patrick.net

I went to UT Austin (McCombs) - Austin is a great city, just not quite as multicultural as SF or NYC yet, and still feels like a small place. Enchanted Rock a fun place to go, so is lake austin and i love Trudi's! But the heat...

but really he dropped the price by $49,000.

Actually, he dropped it by $36k

Going to foreclosure auctions is a bad idea if you are not doing it for living.

You have no idea what the true value of the house is, know little about the legal pitfalls and paperwork, and the disgruntled homedebtor may decide to sarbotage the home just before they leave, or you may get competitive at the court house subsiding to the adrenaline rush...

When the market tanks, you will have plenty of chances to pick and choose. Leave the foreclosure stuff to the professionals.

I think just as a rule of thumb, don't buy any subdivision built after 2003, and particularly those built AFTER the market turns.

This has happened multiple times overseas, and I don't see why US will be an exception. What typically happens elsewhere is, after the market turns, the developers have to cut back significantly on areas that you don't see to make up for the price reductions. So they may substitute lower grade water pipes for more durable ones, cut corners on insulation, basically anything that you cannot inspect with naked eyes during a walk-through.

Those built in the most bubblish times are of inferior quality because they are hurried to the market.

LILLL,

In a normal market that is the best way to buy a foreclosure. You find someone in distress and you find out how much equity they have. Then you make a deal with them taking a good part of their equity and leaving them with something so they can start over and not have their credit destroyed....but when they have no (or negative)equity in the house, because they used a no-down-payment-suicide loan, you cannot make a deal with them. In fact, there was an article recently about how these foreclosure tycoons are having to tell most of the people that call them that they cannot help them due to low/no/negative equity. If I come across that article I will post it.

allah,

what I am particularly concerned with is, those who will have to go upside down on their homes in this environment typically don't care about their credit record or future life any more, because there won't be any.

How do you stop the disgruntled home debtors from sarbotaging the home? I mean, if I decide to sarbotage my home before I move out, there are a few things I can do without alerting the inspector.

KurtS,

Most of what lists in that neighborhood are "me too" listings, and way overpriced for the value, even given a bubble mentality. I suspect those older, poorly maintained homes will get hard during the correction.

Then again, when I see one pop on at substantially less than the overpriced me-toos, it sells in days. I guess these are the smart sellers, using the other delusional sellers to anchor their price.

This is actually why I am skeptical of claims that prices will fall in anything other than a slow, jerky, sticky, uneven and unpredictable manner. I wouldn't be surprised to see this particular CM neighborhood go flat for a couple of years before really declining substantially, and maybe only by 15% then.

those who will have to go upside down on their homes in this environment typically don’t care about their credit record

Alot of them had no credit before they purchased the house.

How do you stop the disgruntled home debtors from sarbotaging the home? I mean, if I decide to sarbotage my home before I move out, there are a few things I can do without alerting the inspector.

Houses usually do get sabotaged before they go into foreclosure. Usually it happens when they are struggling to make the payments and they are fighting with each other because one of them regrets letting their spouse buy the house. They fight, kick holes in the walls, break glass....it's not a pretty site. It is not all physical damage though, it is lack of maintainence also. Ever been through some foreclosed houses? The inside of the house tells quite a story!

If you buy from someone before they go into foreclosure, you are helping them. There should be no reason for vindication. One thing you can do though is keep their money in escrow with a contingency until they actually leave.

Randy,

So far, my observation is, school district seems to be the most important support factor for certain neighborhoods.

Lots of inflated homes out there no doubt, but some neighborhoods move much faster than others. Down in South Bay, Palo Alto and Cupertino seem to be the two holding up the best in terms of transaction and price. Saratoga is doing quite ok as well, for the LG-Saratoga Union high school district. There is a big difference between parts of Los Gatos that fall in the LG-Sa school district and the part with Campbell/San Jose. I went to a couple of open houses with better school districts, no shortage of eager parents.

I suspect that up the peninsula, Hillsborough, Marin may be seeing the same thing. It seems that RE these days all boils down to school districts.

