patrick.net

AAPL is currently trading at $131.84

I just met another Appler that called in sick.

This is really going to help Fortress Cupertino continue to soar. :(

See definition of "Mental Accounting" from the Housing Bubble Glossary. And, no, your parents will probably not listen to you or pay any attention to articles you send them that conflict with whatever they "know" their house is "worth", until reality becomes impossible for them to deny. Just congratulate them on their fine business acumen and change the subject.

My mentally-ill father, dying of dementia, had most of the family fortune tied up in telecom stocks (he had inherited a big block of ATT prior to divestiture and never sold any of the daughter stocks). He refused after years of badgering by my sister and me to permit any of it to be sold - the family fortune lost over $800K which simply evaporated after the dot-com bust.

My 2 cents: Send in any links you find, but stop short of giving direct advice.

I do the same things with my friends. The Indian community in the bay area has always been in favor buying houses (house prices never go down!) and the recent downturn has not changed the opinion even a bit. Now, most people go around saying "prices have dropped so it is a good time to buy".

If I tell them not to buy and the prices go up next year, they are going to be bitter and angry that I prevented them from getting wealthy. If they buy and the prices go down, they would still be mad at me for predicting it as if my prediction had something to do with it.

So, to any of my friends interested in buying/selling houses, I send all links I find relevant *without any specific suggestions of my own*. I report, they decide :)

Send it to them. And back it up with a personal touch. At the very worst they will call you a naysayer. At the very best, when it is all said and done, they will continue to see prices drop and be glad you convinced them to get out when they did.

What they might think about their house and your intentions are completely irrelevant to the market.

Fact: Rental rates are significantly below monthly mortgages.
Fact: Wages are essentially flat to negative relative to inflation.
Fact: Personal savings are at an all time low and access to credit is becoming more difficult.
Result: There are few buyers entering the market.

Fact: New home inventory is at almost record levels.
Fact: The price of new homes continue to fall.
Fact: Sale prices of new homes tend to be artificially inflated due to incentives.
Result: Old houses which are not in a premium location or condition will not beat a new house and will suffer even greater depreciation.

Fact: The market fundamentals simply do not support anything but a continued decline in prices.

Do your best to suppress the emotional aspects. We are potentially talking about a lot of money here if they decide to hang on till the bitter end. Focus on what they will gain from having this money in the future versus what they'll lose in the present moment. Their gain will be tax free and is probably the last major infusion of cash they will have for retirement.

And the final reason you should send it: Even if they ignore everything and take a total bath, at least you can take comfort in the fact that you tried, which is much better than knowing and doing nothing.

But if they do insist on buying, there's a mortgage broker they should use:

http://www.burbed.com/2007/07/05/zak-khan-altaf-shaikh-car-salesman-mortgage-broker-and-more/

Any local gang experts?

There seems to be a tiff going on in this thread on my site:

http://www.burbed.com/2007/05/29/mountain-view-surenos-gang-uses-blue/#comment-8757

Should I delete it?

Unfortunately, there is very little you can do. Generally, other people are stubborn and unwilling to admit mistaken perceptions.

You can "try" by (1) highlighting how much they would pocket even at a lower price and (2) that even if they "lose a little" by pricing house down, they gain by being able to move on with their life and get out of limbo. The main thing is to try to shift their mental accounting towards things that they presumably value more than getting top dollar for their house.

Try a slightly different angle on each parent based on what appeals to them: financial security for your mom, ability to move on for your dad. No guarantee that it would work though.

Here is a quick query I did on Zillow, for an area known as Garden Gate, in Cupertino. The neighborhood is extremely popular with a certain class of people who seem to favor ostentatious McMansions with brazilian cherry and doric columns, and whose school-district mania is elevated to the level of a fetish. Many of the old farm-worker dwellings were torn down to build these ridiculous caricatures of stately homes.

The list below shows the difference between actual "Recently Sold" prices and the "Zestimate". Every one of these has sold for significant amounts below the zestimate (except one which curiously is _exactly_ at zestimate).

