patrick.net

>> I am more than a code monkey — I am a computer software professional! Engineers get less respect than an illegal alien nowadays.

I call myself “The Architect” — learnt after Matrix …..

Do you work for [the] Oracle? How are you going to deal with NEOs (negative equity owners)?

George,

I absolutely agree with you. Exclusive neighborhoods may not do better at all. If you log on to foreclosure.com, you will find plenty of pre-foreclosed homes (relative to the entire housing stock) and tax liens oweing 50,000+ in some "exclusive" neighborhoods. I even find people there I know who were known to be "doing well".

At this rate Cupertino may be one of the early parts of BA to see a decline in YOY per sqft value.

Per sqft value may be deceiving, as some have better amenities than others. We need to look at pergraniteel-adjusted prices.

At a quantum level, we don't know whether a house is undervalued or overvalued until it is observed. And, once observed, the price itself is affected by the observer. So, in effect, we are all affecting the prices simply by observing them. Worse, the notion of an objective state of price-ification is meaningless.

(Damn, it's so much easier to kill a cat.)

I don't know, realtors spin well in up and down markets.

SFWoman,

we would have LESS than a 50% chance of killing the Realtor?

We do have to compensate for the degree of quantum entanglement that Realtors(tm) already have with the Underworld.

I'd say that there is always a 100% chance that you end up getting a calendar with an oversized, airbrushed photo of the Realtor(tm) regardless of the state of the radioisotope.

Check this one out, the school closure is getting out of hand. There is a graph at the end of the article on kindergarten enrollment up till 2002. I believe the picture is going to look even worse if projected out to 2006.

http://www.demographers.com/SCHOOLCLOSURENEWSLETTER.pdf

Fucking Shitball Troll
Metaphysical maggot
Bed buddy of MP

Want proof maggot asshat trolls such as, metaphysical, are not only fucking annoying but stupid shit gobbling monkeys?

Take a look at the piece of shit "condo" it was so unfortuately outbid on. 1.1mil WITH NO FUCKING PARKING.

Where the fuck is it going to park its Hummer? In its wifes ass?

Trolls post online crap
Special Olympic gold medal
Both are retarded.

>I believe patric.net INVENTED the term CONDOTINO

I believe Peter P. invented the term.

@SFWoman, who knows, who cares? If you wish to be truly amused take a look at the blogs from a while back. The maggot MP was posting his flowing brown wave of crap from his work computer. The IP was traced back to Credit Suisse First Boston. The maggot then went to full cover its ass mode, it was quite amusing.

Haiku City USA:

Scary house price, make
me think twice. Hundred-thou job,
I live like a dog.

Damn, I AM a dog.
I grovel in dirt though I
make one hundred K.

Every day house price
goes up. I scream and I cry
and ask god why...me?

We are the children
Of the golden ghetto. We
Live like big piggies.

Next year I make more
Than two hundred-thou and still
Live like a damn cow.

Tax dollars wasted.
College degree worth less than
Sh-t. Me big groundhog.

Silicon Valley
Left me stranded, took away
My pride. I cry tears.

I am but a broke clock
That has stopped dead in its tracks.
No time relax.

Hell hath no fury
Like the market that will crash
Hard. Tsunami time.

I sip cheap wine to
Kill the pain and dream housing
Market falls in flame.

Put down the bong; Turn
Off the Led Zep; zip up your
Pants and go to work.

Pop!,

Uranium Participation Corporation [TSX:U] has a ETF for Uranium (I think). If you have ideas about creating a position based on Uranium please post it here.

ps,

it depends on which pocket of Saratoga you are targeting. If you are targeting the areas west of 85, the golden triangle area or the foothill south of 9, then I'd say don't expect bigger than average crash. If wife really wants it, and you can afford it, then be a good husband.

If you just care about the Saratoga address and don't mind living to the east of 85, then you have bigger bargaining chip. Saratoga is a good piece of real estate, I personally won't mind overpaying a bit for it.

I think anything in the *right* pocket of Saratoga with about 15K lot and 2400 sf home in a good condition, shouldn't crash below 1M. When it gets close to 1M, I believe there will be lots of pent-up demand in the surrounding suburbs wanting to trade up. I have a colleague who literally moved a couple of blocks over just to get the Saratoga address. That's my take on it.

Also, the part of Saratoga bordering Cupertino actually goes to Cupertino schools. The part east of 85 goes to San Jose, and the rest goes to Los Gatos-Saratoga school district.

Investing in uranium ? I wish I had. This is what happens when you are a techie surrounded by only techie friends. You think GOOG is the only game in town.

