patrick.net

IF the economy strengthens and rent goes up rapidly

Huh? Why would the economy strengthen? What new products or services would serve as the basis for this?

Randy and Peter P.,

If rent in the BA goes up significantly in real terms, what's likely to happen is a lot of young people and renters of all ages will move out. Relatively cheap rent is the only thing that makes living in BA viable now. If rent goes up significantly but is not followed by wages, there will be a large second wave of out migration.

has anyone ever seen the Easter Bunny, Superman, and Santa Claus in the same room? See, this proves they are the same person.

Rent is what a property is worth. Rents cannot skyrocket because there aren't enough high salary individuals in the bay area for this to occur. Yes, HaHa, you make a lot of money. I'm just not buying the new paradigm bullshit. Wasn't the dot.com "revolution" a new paradigm also, one in which all that mattered was growth? Oh that's right, profits matter after all.

Do you have a particular prediction of what nominal prices will be over the next 5 years, relative to today.

I don't make specific predictions because I'd only be asking to be wrong. I think in general there will be either slow, flat to moderate nominal gains or losses, but real losses either way -- if it's a soft landing; or it will be a psychology driven hard-landing where people think in nominal terms (nearly everyone does) and we see sharp nominal declines. I can tell you this, it will be a neighborhood by neighborhood battle. There will be small pockets that come out very well and others, perhaps right next door, that get clobbered, relatively.

astrid,

If rent goes up significantly but is not followed by wages, there will be a large second wave of out migration.

That's the if. Rent couldn't go up by enough alone, because of what you say. But, rent could go up faster than real wages go up. But if both go up just slightly out of proportion, then the rent-v-buy decision becomes much different without a lot (or maybe not any) nominal decline in home prices. We would have to see an increase in wages though (or theoretically, a massive cut in taxes).

Surfer-X, you are right that something's gotta give. Either companies make more and pay more, or people get to keep more, or home prices decline. Without something happening there, rents aren't going anywhere soon except perhaps down. And the more rents go down, the less likely anyone should ever buy a home unless they paying factors of millions in present-value to someone else to bank as gains.

I love this counter to the Realtor(tm) sales tactic: "Paying Rent just makes someone else rich" / "...pays someone else's mortgage".

How about, "at least a serious rental property business owner works for their income and gains. after all, being a landlord ain't exactly easy work, especially with a$$holes like me as renters".

Well.. if that ends up being the case, people buying now are not ultimately making a bad move at all.

If that ends up being the case.

We will be very perceptive of any change in conditions.

I’d love to see this bubble plotted out with a couple of other past real estate bubbles just to see how similarly/dissimilarly they behave. What is the average percent drive-up, the slope, the time frame, the denoument (is that what the post peak would be called?), the regression to or below mean.

SFWoman, you should probably be working at a Hedge Fund.

Randy,

"How about, 'at least a serious rental property business owner works for their income and gains. after all, being a landlord ain’t exactly easy work, especially with a$$holes like me as renters'."

LOL! Why just be a bear when I can be a boor!

Huh? Why would the economy strengthen? What new products or services would serve as the basis for this?

Don't know. But the reality is not always reasonable.

If rent in the BA goes up significantly in real terms, what’s likely to happen is a lot of young people and renters of all ages will move out.

Using the 1/3 gross guideline for rental affordability, people can pay a lot more.

For example, someone making 1 HaHa, which is about 13K a month, can afford to pay more than 4400/month.

SFWoman,

I'd feel more comfortable with someone like you working at a HF than many of the types who inhabit those dark depths.

Using the 1/3 gross guideline for rental affordability, people can pay a lot more.

And to further amplify Peter P's point, if you move somewhere like Evansville, IN, then you will be paying significantly more for rent than PITI, which is even worse than it appears because wages are so much lower there.

If people were to do a present value calculation (I know, in my dreams) and really consider their options then fleeing the BA because of rents is not going to be a winner except for a very few select areas in the SE or perhaps Texas.

Peter P,

Yeah, I'm still looking forward to the day of guaranteed 1 Ha Ha per capita income :P Maybe Different Sean can start a worker's revolution around that slogan...

SFWoman,

Noooo, you need to write a bunch a pretty calculus formulae, draw a couple graphs, and throw a differential equation in the foot notes too. Not that these have to really support your numbers, just have lots of greek letters. Seriously, take a look at what the Black-Scholes equation really is and ask yourself if you have what it takes to win a Nobel. I guarantee you did much harder stuff in your second year in undergrad.

Ahh the Laffer Curve. You're venturing beyond my domain of knowledge there because, to me, it's just a sidenote theory in neoclassical economics which manages to piss off both the Keynesians and the high-tax/no-deficit crowd at the same time.

My only claim to fame is having Stiglitz as a prof, but he managed to piss off even his Clinton allies before he got a chance to get fired by Bush.

