Real Estate News
by Peter Giardini
| September 29, 2009
For many real estate investors, these past several months have brought a welcome sigh of relief as homeowners have come into the market in truly satisfying numbers. In many parts of the country the steady downward slide in prices has tapered off and we have been seeing what may be the bottom in terms of further price declines… or NOT!
Are Some Hyping Up the Real Estate Market Too Soon?
The numbers throughout the Summer have been promoted with great fanfare… the Schiller-Case Index and National Board of Realtors proclaiming that prices may have bottomed out and the worst is over. Great news if you can believe it!
While I am delighted that prices have stabilized and even increased in some markets and that home sales over these past several months have been solid and even matching sales volumes from 2005…I have been troubled and what I haven’t been able to put my finger on is this…
With all of the homes going into foreclosure, when will this inventory start to pull this “current” housing recovery down? This Bloomberg article is not good news… and suggests that we have a long way to go before all of the current and projected foreclosed inventory can be absorbed.
So the million dollar question is this… How long can lenders continue to hold their REO inventory?
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Commercial Real Estate
by Tom Koziol
| September 18, 2009
This isn’t a global warming post in any sense of the phrase. Unless, of course, it is your bank account that is melting away faster than you care for it to melt away. This post is a kinda-sorta extension of last week’s post in which I said a new wave of foreclosures is in the immediate future.
My statement was based on the commercial real estate market and lo and behold the very next Monday, Corus Bancshares Inc. was seized by the Feds. As it turns out, CBI financed a 377 unit condo called The Montage in downtown Reno. Several years ago the latest craze to hit this city was to take shuttered casinos – yes, casinos go belly up – and convert them into condo complexes.
This particular complex had units priced from $150,000 to more than $1 million. This was during the high flying years. Today these same units won’t fetch $10,000 no matter where they are located in the complex.
My youngest son was in the market at about that time for a dwelling. He liked the idea this complex was only two blocks from his job and he could walk to work even in the dead of winter, and not freeze before he got there. I went along to see what was worth $1 million.
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Joshua Dorkin
Charles Feldman
Ted Karsch.
A Quiz You Can’t Fail: How Will You Make Money in Real Estate
by Tom Koziol | October 23, 2009As everyone knows, the real estate market is in the tank – at least that is the overall perception. On the other hand, we all have heard that there are people who are still making money in real estate. At least they say they are.
If it is true that people are making money, here is a quiz that should be a no brainer. By the way, this quiz won’t be graded. Not by me at least. You may decide to give yourself a grade just for grins.
The Setting
Lets say you live in a housing market that has been described by a national real estate forecast service as the country’s “weakest housing market.” It is projected to have the biggest decline in value in the next 12 months among all housing markets in the nation with a 12 percent median price dip for both new and existing single-family homes.
In making its determination, the forecast service looked at 260 metro areas using more than 50 variables, including housing supply, population trends, unemployment and inflation. And, speaking of unemployment, your area has just seen a full one percent spike upward.