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Evil Buyers Display Extreme Cruelty to Distressed Sellers
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2007 Apr 17, 5:43am 34,350 views 547 comments
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"How insulted would you be if you were that seller and someone asked you to come down off your price $90,000? Do you think you would say…ok sure no problem. I’m not spinning my heels in mud with an unrealistic buyer who only wants to try and rip a seller off!â€
Sellers already ripped themselves off for buying overpriced investment properties. :)
The only people this will REALLY benifit are the people who bought a home they COULD afford, but had a reaaaaly toxic loan sold to them by a MB who was in it only for the cash. And I suspect these people could get the refi on themselves.
Maybe this not very useful PLAN is the one where everyone wins.
Politicians can take credit for "saving" housing.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can take credit for "saving" housing - justifying their existence.
Some FB's will be "saved" - but most won't be.
Savers won't be completely screwed over.
Sounds like a win-win.
Vicente
2007 Apr 17, 6:47am
What exactly does "spinning my heels in mud" mean?
Sounds kinda dirty....
"“Restructuring their loans into more affordable products, especially 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, would bring them back to good standing, allow them to repair their credit histories and dampen the impact that foreclosures may have on the broader housing market.â€
At what end do you restructure...
(1) Reduce the principle ... stings the bond holder
(2) Reduce the payment ....stings the bond holder
(3) Increase the term dates... stings the bond holder
(4) Decrease the Interest Rates... Cant do that!
There is no real solution for this. These guys are just hoping to avoid
any regulation or goverment medling.
Peter P
2007 Apr 17, 7:00am
I love the thread graphics. My wife always some real mice for our cats as toys. But that would be too cruel. And too messy.
Probably will be lurking more than writing, for quite some time. Baby boy is fine. 8 pounds 3 oz.
Congrats. Did you buy him a house yet? Otherwise, he'll be priced out forever!
James,
Take a look at the "source" for your answer:
Copyright © 2007 UnReality Times®
@Peter P,
The offset blockquotes (with sources cited) are real. The rest is geniune parody.
austingal,
Congrats! Hopefully, the market will "correct" while you're at home nesting, and by the time the little one is old enough to deal with a move, it'll be the right time to buy.
CB,
Is that what they mean when they say "So small you have to go outside to change your mind"? Chicago had a lot of "coach houses" that faced the alley left over from the horse and buggy days but this is ridiculous!
sfbubblebuyer
2007 Apr 17, 7:35am
You never saw Realtors saying :
“Parisi said he believes ‘boom and bloom’ media coverage has hurt the market. ‘We’ve seen some very ridiculous asking prices,’ Parisi said. ‘People shouldn’t be desperate to buy a home… The problem is some sellers are out there just to take advantage of the marketplace.’â€
Even more to the point than Mr. Parisi, Florida Realtorâ„¢ Becky Troutt gets right to the heart of the matter:
“I think some of the sellers are out for blood! …There is a difference from ‘making a buck’ and ‘trying to get something for nothing’! Just because the market is hot right now and homes take less than 3 months to flip…..doesn’t mean that buyers should have to give their financial futures away and it doesn’t give you the right to go for the jugular vein! How insulted would you be if you were that buyer and someone asked you to $90,000 over they had paid for a house 5 months ago? Do you think you would say…ok sure no problem. I’m not spinning my wheels in mud with an unrealistic seller who only wants to try and rip a buyer off!â€
A note to home sellers: If you want to make $90,000 flipping a home……don’t look at homes that are $200,000 when you buy it and gouging idiots with too much access to credit hoping they will spend more than they want to spend or can afford just because it’s a hot market, and you think you can get a buyer up that much…..because….IT AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN!!!â€
Never saw that, did you? Realtors' as a group (with individuals dissenting, I'm sure) wet their pants with glee as their commissions shot up. Never once did you hear them bitching about greedy sellers robbing the buyers. Now that their commission checks are coming down, nothing but bitching and moaning.
@SFBB,
Amen. You nailed it! The quotes so readily lent themselves to this they almost parody on their own don't they?
I think many readers here are missing the sarcasm here. Read the thread post more carefully!
Too funny!
Another great example of creative writing! ...but you know they really feel like this.
@austingal Congratulations!
@Space Ace
You forgot the universe of options that opens up when taxpayers are soaked for bail out bucks to make the bond holders whole. This Reddit discussion thread on bail outs tells me Congress will enact such legislation in one form or another. The mainstream population simply does not grasp that turning to the government means giving more taxes.