10599 N Stelling Rd...... -150K
20987 Greenleaf Dr...... -113K
21031 Hazelbrook Dr.... -81K
10450 Flora Vista Ave... -27K
10242 N Stelling Rd...... -282K
20883 Elenda Dr........... -113K
21011 Greenleaf Dr....... -41K
10411 Glencoe Dr......... -82K
20860 Fargo Dr............. -97K
20861 Fargo Dr............. -34K
20860 Dunbar Dr........... -112K
20984 Alves Dr............. -34K
20916 Alves Dr............. -94K
21065 Freedom Dr........ -59K
21025 Lauretta Dr......... -63K
10584 Flora Vista Ave.... 0

Clearly, if Zillow's Zestimate algorithm works as designed, this should start to depress Zestimates fairly drastically going forward. If you are adventurous enough to buy in this market, please at least factor this into your pricing. And yet...

...houses that are _currently_ on the market in this area are priced significantly _above_ their own Zestimate. Go figure.

Disclaimer: The data is based on what I saw on Zillow, and I cannot guarantee its accuracy. Since the Zestimate changes based on new data, their algorithm may have adjusted zestimates down by the time you check, although I don't expect this will not happen overnight.

SP

And oh, by the way, Garden Gate is within 2 miles of Apple's Cupertino campus, as well as at the interesection of freeways going to Mountain View (Google), San Jose (Ebay) and Palo Alto (you know what).

In other words, as prime as it gets from the dual-income Chindian lemmings' perspective.

SP

"Chindian lemming"

That will be my favorite new phrase.

astrid Says:
“Chindian lemming”
That will be my favorite new phrase.

Glad to be of service. I originally had written "Chindian desperadinks", but figured that didn't quite fit the bill since these are usually DI2K's, not DINK's.

SP

Thanks to whomever put the picture at the top of the post (Harm?)

I mentioned this article to my mom today and she said to send it over. Progress? I think my dad is actually the stubborn one. It's the car salesman in him, he's always convinced he can make the sale.

As an Indian, the phrase "Chindian lemming" makes me chuckle (as well as a little bit sad.)

It pays to remember, though, that Chindians are no stupider than the rest. It is just that (a) there are more DINKs in there who are Chindians and (b) being foreigners, they have no historical perspective of how much houses used to cost.

The ridiculous obsession with school districts don't help either.

I don't know about Indians, but Mainland Chinese are now paying something like 40X annual wage for 800 sq. ft Shanghai apartments. By that measure, BA is absurdly cheap.

sriramgopalan said:
As an Indian ... that Chindians are no stupider than the rest.

Didn't mean to imply stupidity - just that based on what I see in my limited circle, they seem to be extremely focused on school-district and prone to a high degree of peer-pressure when it comes to houses.

An extreme case is an indian couple I know who stopped attending parties because they were too embarrassed to host parties back at their apartment. They only got back to socializing after they bought a McMansion that they too could show off.

SP

SP, no offense taken.

There are different kinds of stupidities and "house stupidity" is one of them. Most Chindians I know are house stupid.

@SQT,

You're welcome :-).

Regarding : Chindian lemmings and Garden Gate area of Cupertino

Another nice phrase, SP.

I also find it very funny that Cupertino has "areas". It's such a small town. San Jose or San Francisco having areas/districts/whatever is fine. But Cupertino ?

This is not against what SP wrote, people actually refer them as such. Not surprisingly, these areas take their name from the neighborhood schools. Garden Gate, Monta Vista etc. Do you need any more proof of school fetish ?

Not much dislodges "mental accounting", thus the concept itself. Mental accounting is the primary reason for down price-stickiness in residential real estate. Real estate is already sticky enough being a very imperfect market with high transaction costs and lots of imperfect information. But add to that the sellers' psychology and it's no wonder that down price markets become terrible, fragmented messes.

The standard general techniques for dealing with mental accounting go something like this:

Given: People perceive losses as 2x worse than equivalent gains. Therefore they will engage in "irrational" behaviors that they perceive as removing losses, even if at too much real cost. (People overbuy insurance, for example).

Therefore: If you can break up big losses into a series of small losses, people will perceive less total loss, even if the aggregate is exactly the same (6 easy payments of $29.99).

