Actualización de mercado Bienes Raíces sacramento – Perdición, Melancolía y Adquisición de Vivienda
Este no es un buen artículo que lo lleve a comprar algo. Los vendedores siempre son positivos, lo dice el mejor entrenador de la industria Tommy Hopkins. Hoy soy más un crítico social. Esta tiene que ser la última vez en este mes que he escrito una actualización del mercado de Sacramento desde que comencé a escribirlas. Tal vez primero una breve disculpa: Lo siento. Creo que no quiero solo charlar acerca de las estadísticas de cuánto las casas cayeron de precio en el último año. Lo he estado haciendo desde el 2005, aproximadamente, y está envejeciendo. Lo que lo lleva a ser aun más antiguo es esta gran especialización que tiene Sacramento Bee en historias de cómo todo es un desastre. Uno o dos días atrás, mis ojos de más de cincuenta años se tropezaron con un artículo acerca de cómo las personas mayores de cincuenta años están pasando por un momento difícil en esta economía. Hola, Tierra a Sacramento Bee, si está teniendo un tiempo fácil en esta economía, probablemente es un gerente de Fondos de Protección (o cobertura), o tal vez un congresista amenazando encender un detonador debajo de la calificación de crédito AAA de nuestro país en aras de no violar su promesa a Grover Norquist, aún es otro tipo blanco rico que quiere ser más rico de lo que es. Fueron estos hombres blancos ricos, queriendo ser más ricos de lo que eran, quienes inventaron el comercio de productos derivados y toda clase de trucos para inflar la oferta monetaria, creando una especie de tormenta de demanda de los compradores en los primeros cinco años de la última década. Cuando ellos hicieron (no diré ganaron) dinero, ellos hicieron dinero. Cuando ellos perdieron dinero, nosotros los contribuyentes pagamos sus pérdidas. Si hay una posibilidad de esperanza en este caos, esta en que la verdad de la situación es que cuando antes las casas de tres habitaciones eran de U$400,000, la mayoría de ustedes no podían realmente … [Read More...]
Google+ Comes to Sacramento Real Estate Site (Watch for my Mug on Google)
If you haven't played around on GooglePlus and want to, let me know as I have plenty of invites left. Meantime, I understand that if I link to Google+ a certain way, if you search for "GooglePlus Comes to Sacramento Real Estate", you should find this article with my GooglePlus account avatar in the Google search results. Facebook, eat your heart out! … [Read More...]
Sacramento Real Estate Market Update – Doom, Gloom, and Housing Affordability
This is not a good blog post to get you to buy something. Salesmen are always positive, says top industry trainer Tommy Hopkins. Today I'm more of a social critic. This has to be the latest in the month that I've written a market update for Sacramento since I started writing them. Perhaps a brief apology is in order: I'm sorry. I suppose I don't want to just babble on about the statistics of just how much homes fell in price over the last year. I've been doing that since about 2005, and it's getting old. What helps it get even older is this great specialization that the Sacramento Bee has in stories about how everything is a disaster. A day or two ago, my over fifty eyes caught sight of an article about how people over fifty are having a hard time in this economy. Hello, Earth to the Sacramento Bee, if you're having an easy time in this economy, you're probably a hedge fund manager, or maybe a congressman threatening to light a fuze under our country's AAA credit rating for the sake of not violating your pledge to Grover Norquist, yet another rich white dude who wants to be richer than he is. It was these rich white dudes, wanting to be richer than they were, who invented derivative trading and all sorts of creative shenanigans to inflate the money supply, creating a sort of firestorm of buyer demand in the first five years of the last decade. When they made (I won't say earned) money, they made money. When they lost money, we the taxpayers covered their losses. If there's a silver lining in this mess, it's that the truth of the matter is, back when three bedroom homes in Sacramento were $400,000, most of you couldn't really afford them. In June of this year the average sold price of a home in Sacramento County was $180,474, down 12.8% from June of 2010. The median sale price was at $158,400. According to the US Census (2010), the median annual household income in Sacramento County was $52,502 in 2010, which works out to about … [Read More...]