CCJ is up - get this - 10 times - no typo there - since Jan 2003. Someone on this very blog mentioned being long on CCJ, only a few weeks ago. I wish I had discovered Patrick.net in 2003.

Shiny red dump truck
Loose your parking brake with zest
Cut loose your moorings

Aim for that Lexus
With leather interior
Don't stop when she screams

Faster than bullet
Dump truck Dump truck, then...
no more Realtorâ„¢

ps,

correctomondo, when you remodel, your home gets reassessed at the market value, that is why I resent this freaking bubble so much, I can't even remodel my home for the fear of tripling my property tax bill. You are only allowed to do very basic maintenance without triggering a reset, you want to do some nice remodeling job? Bang, the county got ya!

Anything above 2M will get a serious haircut. But I personally sense a lot of support at around 1M level. Anything in the west valley area, in a decent location with a large enough lot, some to good view, 1M list price will get you multiple offers above asking.

Now, here is something you need to ask yourself. Do you think something serious will happen to our economy? To me, I am hesitant to trade up or upgrade not because I cannot afford to, but because I don't want to spend a respectable portion of my networth on my home, while I am not sure how the US will turn out in the next 2 decades, I feel we have a lot of unwinding to do, a lot of time bombs to set off. I am not a rich person that I can just treat my residence as a consumption.

If nothing too bad happens, I'd say the part of Saratoga that you are targeting won't go below 1.2-1.3M. Now, if we as a country are doing some serious unwinding in the next 10 years, then all bets are off. That's why I personally will hold off to 2009/2010 so that I can get a better look.

Also, if you are affluent enough that you can afford to lose, say, half a mil, then I think finding a prime Saratoga home at around 1.4M may not be a bad idea. After all, money is for buying joy as well, what is the point of money if you cannot buy a bit of self-gratification. I am just not in a situation to ignore a half mil loss.

astrid,

as the middle class, esp the middle upper class of America get marginalized, they typically converge on particular locations, rather than disperse. They converge in places with good job prospects, good schools, and a natural location with enough greenbelt, scenery, nature, etc. The coming oil crisis will make this trend even more obvious, in essence, people tend to live more together. Crime is another reason driving people to flock to certain suburbs.

For example, Palo Alto only has about a total of 700 homes listed each year. Saratoga has fewer. The *right* pockets of Saratoga have even fewer, probably less than 100 a year. I won't put LG on the same rank as Saratoga, I rank the *right* pockets of Saratoga along with the *right* pockets of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. The total listings in the *right* pockets from these suburbs probably will be less than 300 each year. Do you think you can find 300 households who can fork over 1.4M for these 300 listings each year? I think I can.

Sorry for sounding like a snob, but if you live here long enough, you will know the difference in the same town, it is more than just an address.

astrid,

I will move to Seattle if we continue to rain like this. I know how far 1.5M can go in Seattle, even today. I can move into Medina and be BillG's neighbor.

>I believe patric.net INVENTED the term CONDOTINO

I believe Peter P. invented the term.

No, I thought Lunarpark invented the term... or perhaps some newspaper.

plenty of uranium in australia, hee hee

Australia's vast resources of uranium amount to a staggering 40% of the world's total identified resources of uranium recoverable at low cost.

http://www.ga.gov.au/ausgeonews/ausgeonews200512/uranium.jsp

we'll sell it to you if you're nice, but don't think about getting it by bringing democracy to this country -- we already have some, thank you...

hmm, good ol' kiyosaki:

http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html

financial genius...

"The article says “Kiyosaki’s got his…” and that he lives in a $3.5 million dollar home in Phoenix.

A real-estate broker visitor to this site ran a computer search on Kiyosaki and said Kiyosaki owned two properties in Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix). The assessor’s records showed a purchase price (10/6/99) of $1.2 million and a “full cash value” of $980,000 on his residence, 62 Biltmore Estates Circle, Phoenix, AZ 85016. Neither value is any slouch, but it ain’t $3.5 million. A visitor to this Web site who lives in Phoenix said Kiyosaki spent a lot of money on improvements finishing around April, 2002. A caller in July of 2003 said the house was worth about $2.5 to $3 million then. The other property (a five-room house built in 1979, 2,300 square feet, 1809 East Lane Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85020) had a current “full cash value” of $171,500. He purchased that 8/8/91. It was the house he moved out of when he bought the Biltmore Estates house.

