingredient is greed.

BB,

It seems to me it's been sort of a perfect storm brewing for a while now.

BTW, while on the recent flight to Honolulu for the CRS Sell-a-bration while reading an article about places to buy a second/retirement home today where you could find something at a really great price beacuse of the local market. Poinciana, FL was one of two cities named in that article.

BB,
I wished all the investors went to your market and left our market alone (I don't really), that way our forclouser rate would be normal, housing prices would not have fallen 40%, etc.  It is just like the stock market or the gold market, buy high, sell low! or is it suppose to be the other way around? AJ

BB - that's a great price!  The inventory levels stink, but your market is not alone there.

That house up here would be a solid $275K or more.  Especially on a lot that size. 

BB I love how you always just 'put it all out there'... you clients must love your personality, we Active Rainer sure do......

That is a lot of inventory.  Our $300K+ market is pushing 4 years worth but market wide we're just shy of a year, which is a lot for us.  A couple of years ago we built a house for a couple that during construction, they bought and closed on two houses in Ft. Lauderdale.  They were lucky enough to sell one and make a decent profit... they missed the curve on the second one and it cost them $15K to sell - above and beyond the profit from the first house. There are only so many times that investor resell shell game is going to work before someone gets caught with their pants down. 

BB- I don't think there is much sympathy for the liars and the fraudsters.  Others simply made terrible financial decisions.  Life can be hard....if we make it so.

I suppose it could not go the way it was going forever.  I still think that there are some that could have explained more - and those buyers that could have asked more questions, not being blinded by the headlights...

Great Post Brother

Connor with Honor

I really don't have a problem with people seeing an opportunity to make some money and taking advantage of it (as long as they don't do anything fraudulent), but these same folks need to understand that when your making money from the balloon inflating that you're running the risk of the balloon popping.

A lot of people made a lot of money, but when you see tv programs coming on that "show you how to do it" I think that it's probably a safe bet that the bubble bursting is getting pretty close.

I noticed this here in St. Louis with the flipping market.  For years when I would flip a property, I could usually outbid my competition and since I did quite a bit of the work myself still make a decent profit for my work.   Then it got "popular" and beat up homes started selling for close to what the retail price for those homes was.  

Quite a few of these homes ended up sitting there unsold.  The folks SHOULD have known better than to pay that much for them, but they took the risk and are now reaping the rewards or lack thereof...

Bob Mitchell

ValueList Real Estate Services, Inc. 

Bryant:  I believe any one of us could have written this article in the Year 2005 or earlier.  Wow!... speculators were rampant and many very lucky and made a lot of money.  Now, we have to deal with the situation.

BB, when the second wave of investors drop in, the mess will clean itself up- do you suppose that it's possible for them to purchase homes from their jail cell? 

These investors all subscribed to the bigger sucker theory...unfortunately there is a limit to how many suckers there are! Same over here in Brevard County!

Well hey everyone. I didn't really abandon this post I have been out working all day. Don't you hate it when work interferes with our blogging? I know I do!!!

Anyway......as always I appreciate you guys stopping by. Great comments!!!

BB: In AZ it got bad enough the House Of Clowns actually passed a state law defining 2 types of Mortgage Fraud, Fraud for Housing. That's the little guy trying to buy a home, and Fraud for Gain, which includes occupancy fraud. You did a great service bringing this out as a factor agents should investigate if they are going to attempt a short sale listing.

I was listening to Clarke Howard on the radio yesterday and he stated that in some of the speculative markets like Floirda and Nevada that nearly 20% of new construction houses and condos were sold to speculators who had no intent of ever occupying the property.  So now as many of these properties are getting foreclosed, there are no owner occupant buyers because there are 20% more properties than there are owner occupants.  The buyers just simply don't exist even if the mortgage market were to correct itself.

Broker Bryant,

Like Jim said, we have our share of "fraud for gain" in Arizona.  Tucson has been hit pretty hard in some neighborhoods, with positive results for home buyers at the expense of those speculators who "may" have accelerated the housing downturn."

Mike in Tucson

Excellent Post Broker Bryant- I agree with the analysis and yes, in your area, it is a dire forecast.  5 year inventory...Wow!   Being as masterful as you are, no doubt you will find a way to make your listings sell well above avergae time your inventory of homes ais good AND YOU ARE OFFERING EXCEPTIONAL VALUE TO YOUR BUYERS-

Good Luck and Sell well!

Bryant, that looks like an awful lot of house for the money - you ought to be able to tempt a few Rainers from up where it's cold and a 300 sf efficiency apartment sells for double that.

BB - we concur.  The speculators did a fair amount of damage in our SW Washington market as well.  We are trying to work through the extra inventory however, it is hard to restrain the builders that want to keep on building and adding to the inventory!

John

Hi Bryant: I like that you used the phrase "specualtors" in the beginning... the term "investor" is somewhat different in usage than the term "speculator" and I would agree for the most part that they are the culprit in much of the current state of the market...

There is a long tradition in this country in regard to Speculators in Land, whihc is as old as the country, or older, and many of the founding fathers were involved in land speculation... of course, back then, the land was going to become populated, and the deals were good ones...

Many of these guys lost their shirts when the revolution came along, as much of the title work was done in England, and was revoked in the new governement... that is when G. Washington and others bought up as much as they could, and had to fight over their claims that dated to before the war...

We have not got the war as an excuse now, but it looks like we still  have speculators...

Great post... 

Bryant- Speculators were the main culprit here too. But many of them were the very folks that live here who just did it to themselves! Pay back's a bummer! 

I think this may be one of the main reasons we haven't had the horrendous down markets like your area. We simply weren't seeing that kind of escalation brought about by speculators. There was enough to go around, and we are too connected to a larger real estate market for the impact to be too dramatic in anyone part of the market. I am not saying Speculators didn't have an impact here, but it was nowhere near the warm parts of the country.

5 years worth of inventory, wow, now might be a good time to pounce on the right home! My area in NJ has 6 months and that is nothing in comparison.