Sacramento County Real Estate Market Update
Well, the numbers for homes sold in May are in, so it's time to take a look at our local real estate markets, beginning with Sacramento County. To look at unit volume first, it's practically unchanged since last year, at 1761 units sold in May 2010 versus 1757 in May, 2011, a difference of only .2%. However, when we start to see what's happening on the foreclosure front, a different picture emerges. Compared to the same time last year, foreclosures are up significantly, some 15.5%, from 644 last year to 744 this year. Short sales are down slightly, 2.4%, from 421 last year to 411 this year. Meantime, non-distressed sales are down substantially, from 696 homes in May of 2010 to 602 homes in May of 2011. The net result is that the number of distressed properties selling has risen from 60.5% to 65.7%, or just under two thirds of all sales. Interestingly, the Sacramento numbers seem to be an exception to the trend in California. According to RealtyTrac, from May to April the number of foreclosures sold statewide has dropped from 22,488 in May, 2010 to 14,724 in April of 2011. Unfortunately RealtyTrac hasn't yet published May numbers, so there's a little bit of an apples and oranges thing going on here, but it does look like we're an exception to the rule. As you might expect from the breakdown of what's selling, prices are down -- a lot! The average sold price per square foot fell 13.6^from year to year, from $125.55 in May of 2010 to $108.48 in May of 2011. The median price has dropped from $180,000 to $160,000 during this time (remember that this number includes condos, so single family homes are no doubt higher). The average sale price of $207,162 in 2011 has fallen to $177,491 in May of 2011, a 14.3% drop. In terms of inventory, once again short sales throw the numbers off at 9.5 months of inventory. Inventory for both foreclosures and non-distressed sales are low, at 1.1 months and 3.5 months, respectively. Overall inventory is at 3.8 months, … [Read More...]
Sacramento For Sale By Owner (FSBO) Home – Where To Find Them
From a buyer's point of view, having access to more listings is generally a good thing. More listings of course means more choices. When it comes to For Sale By Owner Homes, however, the amount of different homes you'll find by searching for them may not fully justify the trouble, compared to simply paying closer attention to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). Nevertheless, I thought I'd take a look at some resources you might consider. The largest site I've seen dedicated to FSBOs exclusively so far is Owners.com. This site is advertising fairly aggressively on Google adwords, and as a result, they have a decent number of listings. Keep in mind here that by a "decent number of listings", I'm not talking about anything like what you can find on this web site or another web site fed by our Multiple Listing Service (MLS). For example, in a 20 mile radius of the Elite Properties Pan-Galactic Headquarters here in Orangevale, there are 28 homes listed on owners.com, as compared to 10,635 in the MLS. (OK, to be fair, if you factor out commercial listings, business opportunities, and income properties, it's only 10,186). Still, it's clear that the numbers here represent a mere fraction of what's available in the MLS. One would think the local paper might also prove to be a resource, but the largest category of homes listed on the Sacramento Bee are homes fed by the MLS (as are the homes on this site). Hoping to find more FSBO listings, I checked out the classified, but as I write this the classified real estate listings amount to a mere ten homes, or roughly 1/10 of one percent what's in the MLS. Several of these are listed by agents, so not much help here. Searching the Sacramento Bee classifieds somewhat differently by using the phrase "For Sale By Owner" yields three classified ads, for a body and paint shop business, a boat, and a pit bull. Not exactly a windfall there. Probably the best place to search for For Sale By Owner Homes in Sacramento … [Read More...]
Foreclosure Crisis Villains Part I: Loan Servicers
When I talk to homeowners I know about their problems getting a loan modification or when I work on a short sale, a common theme that comes up over and over again is "Why is this process so hard if the bank is going to lose more money on foreclosure than they will on a loan modification or short sale?" Implicit in this question are two assumptions: That there's "the bank", someone who owns the loan and stands to lose if it isn't paid. That "the bank" is controlling whether some kind of modification / sale goes through or whether you go into foreclosure. The reality is much more complex than this. A far more likely scenario is that there are several parties involved here, not just you and the bank. Most likely the people involved in your loan include: The bank or mortgage broker that originated the loan, who may now be irrelevant because they've sold the loan to someone else. A loan servicer, which often is a mortgage bank or a company with a business relationship with one or more mortgage banks. These are the people responsible for collecting your payment, and who will foreclose on you (or not). Any number of intermediate entities through which the loans were aggregated in a pool of mortgage and "securitized", i.e., converted into one form or another of a mortgage backed security that can be sold to investors. The investors who have purchased the mortgage backed security that includes your loan. Who Wins and Who Loses? Remember our original assumption about "the bank"? Well, there isn't one. When you say that "the bank" will lose if they foreclose, what comes closest to the truth is that the investors who hold the mortgage backed security will lose. The problem is this: the servicer stands to gain more and lose less if you go into foreclosure than if your loan is restructured in any way that's going to really help you. Why Servicers Prefer Foreclosure The main source of a servicer's income is a percentage based on the … [Read More...]