@SFBubbleBuyer
What will be even more interesting to watch is the one-two punch the Realtor industry will be taking. The first punch is the commissions dropping as you mentioned. The second is the trend of information control is going against their favor. They are beginning to lose their control on pricing data, and will have to show business value elsewhere in the transaction.
Lets do the time warp dance...
http://www.dqnews.com/AA1996BAY12.shtm
Resale houses back in 1996
# Sold # Sold Pct. Med($K) Med($K) Pct.
Nov-95 Nov-96 Chng. Nov-95 Nov-96 Chng.
Alameda 807 863 6.9 $198 $207 4.5
Contra Costa 683 756 10.7 $190 $197 3.7
Marin 185 199 7.6 $337 $343 1.8
Napa 80 70 -12.5 $170 $175 2.9
San Francisco 260 283 8.8 $265 $269 1.5
San Mateo 456 528 15.8 $290 $284 -2.1
Santa Clara 1,108 1,031 -6.9 $257 $258 0.4
Solano 295 300 1.7 $147 $137 -6.8
Sonoma 383 395 3.1 $185 $185 0
Bay Area 4,257 4,425 3.9 $227 $229 0.9
Does anyone see prices around even 300K in Bay Area...
Any reason for the inflated prices... what changed??
(Maybe people got stupid)
Oh grasshoppers ... yea shall see...
Space Ace,
Nice find! That helps put things in perspective. Given that things really started to "ramp up" from there doesn't mean prices like that haven't existed for a "long, long time". Sellers like to gloss over that too.
Now those are median prices in Minnesota.
My wife always some real mice for our cats as toys. But that would be too cruel. And too messy.
As Georgie says "that's not food, if it were it would be in my bowl"
Georgie has no desire to catch mice, Georgie is a very lazy cat.
sfbubblebuyer
2007 Apr 17, 8:32am
SP,
I meant to imply that checks got smaller as well as less frequent in the "commission checks coming down" remarks. :)
If buyers sense that prices will start falling, they will wait for lower prices. Which means n_o_b_o_d_y g_e_t_s p_a_i_d. This is the real reason that realtwhores and everyone else who benefits from the transaction (at the buyers’ expense) will do ANYTHING to hide the fact that prices are going down.
This is the buyer-seller standoff problem that's been brought up before. At some point, if buyers do not capitulate, the Realtors (TM) will turn to the sellers and ask, nay, beg them to lower their prices in order to get a sale.
I don't think we're close to that point in the "prime" Bay Area yet.
SpaceAce,
Thanks for the stats. Not to sound almost RE bullish, but one could argue prices in 1996 were below the historical trend for Bay Area housing prices, so the numbers are skewed low.
Either way, point well taken - there's potentially a lot of room for prices to fall. I still think the key is jobs/economy. Once the stupor from the Web 2.0 "the tech bubble is back" BS wears off, that will be the time point we're talking about. In turn, that relates to how much money continues to get pumped into the startups and larger public tech firms, which in turn depends on the overall economy. In that regard, the cracks are already starting to show...
HeadSet Says:
> Savers now get the chance to be evil.
> I’m going to lowball big time, and of course
> be turned down.
> Then when the house is still unsold months
> later, I will get a call seeing if I’m still interested.
You will get the call earlier if you give some friends the chance to be “evil†and offer even lower than your lowball offer (make sure they mention every bad thing about the house to sellers to plant the seed that they own a dump in a bad school district)…
"I still think the key is jobs/economy."
My point exactly, when did you ever see a BA economy that raised prices.
Not in my lifetime living in the BA. Detroit raised the price of Mustrang from 2500 first year to what today.. $20,000 or so. First PC was around $10,000 now down to $500 for laptop.
We dont have the pricing leverge to pay for employees high salaries and their bubbly homes. More recently, we had more acquisitions and mergers, employees loosing jobs than new start up going public (raising capital hiring new employees and expanding).
Thanks for the stats. Not to sound almost RE bullish, but one could argue prices in 1996 were below the historical trend for Bay Area housing prices, so the numbers are skewed low.
To make up for that, assuming 5% appreciation a year, $300k would be about $513k a year today.
DinOR Says "Now those are median prices in Minnesota."
