The Home Crowd

This was featured on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News a couple of days ago. There’s a non-profit housing developer in San Jose which developed a 17 unit condo property blocks away from San Jose State Univ. aimed at the affordable housing crowd. Problem is, out of those 17 available ‘affordable’ units, only one has been sold in the eight months since ‘for sale’ signs went up. I’m not even sure if that’s counting the amount of time this project has been up for pre-sale.

Wait, what? The ‘affordable’ homes are supposed to be snatched up really quick, right? Well, yeah, in most markets they are, so long as they’re “Affordable”. These condos started out expensive, and have just received a price cut to “not as expensive”.

Two-bedroom condos at Villa Almendra once priced at $535,000 now are offered at $450,000. The units come with new appliances, two-car garages and granite countertops.

(From the San Jose Mercury News)

Now, of course, to qualify for affordable housing in santa clara county, the household (up to four) can’t earn an income of more than $84,900 annually. And with loan incentives, the mortgage payment can be brought down to a little over $2,300 a month. That is of course, before HOA fees, taxes, insurance, etc.

So, ‘Affordable’??? Not even close. However, many would be quick to point out that the San Jose/Silicon Valley area is one of the most expensive markets in the U.S. And right you are, if not THE most expensive metropolitan area in the country. From this I bring in the home cost-per-square-foot factor into the mix. Right now, the average cost-per-square-foot for the average home in this country is somewhere around $130 per square foot. In the major housing markets it has traditionally been more.

(From the Wall Street Journal)

And there it is! The writing on the Wall. San Jose checks in at $437 per square foot for a home, well above the $394 San Francisco and $286 New York,NY per-square-foot figures. Now you’d figure that an ‘affordable’ housing project would be considerably below that $437 magic number.

Well, according to the developer’s latest promotional material (http://www.nhssv.org/files/villa%20almandra.pdf), the average price per-square-foot was originally $412. With no sales, they dropped the price to $390 per-square-foot on average. From what the San Jose Mercury News article said, they’ve apparently dropped the price again. And on top of that, but has offered a free Prius to one of the next 8 buyers.

However, now the developer has opened up the sales to anyone, not just those who qualify into the ‘affordable’ category. So if you’ve got an available $2,300+ a month to live in a duplex/triplex condo, you’re in luck, because anyone who may have considered these properties previously, just stuck with commuting or found something actually affordable.

What should this project have been? A higher-density project instead of 6 separate duplex/triplex condo buildings sharing a double-loaded parking alley. Whose kids are realistically going to play on that 5 foot strip of front yard anyhow?

No word yet if the lone property owner is left holding the bag, covering the entire HOA responsibility for the whole project, paying landscapers for the upkeep.

The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article discussing the practice of “Cash for Keys”, which quite simply, is paying off those living in foreclosed properties to leave, without incident or destruction. Apparently “Foreclosure Rage” is a frequent enough occurrence to cause banks and lenders to send out their associates to foreclosed properties they suspect the residents are still inhabiting and leave a offer of cash to vacate or to call and negotiate a better offer to leave.

How much better?

The owner, a 43-year-old man with two children who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, says he bought the property in 1993 for $140,000. Three years ago, he says he had the house appraised for $440,000 and took out a $207,000 home-equity loan to pay off credit-card bills and buy his wife a new van. His initial payments were an affordable $1,800 a month.

He fell behind, however, after he went through a divorce and his landscaping business faltered, just as his interest rate was rising. The man worked out a payment plan with the bank and borrowed heavily from his father, but, including penalties, his monthly payments rose to $4,000, he says. After two months, he says, he ran out of money, and the bank foreclosed.

He called Mr. Carver after receiving the cash-for-keys note, but was left cold by the bank’s initial $500 offer to leave the house soon, intact and broom-swept. “If I stay here it will cost them a lot more money,” both men remember the former owner saying.

