BloodhoundBlog

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Month: November 2009 (page 4 of 4)

November 6, 2009

Homebound hounds: You’re going to have break those chains on your own this year in San Diego

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think it should be obvious by our lack of self-promotion, but we ended up not putting anything together for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in San Diego. I can’t speak for Brian, but I’ve been wall-to-wall with work for months, and I haven’t had time for anything else.

I’ll go through the PayPal records tonight to make sure everyone’s money is refunded.

Meanwhile: If you see any NAR grand poobahs, be sure to kick ’em in the shins for shifting all your November move-ups into December. Christmas may be good, Thanksgiving not so much…

November 5, 2009

Congress extends and expands the home-buyer’s tax credit

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Washington Post:

Under the housing program, people seeking to own a home for the first time in three years would receive an $8,000 tax credit if they sign a contract by April 30 and close on it by June 30. Current homeowners who are buying a new primary residence would be eligible for a $6,500 tax credit starting Dec. 1 if they owned their home for five consecutive years in the previous eight.

The timing is more lenient for military families who have been deployed overseas for 90 days or more in 2008 or 2009. They would have until April 30, 2011 to sign a contract.

But the measure limits the purchase price of the home to $800,000. It also imposes income caps so that people who make more than $125,000 annually and couples who make more than $225,000 would not be eligible for a refund. Anyone who collects the tax credit but sells their home within three years of buying it must return the refund.

The program is estimated to cost $10.8 billion.

The passage of the tax credit provision was a huge win for the real estate industry, which has been lobbying aggressively to extend and expand the program. They say the tax credit has helped boost sales and clear out a glut of lower-priced homes, especially foreclosures, and that ending it would be a blow to the housing market’s recovery.

But critics of the program, including some economists, say the program is far too expensive. They say that most people who used it would have bought homes anyway. They attribute the uptick in home sales in recent months more to low prices and record low interest rates.

Questions for the lenders: The tax credit for move-ups doesn’t commence until 12/01/09. What about first-timers? Can they be under contract now, or do they need to wait until after the end of the month.

More: Do I read this right? Can you “move up” after having rented for the last three years?

I hate this, of course. The real estate market can’t shake out if we won’t let it. But as listers of higher-end homes… Thus does the Read more

November 5, 2009

FannieRents: “Taxpayers are now going to own all these houses Fannie Mae should have unloaded. It’s going to cost a fortune.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Yahoo News:

Can’t pay the mortgage? You still might be able to stay in your home. Government-controlled mortgage company Fannie Mae is going to give borrowers on the verge of foreclosure the option of renting their homes for a year.

The change announced Thursday could give a temporary break to thousands of homeowners, but critics question whether it will only add to the mushrooming losses at the company, which has received billions in taxpayer money.

The new “Deed for Lease” program will allow homeowners to transfer title to Fannie Mae and sign a one-year lease, with potential month-to-month extensions after that. It also helps save money because the lender does not need to complete the often lengthy and time-consuming foreclosure process.

The program helps “eliminate some of the uncertainty of foreclosure, keeps families and tenants in their homes during a transitional period, and helps to stabilize neighborhoods and communities,” Jay Ryan, a Fannie Mae vice president, said in a statement.

It also does less harm to the borrower’s credit record.

“It shows that you put your best effort to work out a solution,” said Gabe Del Rio, director of homeownership at Community HousingWorks of San Diego.

However, Mike Himes, director of homeownership services at NeighborWorks Sacramento, said the industry should push harder to modify loans at lower monthly payments. “The preferred option is allowing people to retain ownership,” he said.

Fannie Mae executives said the rental program is designed to help delinquent homeowners who don’t qualify for a loan modification, but still want to stay in their homes.

To qualify, homeowners have to live in the home as the primary residence and prove that they can afford the market rent, which will be established by the management company running the program. Rents are based on current market rates.

The plan is expected to be particularly attractive in places like Phoenix or Orange County, Calif., where homeowners are stuck paying large mortgage bills on properties that are now worth far less than they originally paid. At the same time, rents have been falling in those areas and homeowners may find they are paying far less to live in their home.

In Orange County, Read more

November 4, 2009

What could be more important than television?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had a dental dilemma yesterday, and it’s left me less than useful. I’m working — I wrote a contract earlier this evening — but I’m housebound for now. It gives me time to post, for a change, and this is an important topic that I’ve wanted to take on for quite some time.

The issue?

Television.

I almost never make time for it, and then not regularly, but there are exceptions in my life (facilitated by on-line and on-demand re-runs).

Thus:

1. Glee. Incomparable harmonies. Preciously POMO, but still deliciously rude. Corollary: Baseball sucks. Cut it out.

2. Madmen. Will Donald Draper defenestrate this Sunday?

3. South Park. I have concluded that Leopold Stotch (“Butters”) is the glue that holds the show together.

I would like to have something of moment to say about Entourage, which we always enjoy when we see it, but I’m too cheap to pay for HBO.

November 4, 2009

Vook dead yet? Doesn’t matter. If you want to sell blades, first you have to find stubble that people are willing to pay to have shaved.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This was in my email this morning, spam from LinkedIn.com:

Joel Burslem is no longer Director of Product Development at Vook

Means what, I don’t know. Deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no huge surging mass of sub-literates demanding even easier-reading access to the half-shouted profundities of Gary Vaynerchuk. Love him or hate him, the guys lives and dies in video. He cannot be caged by a page, no matter how stylish or expensive or electronic that page might be. The book is a dead letter, so how could the Vook not be an even-deader letter? You cannot even pretend to believe otherwise unless you are in the pay of Brad Inman.