Randy,

get hard during the correction and slow, jerky, sticky

Sounds funny.

You don't seem to be much of a bubblehead at all. Why do you believe real estate will be sticky given the enormous runnup with time-bomb loans and an already all-time-high inventory? Remember, sticky can only happen when sellers take their houses off the market because they can't get their price....when people don't have that opportunity, they must sell or foreclose.

allah,

I'd say it depends on the neighborhood. Maybe there are more smart bubblesitters than we realize, or just flat out more wealthy people to go around, for a few select spots in the Bay Area.

I think we discussed this a while back with Fewlish, SP. I still maintain that for certain desirable pockets of South Bay where annual properties on the market may be less than 1,000 combined, I don't see a 2200sf-on-15000sf home dropping below 1.2 or 1.3M. That price point may have turned out to be a permanent plateau for such homes. Now they are asking for 1.5-1.7M, so still a 20% drop, but not much more than that.

So far, my observation is, school district seems to be the most important support factor for certain neighborhoods.

To me, trees are more important.

I went to a couple of open houses with better school districts, no shortage of eager parents.

When is the deadline to register for school this fall?

Any nice neighborhoods with bad school districts? I really do not care much about school. Safety is far more important.

i have a feeling that good school districts will not hold up in the near future without major local tax hikes. Boomers will prevent this from happening.

All of a sudden I’m not having much difficulty visualizing buyers asking their realtors “Don’t show me ANYTHING that was purchased in 2005″.

Don’t show me anything purchased in 2004.
Don’t show me anything purchased after 2000!

Absolutely. Make that 1985, since housing almost doubled as fallout from the 1987 stock market crash. 1971 would be even better.

Having found the mythical 1985 purchaser, I would draw a line gradient on a graph from the 1985 price where y/x=averaged annual CPI and draw a little X where it intercepts 2006 and make an offer accordingly.

it gets worse!

Randy H Says: I have a thought. Bare with me...

there IS a nudist beach near here, i suppose :oops:

John,

most of these folks buying into the traditional blue-ribbon areas are trade-ups rather than first time buyers (well, we also have stock market lottery winners from time to time, although they are harder to come by these days).

Most people buying 1M+ properties are not first time buyers, and as long as they can unload their condos/THs/beginner homes to true beginners, they just plough in their equity into their next home.

Also, the homes available in these select pockets are quite limited, compared to the number of people who desire to move there, for schools, or prestige, or safety, whatever.

I do think we are entering a phase in history that there will be a wider dividing line between the haves and have nots. Walmart is suffering, Tiffany's, LVMH are having record sales growth. High-end retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch are all doing well. If you try to book an European tour with Tauck, it is not possible to secure a seat unless you do so half a year ahead.

Will this trend reverse? I am not sure if it will within our lifetime, although I dislike it just as much as the next guy.

Also, there is an article in BW earlier about the highest earners of this country have seen their annual earnings grow by 350%+ in the last decade while most people only saw a single-digit increase. Numbers may be slightly off, but you get the picture.

DS,

I stand corrected. I always get "bare" and "bear" wrong. There should be a third spelling of that damned word.

allah,

You don’t seem to be much of a bubblehead at all. Why do you believe real estate will be sticky given the enormous runnup with time-bomb loans and an already all-time-high inventory? Remember, sticky can only happen when sellers take their houses off the market because they can’t get their price….when people don’t have that opportunity, they must sell or foreclose.

Prices are already well into a phase of demonstrated stickiness. I ensure you that there are plenty of recent buyers who are not FBs. I realize that homes are priced on the margin, but homes are not easily direct substitutes for one another either. Differences in neighborhoods, and more importantly the wealth profile who tend to self segregate into those neighborhoods, is a stark intrinsic value discriminator.

Anecdotally, I work with many of the folks who have traded up 1,2,3 times into $2Mish homes, yet they also have well over 50% equity stakes and pay little more than they did on their starter condos years ago. We're talking about owneroccupiers who are paying maybe 12% AGI to PITI. We were paying about 14% before we sold in 2004.