Bear in Mind prices in New Jersey were the same as prices in SF South Bay. Yes they had snow in NJ while CA suffered a draught. That was back in 1976-79. Point being CA prices were no different than other parts of the nation. The stupid notion your paying for sunside was indeed stupid.
Randy H
2007 Apr 17, 9:08am
What FAB is referring to is framing. If you can get a collaborator to really do this it is *extremely* powerful int he seller's psyche. It turns them around from perceiving your $250K under asking offer as a quarter million dollar _loss_ to instead seeing your $50K over the last offer as a _gain_.
There are two problems:
1. Many sellers have a disgust barrier. Breaking their mental accounting through that barrier is the very definition of stickiness. It's hard to do. Many many sellers will say f-u to the first offer and just pull their listing if your second lowball comes in.
2. Getting a collaborator isn't easy. It's a *lot* of work for them. They have to be credible, which probably means they don't already have a house. They have to get pre-approved, make a earnest deposit, and make it look real. That always means there's a very small chance they end up with the house, also. (Of course then they could figure out somehow to let you take over the offer I suppose, but it would be messy).
Peter P
2007 Apr 17, 9:10am
What FAB is referring to is framing. If you can get a collaborator to really do this it is *extremely* powerful int he seller’s psyche.
Framing is a very interesting topic. Beyond Greed and Fear has some good discussion on it. Perception is everything.
An average 2000 sq ft TH I seen in 1997
was fetching for under $200K. Add 5%YoY
appreciation.
1997 200,000
1998 210,000
1999 220,500
2000 231,525
2001 243,101
2002 255,256
2003 268,019
2004 281,420
2005 295,491
2006 310,266
2007 325,779
That Same TH now is listed at $660K
Needless to say a 50% decline would
get you back to normal trend. You can
factor in Rent vs own and Income to price
you pretty much get back to LT averages.
2. Getting a collaborator isn’t easy. It’s a *lot* of work for them. They have to be credible, which probably means they don’t already have a house. They have to get pre-approved, make a earnest deposit, and make it look real. That always means there’s a very small chance they end up with the house, also. (Of course then they could figure out somehow to let you take over the offer I suppose, but it would be messy).
Oh... I don't know. I imagine you could find a *few* willing parties like that on this blog (_whistles innocently, rolls eyes skyward_).
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Sadistic, Greedy Buyers Toying with Sellers Like Cats with Prey*
Copyright © 2007 UnReality Times®. All Rights Reserved.
by David Lereah, Leslie Appleton-Young and John Karevoll
As the alleged real estate bear market enters its second year of hitting bottom, some buyers out there are clearly enjoying this one-time market aberration --perhaps a little too much. Is deriving sadistic glee from other peoples' suffering a nice thing to do? The Germans have a word for this: schadenfreude (and we all know what cruelty the Germans are capable of!).
According to Donald Parisi, president of the Realtor Association of the Fox Valley (IL), buyer cruelty is reaching grotesque proportions:
This view is further clarified by Jim Fox, manager of Realty One in Canton, Ohio:
Even more to the point than Mr. Parisi, Florida Realtorâ„¢ Becky Troutt gets right to the heart of the matter:
Now, that's telling 'em like it is, Becky!
While the unbridled greed and glee exhibited by these sadistic buyers (and the American Dreamâ„¢-hating press) are stomach-turning awful, they are not the primary causes of this upside-down market. The real culprit for this most unnatural and unhealthy market condition, is well understood in the industry:
Clearly what's needed here is massive government intervention to protect homeowners and rekindle the normal 20%/year appreciation. This might take the form of a distressed homeowner mortgage buy-down, or federal underwriting for all the kindhearted subprime lenders who generously enabled low-income Americans participate in the American Dreamâ„¢ (often mischaracterized by Gloom'n'Doomers as a "bailout").
To proactively tackle this looming crisis, the NAR and CAR have teamed up with the MBAA (Mortgage Bankers Association of America) to sponsor the Save the American Dreamâ„¢ Act of 2007. Says NAR Chief Economist, David Lereah, "We are urging people to sign our online petition, and write, call, email and beg their Senators and Congresspersons to support this badly needed piece of mercy legislation. Home ownership is as American as apple pie --only you (and Uncle Sam) have the power to save it! Please do your patriotic duty and support the SADA. God bless."
[*Note: while the offset quotes and links are real, this 'article' is a parody]
#housing