But: None of that matters. The Vook is instructive because it teaches us a host of interesting lessons about how to fail in business. Big names. Big funding. Design budget. Attractive product that works. Fancy offices filled with bigfoot corporate types. Even Aeron chairs, I’ll bet. What could go wrong?

Only this: There is no market for the product.

Remember that “find a need and fulfill it” bit from Business 101?

Can you name even one person who has confided to you, “You know, I’d probably read more if books were more like television?”

“I’d sure like to read more books, but the books I want to read are interrupted at intervals by bad actors enacting bad scripts.”

“What I want from books requires a sub-woofer!”

That’s a disaster from day one, and I have been ridiculing the Vook since first I heard about it. But even now, I can see an actual use for this technology: How-To books: How to build a rocking chair in 24 easy steps or The Kama Sutra for Klutzes. Those could sell, because they answer a need that can be served by both text and video. Even then, though, they’d be better as web sites — easier to control, easier to revise, etc.

But let’s go back to the Vook’s original marketing problem and try to solve it in a better way.

Brad Inman is a choke-point dinosaur. His goal was to come up with a “blade” dispenser — a relatively cheap razor Read more

November 4, 2009

Voters discover a cure for Obamania?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I actually feel kind of bad for the should-have-known-better folks who voted for Obama. It was obvious to me last fall that he was a false-flag candidate, a stone liberal masquerading as a centrist. And I understand that, for true stone liberals, he’s actually been somewhat of a disappointment. But for people who can do math, their misplaced faith in Obama has to sting twice, once for having been so dreadfully wrong, and once again because snarky assholes like me just won’t let it slide.

But here’s the good news, from my point of view: Last night’s results may have the immediate impact of putting the brakes on all this tax-and-spend stupidity. The larger stupidities will endure, of course, but we just might have gotten ourselves shut of the home-buyer’s tax-credit last night. Surely this is an event worth celebrating.

This is Instanpundit.com’s Glenn Reynolds in today’s New York Post:

But [Obama] was right the first time about not being ready for the Oval Office. As president, he seems confused and a bit distant on the issues, leaving the details to congressional Democrats and an ever-growing number of “czars” while he golfs and launches attacks at Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

With the economy tanking (unemployment is much worse after Obama’s deficit-swelling stimulus than Obama’s advisers predicted it would be with no stimulus at all), with the promised post-partisanship dissolving into witch-hunts against hostile media and the promised post-racial America devolving into the awkwardly staged “beer summit,” with the “necessary war” in Afghanistan the subject of endless dithering and the promised “smart diplomacy” materializing as a series of awkward missteps by Hillary Clinton, the froth has become a lot less frothy.

Republicans, who were prepared to give Obama the benefit of the doubt a year ago, now can’t stand him. Independents who voted for him are deserting in droves. And Democrats don’t seem that happy either.

The good news for Obama is that he doesn’t have to run for re-election for three more years, so he still has a chance to get his feet under him. But for Congress members facing elections in a year — including Read more

November 2, 2009

CIT + FED = BK

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

A few months back, as part of a Tin Foil Hat Production, I mentioned CIT’s desperate need for funds and the Fed’s decision not to bail them out. Why is this noteworthy? After all, I don’t believe the Fed should bail anybody out.  I cheer wildly to see Ford record surprising profits while competing against the Frankenstein creation that is GM, just as I quietly root for GM’s justified demise.  But here we are, with CIT declaring bankruptcy and the hypocrisy is just too much.   Apparently, a company focused on financing small business (70% of the entire factoring business!) is not worth a bail out from the administration that claims to look for ways to spur Small Business.  Color me cynical, but I think CIT’s main problem was a lack of Goldman-Sach’s alumni on its board…

November 1, 2009

“The net effect of government intrusions in the real estate market is to create a standing wave of foreclosures amid steadily-declining home values”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This from my Arizona Republic real estate column:

As I write this, the entire real estate industry is on tenterhooks, waiting to see if the $8,000 first-time home-buyers tax credit is going to be extended.

It’s not really a tax credit, it’s a taxpayer-funded subsidy, a “gift” extracted by force from everyone who does not buy a house under the program. The money taken from taxpayers — either now or later by deficit spending — is money that cannot be spent or invested elsewhere.

And it’s not as though this were a zero-sum game. The actual marginal sales — the home sales that would not have happened without the subsidy — may have cost taxpayers from $40,000 to $75,000 each. And as huge as those numbers are, they ignore the interest cost of the borrowed money, the opportunity costs of mal-investment and the compound interest value of those opportunity costs.

Government action cannot create wealth. At best, it moves wealth around. At worst, government destroys wealth by taking it away from the very people who have new ideas and new technologies to invest in.

But as bad as this tax credit is, it’s only temporary. Someday it will end. The mortgage interest tax deduction — which almost no home-owners actually get — is forever. The government dominance of the secondary mortgage market — FannieMae, FreddieMac, GinnieMae, etc. — is forever.

And here’s the real kick in the head, given all we’ve been through in the real estate market over the last eight years: The National Association of Realtors reports that 59% of all new home loans this year were underwritten by the Federal Housing Authority, the Veterans Administration or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

What this means is that a huge number of homes will have been sold this year with down-payments ranging from 3.5% to -5%. Six out of ten new mortgages are essentially nothing-down loans.

The U.S. government wants to buy your vote by making home-ownership easy. But the net effect of government intrusions in the real estate market is to create a standing wave of foreclosures amid steadily-declining home values.

 
Steal this book: I’ve written over 200 Read more

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