If possible: Turn perceived losses into perceived gains. (It's not that you're spending money for life insurance, it's that you're ensuring the safety of your family).

Create scarcity: Act now or else you'll miss your opportunity. This might be hard, but just put the buy now or be priced out argument in reverse -- but be careful not to appeal to fear, which won't work for sellers like it does for buyers. Instead put it more like the window of opportunity to reap top-of-the-market prices is closing.

Link the action to more than 2X more gains than will be "lost". Talk in terms of all those gains, minimizing the loss. Appeal to the "price" of qualitative factors (don't really price it, just talk in touchy feely terms of "priceless" and "invaluable").

All this said, it probably won't work. Sellers have an almost insurmountable nominal-price-tag effect working to create the illusion of losses. They've already booked the gains in their head from a price a year or two ago a neighbor got. Now they simply won't take anything much below that price, not for no reason not for nobody. It just hurts too much. Remember, they "feel" a $100K price reduction like it costs them over $200K, even if the original price was fanciful.

Oh yea, that's because of "anchoring". It doesn't matter how much bullshit the original asking price is, it creates a very powerful anchor. And sellers always get to set the anchor, and they usually anchor high. All buyers can do is counter with an equally offset mythically low anchor. Ask me how well that works.

--

And to this point, here in Marin tons of stuff we've been anxiously waiting out -- much of it approaching 100+ DOM, much of that really close to a year on market with a couple relists -- is being simply pulled. The agents have all sung the same recital: "we think you're price is a bit low, but not too low to at least consider and negotiate from, but the sellers just don't believe it. They think something is going on and they'll get their price in 6 months or so. And they will just live there another couple years until they do, if necessary".

Mental accounting sucks.

SQT: This is a no-win situation. All it takes is for one neighbor to sell later at a higher price, and your parents will forever think that you cost them tens of thousands of dollars. They need to draw their own conclusions. You should not attempt to be their source of facts; you should be asking specific questions that they should ask their realtor. Otherwise your best case is that they lower the price thanks to your advice, but then eternally believe that the house sold quickly just because it was undervalued.

Suggest to your parents that they go to some open houses of similar homes. Tell them to look at the staging, the updating and so forth. Heck, they might even ask their realtor to just take them on a fact-finding tour. Then they can look at the DOM of the comps. They can do a square footage cost analysis, then factor in the updating and adjustments.

When one becomes overly identified with the goal of home ownership and ones logical, intelligent reasoning runs into the owner(s) subjective yet collective emotionality there is nothing to be done, for now.

Paraphrasing from Hesse’s Siddhartha: I can think, I can wait, I can rent

StuckInBA Says:
Regarding : Garden Gate area of Cupertino - I also find it very funny that Cupertino has “areas”.

You're right, the 'areas' generally map to schools. The Miller-Lynbrook area, Garden Gate area and the 'Bubb Area' (aka Lincoln-Kennedy-MontaVista), and so on.

That said, there were two reasons I restricted my post to that area - one is that the homes values are generally comparable and in the same 'band'. Secondly, the sheer number of 'upside-down' sales (relative to Zestimates) precludes me from covering all of the Fortress in one post.

If you run the same query in Zillow, you will find the same pattern across the board. Looks like nearly _every_ recent sale in the last three months has been below Zestimates. I remember last year nearly every sale was above the Zestimate. It sounds like a very telling indicator to me.

SP

Brand

You're right, it is a no win. The worst part though, is if they don't sell soon I think bankruptcy or foreclosure is a fairly sure bet.

SQT,

A few threads ago astrid (I think) had asked a similar question. The consensus was similar. Giving advice to sell (or to not buy) will not help your relations no matter what - whether you are right or wrong. In your case, the situation is trickier. So forwarding an article seems like a good start.

Nestle's Brabeck says food prices set for 'long-lasting' inflation.

http://tinyurl.com/3ac2mp

Thank God, we don't consider "food" a part of "core" needs. These Europeans need to learn a thing or two from us. They still live in a financial stone age - like increasing interest rates and such stuff to combat inflation. How backward !

