patrick.net

Facebooksux says

No offense but have you been living under a rock the past year?

It's driven only by speculation/investors. Not first time buyers.

LOL ! LIke Like Like (Yes, no offense)

Very true! Most of the people I know around here who own houses got a huge break one way or another and hard work did not count for much of anything.

Well, not ALL of us anyway. We just did it the old-fashioned way and save for a decade.

E-man says

There's not much in the pipeline for the past several months. That means there won't be much inventory hitting the market in the next 4-6 months.

I would view the end of this year and early next year as a great opportunity to refinance due to lower interest rate and higher sale comparables, and pull out as much equity from all investment properties as possible and get ready for the next foreclosure wave so you can load up on more income properties. If it doesn't happen, that's ok too because you have essentially transferred all the risk to the lenders, and you still have all the cash in hand waiting for the next opportunity to present itself.

Wow. Looking back at this comment 8 months later and I got 6 dislikes for it. Reality is a bitch isn't it?

Well, things were even worse in the 2nd half of 2012 and YTD. Basically, the distress market is even more pathetic than the 1st half of 2012. There will not be REO inventory in the next 6 months. The housing inventory will have to come from regular sales if any. So depressing because there's nothing to buy.

You can thank Ben Bernake and the Fed.

@SFace,

I expect the market to do well into the fall, and then we will see consolidation in the 4th quarter of 2013 to at least summer 2014. I wouldn't be surprised if we continue to consolidate till early 2015. Then we should see a nice move up for 3 years. That'd be my guess.

The number of regular sales have been dominating the market for almost a year now where distressed properties used to dominate. As the market is moving up, I see pent-up sellers as well as pent-up buyers. Pent-up sellers due to they cannot refinance their 6%+ interest rate for various reasons. I guess I don't have to explain the reason for pent-up buyers.

A couple of years ago, banks were foreclosing at a pace of about 500 homes/month in Santa Clara County. If you factored in the short sale market, you're looking at about about 750 distressed properties/month. Santa Clara County absorbs about 1,300 - 1,400 properties/month. Then the number of foreclosed properties gradually dropped to 300 properties/month, then 150/month, and now we're looking at 80 properties/month. That's a significant drop. The number of NODs have been dropping significantly too, which explains the drop in short sale inventory.

One month doesn't make a trend, but the number of regular listings has been increased at a healthy pace in the last month or so. If this continues, it will slowly add more housing inventory to the pipeline. By year end, we might see 2-3 months worth of inventory instead of less than 1-month.

Another year of nice appreciation coupled with increasing inventory will likely dampen the rally. That's why I predict the housing market has a good chance of going into consolidation mode starting later this year.

It's hard for me to see the market keeps on going up like this for another 3 years without any consolidation. If history is any indication, I have a decent of being correct.

What do you want from me Professor Roberto?

I don't know honestly. After I bought my own house, I sort of stopped looking at housing trends for a long while.

How is the Phoenix market doing? My guess is low inventory still, but I suspect a lot of underwater people, and squatters as well.

Phoenix is still a pretty good buy. Weather is perfect for 3/4 year. Extremely low property taxes. The inner core is currently being modernized with public transport and heavy development. Recently there was a shortage of CONSTRUCTION CRANES in Phoenix.

MershedPerturders says

Phoenix is still a pretty good buy. Weather is perfect for 3/4 year. Extremely low property taxes. The inner core is currently being modernized with public transport and heavy development. Recently there was a shortage of CONSTRUCTION CRANES in Phoenix.

Is this robertoaribas' 2nd account?

If he made so much money, why does he waste time on this website?

You posted so many sales you make it sound like you own 50 some buildings out there by now. It doesn't seem legitimate. Phoenix isn't Walmart for houses.

xenogear3 says

Is this robertoaribas' 2nd account?

If he made so much money, why does he waste time on this website?

not quite. me and Roberto are quite different sort of Arizonans you might say.

There's always been a tense relationship between Californians and Arizonans. AZ has always been small-government, cheap, anti-Californian place and thus Californians constantly deny that it's a viable option. For instance in the early proposals for High Speed Rail systems the Californian Democrats didn't even have a proposal to connect Phoenix even though it's the 5th largest city in the US(and not very far from LA).

Phoenix is having a veritable revival that you can't deny. Downtown Phoenix is everything 'downtown LA' aka Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome isn't. It's got public transport, it's relatively clean, taxes are incredibly low.

I think most on here are underestimating how poor Americans are because they are going by what they see around them and refuse to see around them. The market for affordable places like Phoenix is very strong. You can buy a functional house in Phx for about 50k right now, a bit more and youre in the middle of a major metro with access to a light rail, international airport, convention center, restaurants, large office towers, etc. AZ has been largely falsely branded by the media because Arizonans generally take a stand against the encroaching Obamization of the US.