A visit to the Maricopa County Recorders Web site shows that he bought the Biltmore home from an odd home seller—the National Model Railroad Association. You can see at the Web site that the down payment was originally $23,000, but that was crossed out and $300,000 was written in. The recording number from the assessor’s records is 990929308 10/6/99."

he's a big 'xaggerator...

fair enough, george...

in the present day kiyosaki article he still quotes his 'rich dad' as saying something fatuous like: "This is when God reminds you that you're not as smart as you thought you were." what a mine of wisdom that rich dad was...

elsewhere, reed points out that rich dad has never been named in the acknowledgements in the books, nor been tracked down as a real person, and kiyo has said 'so what if he's not real?' in interviews.

and i can sell you a good work of non-fiction by james frey ;)
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey1.html

but was kiyo the original phoenix specuvestor?

It seems Rich Dad/Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki has weighed in on the Housing Bubble….can’t say I disagree either:

http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/article/richricher/3413

Having just read through this link, most of it is rehashed stuff other people have said long before Kiyosaki. The interesting thing is that Kiyosaki continues to pimp himself at the Learning Annex real estate seminars (discussed on previous threads) at the same time he is writhing this crap.

OwnerOccupier,
Seriously- If you really have 1.5 million bucks, you have the ability to totally avoid the pricey areas, settle in an area like Dallas-Austin-Raleigh-Atlanta... or just about anywhere else besides The entire west and East coast and be set absolutly for life. We're talking a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood, with enough money to set aside to live off of without a job until you die. I know if I were in your shoes, I'd jump at this chance. Seattle is basically a little less expensive than SF but with (usually) wetter weather.

Amazing saavy
I borrowed and lost, popped
My swagger replaced

Owneroccupier Says:

Anything above 2M will get a serious haircut. But I personally sense a lot of support at around 1M level.

That's an interesting observation - I totally agree. There's a pretty distinct cutoff in volume of interested buyers at the just-over $1M level. The market thins pretty quickly above the ~$1M masses, in the $1.5M to $2.5M range, and above that it seems to be a whole other ballgame (the aforementioned Google/stock option lottery winners, etc). We're keeping an eye on the low end of some pricey areas as well (Woodside, Portola Valley), and believe me, there is a fair amount of crap in that range to sort through. Observers outside the BA can't help but be floored by these numbers, I would guess.

" Observers outside the BA can’t help but be floored by these numbers, I would guess.

Trust me. They are. The last time I went to visit my folks, I went to have breakfast with my dad's boss for some business advice. He started a number of smaller cable networks and vartious book stores across the region and has a very nice home on the lake- a property that is valued at around 600k, but would probably fetch several million in anywhere CA. One of the first things he asked me was how in the hell do people afford to live out there? I didn't have an answer for him. He's made a lot of sucess for himself by using common sense. He has no college degree either. He made a very interesting comment that basically, people are constantly in a state of conditioning. For example, Gas may go up to $3.50 a gallon, which shocks the hell out of people for a few weeks and makes the headlines. Then the prices go down to $2.89 and suddenly, everyone thinks we're getting a bargain. Such is the case in California real estate. If the prices go up to a new platue, of course we're all shocked, but eventually, people start nodding their heads thinking that 450k is a "real bargain" Versus the new level set at 600k. In a way, Californians are sort of insulated from the rest of the country.
Basically, people lose track of common sense fairly quick, and the result is a lack of restrainment. If it were up to me and I ran the education system, I would make it a requirement that students would have to take a 3 week bus trip across the country and gauge the true nature o the country and get a sense of what values mean to diffrent areas of the nation. Perhaps this would help instill common sense and a return to a realistic evaluation of economics.

nomadtoons2,

You're dad is right on the mark in terms of conditioning. I spent a few years in Boston as well, and people there are completely used to the frigging cold-as-hell winters, so after a week of -20deg F, 30deg is balmy, and you see die-hards coming out in t-shirts. The exposed pasty skins are a sight to behold. However, it's one thing to be insulated from reality (which Californians are in more ways than just RE), but it's another thing to actually have the means to still pay for these prices. It's been beaten to death, but the means clearly come from a combination of loose lending standards, the pyramid scheme of equity (long-time owners sell and can afford more expensive homes with the equity they've cashed out) and the higher-end money folks in the BA (Google effect).

Housing crashes big,
I dance in the streets and smile!
Die you greedy dogs...

SF Woman,

And the only thing less charming than Medford, OR are the actual inhabitants.