The SF Chronicle has an article about Rex, a company that will buy a "share" of you homes future appreciation (or depreciation). Seems they have added a 5 year "hold" window to prevent "flipper arbitrage" (sorry Randy). The reason I am writing, though, is because it contains this priceless quote from Chris Thornberg, who seems to be getting a bit surly these days.
"Most people are over-invested in their home," said Christopher Thornberg, principal at Beacon Economics in Los Angeles. Selling "an equity stake in your home makes sense to me. Taking money out of your house and putting it in some other type of investment like stocks or bonds basically reduces the overall risk of your portfolio."

Thornberg said he wondered why Rex is starting now "considering that equity will go nowhere but down."

Nothing to worry about though, another expert theorizes they could package this investment as a security to be foisted on the general public, just like what is done with mortgages -- nifty.

Prince Prospero, a Mr. Zest is here to see you in the purple room.

My SoCal sister has been looking at a preconstruction purchase in a new development near Eugene and we discussed it last month - my suggestion being she 'keep her powder dry' as the Cali bust was in progress and still had a ways to go. I did tell her, however, it wouldn't surprise or upset me to learn she'd liked the deal and decided to purchase.

Just spoke with her last night and learned she gave it a pass. The dealbreaker? No direct flights from San Diego. Essentially, I get credit for caring while having no effect whatever on basis of her decision.

Oy geev opp.

The sort of good news on that front is that my friend is no longer planning to move to Palo Alto. The bad news is that she still wants to buy a house on an in-house counsel's salary and WHILE paying $30,000/yr tuition for each of her two kids.

She must be planning a move into BigLaw soon.

My sister-in-law (SIL) is a realtor in MA and told me she sold her house at a picnic on the 4th. I was impressed at first - she said she got full asking in this market.
Well, she didn't really sell it; she has a P&S contingent on the potential buyers selling their home for full asking, because they need every penny in "equity" for the down payment on the upgrade. Meanwhile, SIL has a P&S on another house, contingent on her house selling.
The house she wants is empty and the sellers installed a college dropout friend to "watch" the place while it's unoccupied (!). The P&S has been extended on both ends twice at 45 days each.
The situation reminds me of one of those slapstick action sequences where each character has a gun to another's head. Who'll twitch first?
[At the end of the conversation about "selling" her house, she did ask me when I was going to "stop throwing my money away on rent" and "let her find me a house". Ah jeez!]

talking about messanger. here's a bad one.

i talked my friend out of buying a house in bay area in 2000. i thought it was too expensive then. couple of my friends had bought a house and paid twice the amount for what the sellers bought it for. the house has appreciated over 150-200k.

fast forward : 2006 market : trying to convince another friend to wait another year or two to get better deals, ignores my advice and buys in sunnyvale for close to 1M. now he says his house is appreciated more than 100K.

both cases my calculation leads me to believe they actually didn't make( wouldn't have made) much profit and are paying huge amount of interest and taxes/insurance.

one feels bad he took my advice, other feels good he ignored me.

the only talk i do now a days is to tell people that house prices can go down. never tell when to buy or when not to buy. after all you are not a fool if you have one behind you.

astrid Says:
I don’t know about Indians, but Mainland Chinese are now paying something like 40X annual wage for 800 sq. ft Shanghai apartments. By that measure, BA is absurdly cheap.

An Indian guy at work said he recently bought an _apartment_ in India for more than 300K USD, which makes it sound equally expensive. I have no idea what wages are like over there, but since all this offshoring is supposed to be for lower-wage engineers, it logically follows that wages are lower there than here. So, it looks like housing is a bit out of whack there too.

SP

EBGuy

Two showstoppers for REX in my opinion. I looked into them (for the 3rd time) again about 2 months ago or so.

1. Their ceilings are too low to really help much with Bay Area prices. Seems they're targeting the bottom of the BA market, and the median of the wider Western RE markets. I know they do business in most major states, so they may cover places like the Midwest well at price. But where $1.00mm is *below median* (ie. Marin), their offering doesn't add enough value to justify a structured purchase.

What I toyed with was the notion of buying in a 50% or less ownership, therefore "reverse levering" losses on premiums.

2. The holding period. 3 years would be better. That would have allowed (1) to work. I was imagining buying something close to $2mm, with them taking well over $1mm of that, eating the losses, then buying them out at 3+ years at a discount.