Randy and Peter,

Okay, let's work with the 1 HaHa number. :P

1. I think we'd better work with after tax dollars for rent, since realtors are always telling us that there's no tax deduction for rent. The tax bill will eats up about 45% of that Ha Ha. If I made less in a different part of the country, the tax burden would also be lower, esp. in a state with lower taxes.

2. Although rent is higher than PITI in certain parts of the country, both PITI and rent are a lot cheaper in absolute terms than BA right now, and will be even cheaper when BA rent starts going up.

3. In a lot of the other communities, decent to good public schools are still available, so there may be savings on private school tuition.

However, I never assumed the rising rent price to squeeze out directors and tech supervisors (because junior engineers do not make 1 HaHa, I wish they do so I could mooch off of my junior tech friends more, but they don't), it's the marginal people who are barely making ends meet. Any price increase can lead to affordability problems and drive them or towards cheaper local housing.

In any case, I don't see anything driving BA wage growth or population growth right now. And the housing stock now in existence will still be there when the bubble bursts. I just don't see any conditions, outside of a few small high income pockets, that would give landlord pricing power.

SFWoman,

Your intuitions are right. RE isn't liquid enough for B-S to really apply anyway, but certainly RE is highly psychology-driven (there is no efficient market for RE transactions, at least not yet or probably anytime soon).

In B-S risk is just volatility as measured by standard deviation. There's all kinds of related pricing theories which include more esoteric stuff like random-walk theory, Brownian motion, and stuff only math and physics Phds can understand. But none of these work for RE.

Maybe you could use a binomial model on RE for a specific home if you could get the function right.

I thought the 1/3rd was for buying a house, not renting? I assume rent should be less, because:

1. no tax deduction
2. no equity building

Landlords also use the 1/3 guideline to qualify tenants.

SFWoman,

So coy with your nameless Ivy League school. :P

Return to BA,

Congrats, sounds like a nice bargain. I asked about CL bargains. Just curious. I sold some furniture on CL when my parents moved and everything worked out pretty well. Are you moving back to the BA before the summer heat sets in for Virginia?

Ha Ha is 150K pre-tax.

Yeah, I’m still looking forward to the day of guaranteed 1 Ha Ha per capita income Maybe Different Sean can start a worker’s revolution around that slogan…

'Universal suffrage, Universal HaHaness'
'One HaHa for all'
'A message to all employers: HaHa'

We're doing an international comparison, and this is the only wrap I get :cry: Some trotskyist, 1st international comintern reference...

Apart from the FT articles, there's a recent OECD report on housing affordability across 17 affluent OECD countries. This is a useful summary from The Age which includes links (may also require free subscription, hmm, I will paste it in if any demand):
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/house-prices-world-highest/2005/11/30/1133311106610.html

and plenty of coverage in The Economist in recent years. Some good work at demographia.com also, altho Robert Cote and I disagree quite adamantly with some of Wendell Cox's most basic theses...

OECD report (PDF):

www.oecd.org/dataoecd/41/56/35756053.pdf

Returning to BA,

Ha! You Bay Area weather wimp! Well when I was young, I lived in Shanghai with no air condition, and 100% humidity and mosquitoes the size of giant mallrats...

Sorry, can't resist. I took some classes at Berkeley one summer and had project partners who thought Berkeley had bad weather! :P

DS,

Excellent slogans. Can't wait for my 1 HaHa job. Do I have to take over factories physically? or can I just send in my resume?

Thanks for the graph, very interesting and very effective demonstration of your point about higher housing costs.

DS, Anyways, sorry about what I may or may not have implied about your being or not being a Trotskyite. It's really a sort of praise, I'm too flabby and bourgeoisie to lead a revolution.

Return to BA,

Well, at least the evenings will be cool and the humidity will be low. The Tri-Valley areas is a bit more temperature extreme than the rest of BA.

Bhiptis says:
I’m still not convinced that the correction would be a decline, rather than just a moderation.

That's fine.

I've been playing around with a Randy's model, and one that I built from scratch that shows a month-to-month breakdown of all costs, tax advantages, reinvestment returns, etc. There are a couple of selectable scenarios for appreciation and inflation ("Hard Landing" and "Speculator's Wet Dream" among them :-) ).

Given the current gap between PITI and equivalent rent, in most scenarios a renter who saves the difference and reinvests will be ahead of a buyer. Leveling prices at anything less than 10% inflation gives an advantage to the renter. The lower the inflation rate, the better for the renter.

Peter P says:
Using the 1/3 gross guideline for rental affordability, people can pay a lot more.

For example, someone making 1 HaHa, which is about 13K a month, can afford to pay more than 4400/month.

I thought then "1/3 gross" rule works only when paying PITI, because at first, most of your monthly payment is tax-deductible.
$4400 after tax is a boatload of money, even if you make 1 HaHa.

Peter P says:
But I am quite surprised that rent is nearly 25% higher in Mountain View compared to last year.

That *is* the Google effect.
Have you been to downtown Mountain View recently? No one over 30 lives there, it seems.