These people will not sell if prices correct by 50% unless forced to by non-financial motives; things like moves for family or better career opportunities elsewhere (which will need to be even that much better to compensate for the hit they'll take on their sale).

This is all moot anyway. RE transactions are sticky almost by definition anyway because of the non-liquid nature of the market and quite substantial transaction frictions. The time-lag to RE transactions alone causes a high degree of marginal pricing stickiness.

And I'm not a bubble-head; and I'm proud of that. I am a rational market observer who has come to the conclusion that most residential real-estate in this area is overpriced and will revert to mean. No faith there at all. Just logical deduction.

JH,

Like I said though, I still cant believe these people are in for more than 70% equity.

I work with a lot of folks who have 70% equity stakes in $2M+ homes. We had 60% in the home we sold in '04, and we are not that special. Lots of folks are smart with their money.

--Also, there is an article in BW earlier about the highest earners of this country have seen their annual earnings grow by 350%+ in the last decade while most people only saw a single-digit increase. Numbers may be slightly off, but you get the picture.--

So if the US’s median house is at 220K, but the salaries are stuck at the level they were 5-10 years ago, how can these folks afford to buy the drastically higher priced homes?

The FT had some of the same data (along with the evidence that US corporations now constitute the largest portion of global output since WWII, and earnings of US corps are growing faster than anytime since 1947; which is astounding when you factor in the size of today's global economy and ferocity of competition. In 1947 lots of our main competitors today were still smoldering.)

The distribution is bimodal. That explains nearly all of your dilemma. There is a secular shift occurring in the structure of asset ownership in the US. It is quite possible to end up in a situation where real-estate is permanently higher than median affordability. Many European countries provide real-world examples of such, because they have permanently bimodal wealth structures.

I don't want this to happen to the US, but that's the answer to the scary fundamental driving some of this (the non-speculative part).

Are they on fixed loans? Why would they want to trade up into these properties with a new huge tax load?

Yes, fixed loans. Often well engineered to amortize aggressively. Why? Because they make that 350% referred to above, so their marginal dollar is worth far less than those stuck on the other side of the divide. That's what salary inflation does in a bimodal model. I know people in corporate finance who have seen their salaries balloon by 50-70% since 2001; and these are middle-managers not execs. The execs make obscene coin.

I know price stickiness pisses people off. I would just like you who insist it's not going to be sticky this time to consider this, please:

Every single RE downturn has exhibited sticky prices in the past. SO, if you're arguing it is "different this time", then you're arguing for a "new paradigm". Yet, you bristle whenever anyone suggests other "new paradigms" which you don't agree with.

So, if your new paradigm whereby now RE is no longer sticky holds, then you have to either

a) prove it with consistent theory, or
b) disprove alternative paradigms you don't like instead of just labeling them "new paradigms" and dismissing them.

Consistency is a bitch.

JH,

LOL, you're talking about my wife, btw. Regardless, I'll let your statements stand on their own. Invest in a public company with weak corporate finance, accounting and control at your own peril.

Is OO the same old owneroccupier ?

News,

I agree that we are coming to the end of a tremendous corporate earnings growth cycle, in fact the strongest in 50 years. We are due for a recessionary period.

The question is whether rising US corporate dominance -- which is tremendous, I'll dump some data I read this week below -- was just a strong cycle or represents a secular trend that will last for decades. I can find reason to justify both outcomes, depending upon how "macro" I look at things.

--

2001: US corps represented 7% of global output
2005: 12.2%. many times higher than any other single country, and growing at a rate an order of magnitude faster than any other country, including the Asian Tigers.

Fastest rate since the post war rebuilding boom starting in 1947.

2001: profits were $714.5bn
2005: $1,595.4bn; 123% increase

Largest growth in the US manufacturing sector, enough to offset the weakness in technology earnings and US auto manufacturers.

Top 15% US workers saw real wages grow by over 350%
Lower 85% saw their wage share of GDP decline from 58.6% to 56.2%, despite the fact real labor costs rose only 0.3%.