3. What happens if they go kaploohey. In passing I asked my RE attorney what could happen and he basically said "anything". It's really untested how rights would flow in the case they went belly up, and one could end up with some hedge fund holding a residual claim on your title. In the worst case, they could have some kind of callable rights and a financial incentive to try to force foreclosure. It's also a bit likely the courts wouldn't favor you much being they'd look at you like a sophisticated investor for having used the Rex service in the first place, and the legislature wouldn't have an incentive to protect you since you'd be in a tiny minuscule minority of distressed home owners.

Just my 0.02USD nominal.

i talked my friend out of buying a house in bay area in 2000. i thought it was too expensive then.\

This story smells a tad fishy to me. 2000 would have been a fantastically good entry point, as CA prices have roughly tripled since. PITI would have been at or below equivalent monthly rents at that time.

I have no idea what wages are like over there, but since all this offshoring is supposed to be for lower-wage engineers, it logically follows that wages are lower there than here. So, it looks like housing is a bit out of whack there too.

SP,

This WSJ article (login needed) is relevant to your point:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118342455118256110-search.html?KEYWORDS=salary+india&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month

It only means more "Chindian Sheeple" looking for homes in the "Fortress"!!
__________________________

Some in Silicon Valley Begin to Sour on India

A Few Bring Jobs Back As Pay of Top Engineers In Bangalore Skyrockets
By PUI-WING TAM and JACKIE RANGE
July 3, 2007; Page A1

Silicon Valley has helped power India's outsourcing boom by shifting technology jobs to that country. Three months ago, Munjal Shah reversed a bit of that shift.

Mr. Shah, who leads a California start-up called Riya Inc., had opened an office in India's technology capital of Bangalore in 2005, hiring about 20 skilled software developers. The lure was the wage level: just a quarter of what experienced Silicon Valley computer engineers make.

Then Indian salaries soared. Last year, Mr. Shah paid his engineers in India about half of Silicon Valley levels. By early this year, it was 75%. "Taking into account the time difference with India," he says, "we weren't saving any money by being there anymore." In April, Mr. Shah shut down the Bangalore office and offered half of its engineers a chance to move to San Mateo, Calif., with work visas.

Across Silicon Valley, some technology companies, particularly start-up and midsize ones, are beginning to turn away from India for low-cost labor to do sophisticated tech work.

This story smells a tad fishy to me. 2000 would have been a fantastically good entry point, as CA prices have roughly tripled since. PITI would have been at or below equivalent monthly rents at that time.
Uhhh.... HARM. Our fearless leader gave up house hunting in Berkeley in 2000 and eventually took his pine table to Palo Alto. Also, prices have about doubled since that time period. Winter of 1999/2000 was brutal. Normal off season low inventory with hordes of swarming buyers. Things definitely seemed overpriced, especially when the dotcoms crashed in 2000.

i talked my friend out of buying a house in bay area in 2000. i thought it was too expensive then.\

This story smells a tad fishy to me. 2000 would have been a fantastically good entry point, as CA prices have roughly tripled since. PITI would have been at or below equivalent monthly rents at that time.

my friend bought a house for 550k from a seller who had bought it 2 years before selling (1998) for 270K. if that doesn't look expensive, i don't tknow what is. like i said, you are not a fool if another one is behind you. the difficult part is to know if one is behind you. it's very obvious now but wasn't in 2000.

@RandyH
Check out my response on previous thread re: a personal carbon-credit application. Nothing for your startup to worry about, :-) but would like to get your opinion on it.
SP

Regarding prices in 2000....

I think it depends on where you are living. Prices here hadn't gone totally crazy by 2000, though they had gone up. I didn't really start taking notice until about 2003 when it seemed like things had really gotten out of hand. That was about the time the flipper mania had started around here.

I was just astonished to find 3 real comments languishing in moderation, and NO spam comments!

So requiring logins has nearly eliminated spam, but now I do have to watch the moderation queue. I don't even know how those comments got picked for moderation.

Please poke me by email (p@patrick.net) if your comment gets into moderation and I'll hurry to get it posted.

Patrick