I wrote:
Given the current gap between PITI and equivalent rent, in most scenarios a renter who saves the difference and reinvests will be ahead of a buyer. Leveling prices at anything less than 10% inflation gives an advantage to the renter. The lower the inflation rate, the better for the renter.

Correction: if prices stay flat for 10 years, then start rising again at the rate of inflation, higher inflation is actually better for renters.
For a house price of $1mil, $2800 equivalent rent, an after-tax reinvestment return of 2% above inflation and 10% inflation p.a., a renter who saves and reinvests the difference to today's PITI can buy the house in cash after about 10 years.
After about 6 years, the renter's PITI will be lower than his rent if he bought at that time. Nice.

Pop!,

yes, 28% collectable tax. However, here is the caveat, if you can engage in a cash transaction when you sell, you don't need to tell IRS, the coin dealer will certainly report you though, unless the transaction is small.

If you buy CEF, you are not taxed the 28% collectable tax, only capped at CG tax 15%, however, you are subject to PFIC tax filing each year. You can google Passive Foreign Investment Company to familiarize yourself with PFIC taxation.

*not a tax advice nor an investment advice*

Joe Schmoe,

of course wealth has concentrated, just look at the earnings and assets of the top 10% housholds, they have increased their share of the entire pie significantly in the last decade.

Come on, do you really take the 70% home "ownership" at face value? 0-down ARM/Neg-am - financed homebuying will make you a home "owner"?
Without at least a certain percent equity (I personally define that to be 50% at least), one cannot call himself an owner, he is a debtor, the bank is the homeowner. Who owns the bank? Who owns the MBS?

Real estate is just one form of asset. And owner-occupied home is NOT an asset, it is a durable good. What can I do with my home? Unless I want to start a business and need to pull equity from the home to get a head start, it is of no use other than providing a roof over my head. BillG doesn't need to own homes, he can own shares of REITs, he can own GSE shares, owning a home and renting it out is very *primitive* and *labor-intensive* way to make money these days, let the REITs or professional apartment owners do that, you provide the money, they provide the sweat job, that is how capitalism works, marrying money with knowhow.

This RE bubble will lead to further redistribution of wealth from the moron masses to the wealthy class. Why? The wealthy people are unlikely to take on toxic loans to buy 3 McMansions. They instead invest in REITs, or hold GSE bonds, or shares to benefit from the RE boom. Remember we said who will get bailed out when this all blows up? It is certainly not the shareholders of GSEs or large banks who will be the bagholders. The bagholders will be still the marginal middle class who took on the toxic loans thinking that they can get ahead in this game. This is their ticket to poverty.

I thought then “1/3 gross” rule works only when paying PITI, because at first, most of your monthly payment is tax-deductible.

It is on most apartment rental application. Again, there are affordability guidelines. One should spend LESS than that.

Most people do not itemize anyway. To them, mortgage interest deduction does not exist.

That *is* the Google effect.
Have you been to downtown Mountain View recently? No one over 30 lives there, it seems.

Too bad I have to compete for housing with these people. :)

I am not bitter, if rent continues to explode, buying would not be as bad an idea. I doubt this will happen soon. But if it does, I will embrace the change.

GLD between approval and launch took almost a year, so there is no telling when it is going to launch, but at least we know 90% of chance is, it is going to launch. That's why CEF is exploding with the premium, in case you are really desperate to get in, you can buy a UK silver ETF on LSE. You pay no capital gains tax to UK for playing on the LSE as a foreigner, but you still owe uncle sam.

The only problem is, this fund is just backed by futures contract like DBS on NYSE, it doesn't carry physical silver. I prefer SLV that will store physical silver.

I won't use the Hunt Brothers $40 as a benchmark tho, that was an unnatural price. Silver also had some fundamental weakness, like the disappearance of film processing, I have yet to see another big industrial usage replacing that yet. However, during the 1980s, the natural support seems to be around $20, which is about $50 at today's price, I hope SLV will launch before silver hits $20.

You also need to watch out for gold. Gold in the last run shot up from $650 to $850 in FIVE days, so not many people could really cash out at the top, so setting a realistic goal of $650 adjusted for CPI is a better way. But again that also depends on how much money FED prints, who knows, last time we had a 18% Fed rate to curb the gold run, I don't think Ben has the gut to do so.

Fewlesh,

as a west valley native, do you know of any nearby places with really beautiful setting, least earthquake risk, and NO brand name (or least brand name), so when things tank I don't have to compete with other IPO lotto winners, trust fund kids for a good piece of land. School district is not an issue with me, I plan to send kids to private schools. I prefer something on the west side, commutable within 45 minutes to San Jose.

Fewlesh,

why can't Fed just buy the federal long-term treasury outright through open market operation? At least in the short term, that will stabilize the long rates. In the long term, we all know that USD is doomed.

Fewlish,

thanks for the link on electronic manufacturing, that is a big help.

Do you know what is holding up SLV ETF? I think the price is going to explode once it is available. Perhaps that is the problem.

USO is already trading.