The wage differential is even more disgusting when you consider that the real cost of financing for corporations dropped from 5.6% to 4.1%, meaning that corporate costs are flat to slightly falling, while profits are exploding, yet workers are being paid less (unless you're in the top 15%).

Sources: FT, Global Insight, US official economic data, and UN economic commission data.

Randy,

I also cast my vote to "It's different this time". No one has a firm handle on what will be the effect of toxic loans. It's the wild card.

Has anyone noticed how quickly things seem to have changed since the stock market melt down began ? Even the NAR and DL seem visibly scared. HB stocks have been hammered even more. Every news is bad news.

The stickiness is not completely independent of sentiment and psychology. If the sentiments change drastically, stickiness would be under pressure.

Speaking of accounting firms, I can't help but be amused at Ernst & Young's retraction of their report on the size of China's nonperforming loans. "We hope this won't affect our business in China", says the spokesperson, as she touts the official $164 billion figure as correct. "We don't know how that $911 billion figure slipped passed our review process."

Yeah... can't imagine how that happened. I know who's numbers I'm not going to be trusting anytime soon.

Great thread HARM! Nothing to contribute, but enjoyed it all.

JH,

I can’t get my mind around this. I think of things as P&L. How much money is made, and how much it cost to make it. I find it fascinating how complicated this has become.

With all due respect, if you don't know the why and how of these things then you might consider tempering your animosity towards those working in that field. Cost accounting is not financial accounting, despite your protestations to the contrary. Or would you prefer that everyone who doesn't understand engineering simply lump it all together and dismiss those who study their entire lives to excel in their given specialty with an equal "perception of efficacy"?

Yeah, oo is me.

I am starting to think that this country needs a fundamental shift of wealth distribution, or something crazy like this may actually stick for many years to come. If we go down this path without turning back, this may mark the beginning of new serfdom for the mass.

Let me explain why. My wife and I went to her class reunion last week. We are obviously not in the most profitable industry although we do ok, but there are quite a few people in her class, in their mid-30s, earning seven figures, yes seven, including bonus, before tax of course, doing investment banking and hedge funds. There are folks we know for a long time that did well, there are also folks that we haven't kept in touch who did well. All of them live in CA (LA and SF) and NYC. And of course these people own their homes outright, since they are already in a tax bracket that mortgage deduction doesn't matter any more.

It seems that we are in a very perculiar state of economy. There are a bunch of top earners, and increasing number of them (although a very small percent of the total US population) earning insane compensation packages, while the mass earn less and less, adjusted for inflation. Since these jobs tend to concentrate in certain areas, and everyone wants to live in certain enclaves, and houses are priced by the marginal inventory, it is very likely that we may even see APPRECIATION for a bunch of middle upper class properties while the general housing sector suffers. It doesn't take a lot of them to keep the housing price of certain enclaves permanently high, and over the last few years we seem to have a lot of these ultra-high earners manufactured by the Wall Street.

It is the polarized income distribution, aka, the disappearing middle class of America that is causing this very odd housing situation. Housing is simply a symptom.

JH,

Those numbers are GDP deflated, not nominal. Thus the word real.

JH, The dollar devaluation is going to be steep. I hope that in the effort to correct trade deficits, the spillover into the US economy won't leave the public in soup lines.

OO aka Owneroccupier,

Welcome back. You still long on Gold ?

Yeah, still long, haven't sold a single ounce :-)

What Ben is doing is managing a "soft landing" for USD, you can't just let it slide outright, or the slide will become disastrous. I believe he will already pause in June. Gold will take off once the tightening is over.

news,

I think the difference between growth in real profits versus real stock market returns represents a reversion to more supportable valuations. Equities had remained stubbornly overvalued and would not be expected to grow in line with profits growth.