SFwoman,
Well, I was there around 10 years ago. Mind you that I was still very green to cities in general, so any city to me was cool. I recall the traffic was appalling, and it was very hot. I recall it being a fairly nice place, but then again- I haven't been there in a long time. Perhaps it is truly disgusting. Half of my company is located there. The entire marketing team just got back from there and had a blast, but maybe it was because it has been raining here since December. Sort of funny that some of the guys in Dallas were trying to convince some of them to sell and move there.
Maybe Dallas is ugly. Perhaps Iowa is beautiful and scenic. I don't know- never been there. Maybe South Dakota is heaven on earth. Beats me, never even flown over it. So as you can see, my actual knowledge of vast chunk of the country are inconclusive. So when I say places like Dallas, I'm simply using it as an example of another major metropolitan area that has a supremely opposite contrast to here in terms of raw costs associated with it. Maybe it's hell on earth. Then again- lots of people live there- more so than here in fact, so there must be things about that area that the inhabitants like.Most people choose to not live in an area if they don't like it. Diffrent strokes for diffrent folks.

The lead article linked this morning (thank you Patrick) is titled:

"Most Lenders believe bubble bursting" which kind of surprised me. They're providing the "punch bowl" and even an alarming percentage acknowledge that there is a bubble with substantial probabilities of real declines? What was even more alarming was their assesment of the risk going forward.

"When asked to select from a list of six issues that had the most potential to hurt the US economy"

38% of the lenders said the federal budget deficit
18% said the war in Iraq
12% said the sluggish job market
9% said low household savings rate
9% said the RE bubble

Is this ass backwards or what? As a lender my first concern should be the ability of the borrower to repay the loan! Followed closely by the value of my collateral, the rest of it is all just politics and things that a lender has no control over. If these guys were that concerned about the deficit maybe they should have considered that before they underwrote a couple of trillion dollars in I/O mortgages in a bubbly environment.

I realize the context of the original question but they should concern themselves more with writing loans that make sense and less with external influences they can't control.

Shoot David Lereah
That monkey leads the parade
He deserves to die

PS, I'd like to add some perspective of my own concerning racism and biggotry by assuming that you aknowledge that it exsists in all corners of the globe- even SF. In my 22 years of living in that region, it was never a big issue. Sure- we have racsists there. We also have religious fanatics.I'm not going to blatently say there aren't problems, because there are.I walked around with a shaved head, some nasty bumper stickers, and hung out with all kinds of people who should have been in the popularly conceived rhetoric been thrashed and preached to by the locals.3 members of my family are gay. I am part native American and have fairly dark skin. You'd think I would've had problems. Hell- people used to make comments like "dirty mexican!" to me.But it was never a huge problem for me. racist examples are also in SF. The fact that ethinic groups are shoved into ghettos here- like hunters point and West Oakland is proof to me, except that people don't consider this to be racism. Racial segregation and unfair economic conditons are still rampant here.That's one of the reasons I'm probably going to move.It's just that people here tend to ignore it.There is no racsism in the context you mention because they're all shoved into hovels, conveniently shoveled out of site and mind. I've lived here for 7 years and this is my observation. And religion? Well to me religion is basically one man's gospel and vocation to preach to the masses. Then by definition, far left politics are the religion of the bay Area. Call it christianity- call it Budhism, or call it extreme liberalism. I have never been "preached" to more in my life than here, from people who are very, very sure of themselves. People who just know that what I know and observe is wrong. I listen attentivly, as it is our right to have free speech, but when everyone thinks and says the same things over and over, I can't help but associate it with the Sunday Sermon of another parable we've heard for years now.It's not diffrent to me.
The Great Red Fear(tm) will undoubtedly keep many people out of these regions indefinantly. To each his own, and I'm on the fence of what's really important for me. What this life has taught me so far is that nice people, and ugly people are everywhere, and where you choose to hang your hat is just that- a place to live and your ability to adapt.

@nomadtoons, love your work! Good stuff. I am sorry you were called a dirty mexican, as I truly am a dirty mexican.

tannenbaum Says:

I’ve been following your posts for awhile and all I can ask you is: What are you still doing here living in the Bay Area? You are clearly unhappy here. Pack up and move back to the South. What are you waiting for?

How is this comment any different from "if you don't like this country, you can get the hell out" spewed at protesters by jingoistic reactionaries, or "y'all ain't from around here" stereotypically uttered by some southern yokel? I happen to think a) nomadtoons2 is right about the liberal indoctrination in the BA, and b) counteropinions are good for the mainstream, even if in the BA that means being more conservative.

There is a lot of lip service paid to liberal ideals here, but a lot less action. NIMBY politics against housing development are a perfect example. For example, the attitude of Bolinas' anti-development movement portrayed by the national media is emarrassing to the BA, IMO.