In fact, I think this explains the failure of value-style investing and the rise of all those annoying quant-style hedge funds in the past half decade. It's easier to arbitrage technicals than fundamentals during such a "correction".

news,

it depends on whether the central banks are really ready to tighten. I believe all central banks are unanimously concerned about employment first, although none of them come out to say it. That's why I expect this hedge fund party to go on much longer than we expect, I don't mean they won't end, it will just end much later. In the meantime, everyone suffers with stagflation and those who are closest to where the CBs sprinkle money will continue to enjoy outrageous compensation.

OO,

I am starting to have my doubts about BB. He might turn out to be a real man. There are advantages and disadvantages of both strong and not-so-strong USD. He is posturing as if he wants to save the USD. He might actually mean it.

ToBA,

well, BB is literally painting himself into a corner. Now he has essentially built up an expecation of 50bps by June 29. Well, if he only raises 25bps, everything will already shoot up. If he pauses, this take-off effect will be even more obvious.

A lifetime scholar doesn't switch position in the last minute. If you are trained to tackle a particular problem in your life, and you have shown multiple traits of favoring a certain solution, you are not likely to venture into the opposite of what you are preaching. He has talked the talk, now by end of June he will have to walk the walk.

JH,

essentially all Wall street jobs, M&A, IPO, trading, hedge funds, pushing USD around so to speak. The more USD they push around, the more USD they make and the more USD they get to push around.

15 years ago, people in the same position made far less. A director or managing director at a major IB made *only* 300-800K. Nowadays, they are making record salary plus bonus, in the neighborhood of close to 2M.

Wall Street has been around for a long time, no sign of rebellion in the masses.

JH,

I'm not a financial accountant, but have studied quite a bit of it in order to understand GAAP statements. My wife was a financial accountant for many years.

Financial accounting is a means by which everyone is supposed to be using the same measure. Apples to apples. Cost accounting is economic in nature. Financial accounting is comparative in nature. Cost accounting depends upon the intent of the organization using it. Some operations are best accounted with cost allocation, some with activity-based-costing, some with other types of methods. None of those methods can be compared to one another. If you tell me your department is adding positive contribution using one method, and another dept. says the same using another, yet the company is losing money because of improper allocation of fixed costs, for example, then how do we resolve this?

We force everyone to use the same cost accounting method, of course, as dictated by corporate finance, to make it all apples-to-apples. But that's all cost-accounting.

Now try to compare companies, in different industries of different sizes to one another. How do I know if a mining operation is being managed any better than a software company? They will necessarily cost-account in wildly different ways.

The normalization of all that into a universal scoreboard is Financial Accounting.

It is necessarily complicated, and there are raging theoretical debates about its form and direction. The IASB (mainly Europe) argues "market value" means one thing while the FASB argues it means something else. If they can't agree then investors cannot be expected to make rational investment decisions even assuming they get all their accounting perfect.

You mentioned revenue accounting indirectly earlier. This area alone has spawned enormous amounts of evolution in accounting due to the rapidly changing meaning of a "customer", "sale" and "payment". When is a sale a sale? When you get the money? What if their is a contractual promise to the customer for future performance which could cause a related charge-back? What portion is revenue when? Unless someone puts forth a set of uniform rules and requires that everyone reconcile to them, the very word revenue is meaningless.

This stuff is extremely complicated, and without it there would be no basis for any type of financial equity markets at all.

Financial accounting dates to 1494, predating cost-accounting by many centuries. Cost accounting is a modern invention of economic optimization, dating back to the early 20th century and the need to manage efficiently manage large, complex industrial operations.

JH,

Revenue accounting is incredibly complicated. Your one logical rule you produced from the chargeback scenario is but one of thousands upon thousands of issues that occur in the real world. And that's just revenue. What about depreciation, or investments, or expenses. How about when these should all be timed? You can't just let everyone do it on a cash-basis, or they'll just delay collections or accelerate expenses whenever they want to change a number.

Start making rules for all of those and you have the FAS.

I get demoralized when my mechanic starts spewing thisandthat about my car engine which I don't understand at all due to its insane complexity. That doesn't make his efforts unworthy of my respect, even if some mechanics use this to lie to people like me and steal our money.