The man says he was just pointing out that eviction is expensive for the bank and says he had no intention of damaging the house. But he had “pushed the right buttons” for Mr. Carver. “He didn’t actually come out and threaten the property in any way,” Mr. Carver says. “But I assumed that he probably wouldn’t be too happy if he got evicted and locked out.”

Mr. Carver consulted with the bank and upped the offer to $2,800.

So not only are those in foreclosed properties not forced out, but they get a cash bonus to possibly help get a jump start at finding an apartment and get their financial life back on track. The banks however, consider the ‘cash for keys’ practice commonplace and find it beneficial to pay out a small sum rather than to try to market a foreclosed property which has been trashed. Some angry foreclosure owners, it seems, have gotten back at the banks by trashing their homes. Pouring paint on the carpet, having their pets use the home as a giant litterbox, and holes in the walls are commonplace reports. And the banks just find it easier and definitely more profitable to sell a foreclosed home which is in good shape. They’re not even rehabbing/remodeling the trashed ones, they’re taking less to move a trashed foreclosed property rather than put out the time, effort and money which as we’ve learned, only returns 80% at best, usually, of the remodel cost.

Lesson: Take the money and run; Don’t pack up the appliances, smear goat’s blood on the walls and leave the middle of the night.

Buyer’s Revenge: Trash the House after the foreclosure (Wall Street Journal)

The news out of everywhere this past month, whether it be in print, on TV, or basically every general news source on the web has been a daily “Sky is Falling!” headline. Which then leads to it’s respective story, which of course is “Are we in a recession”. So and so expert says ‘yes’, but yada yada economist says ‘not yet’. Is anyone really sure? Does anyone know, and when they do, will they tell us? The big news this month was the bailout/buyout of Bear Stearns. To those who don’t follow the financial world all that closely, this may be the first time they’d heard of Bear Stearns. But when coupled with the terms ‘Bailout/Buyout’, everyone’s ears perk right up. And it all comes down to the housing bust. A company that was worth 170$ a share a year ago, was sold to JP Morgan last sunday for 2$ a share, with the federal reserve financing the transaction and backing it up as much as 30 billion.

What do we know for sure?

1. – The housing bubble was the largest economic bubble in recent history. Of course the financial world felt comfortable gambling with everyone’s chips when the housing market had done nothing but go up since…well, since always.

2. – When’s the economic downturn gonna stop? Who knows. If you find the guy that knows, have him/her e-mail me. Me and about 100 million other people are looking for such a person. Many of the creative/sub-prime mortgages had a 3-year ‘teaser’ rate to get buyers in before someone had to pay the piper. The bulk of those 3 year teasers will be ending sixth months from now in September ’08. I’ll probably follow this up in September to update on how this has affected us all, and once again in March ’09 for the same topic.

3. – The housing market was really good for a relatively long time. Before there was a bubble, you’d always read about housing market anomolies, a month here and there every couple of years when home value would pep up, and everyone would notice, but the market would go back to it’s usual pace by the next month. A few years ago, however, some markets would see values increase at an incredible rate for consecutive months. You’d look at your neighbor’s house and think “no way they’ll ever get what they’re asking for” and then they did just that. Everything was good, and it was good for a few years, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was bad, and bad for a while, until prices come down to the point where the average home buyer is able to afford the average home with a traditional mortgage, because the days of the creative mortgage are gone.

Still confused? Is the news getting you on the hook with big headlines of “Housing Bust”, then leaving you with no real explanation?

The best article I’ve seen explaining the current housing downturn and how it relates to the economy was published last week by the New York Times.

“As is often the case with innovations, though, there was soon too much of a good thing. Those same global investors, flush with cash from Asia’s boom or rising oil prices, demanded good returns. Wall Street had an answer: subprime mortgages.

Because these loans go to people stretching to afford a house, they come with higher interest rates — even if they’re disguised by low initial rates — and thus higher returns. The mortgages were then sliced into pieces and bundled into investments, often known as collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s (a term that appeared in this newspaper only three times before 2005, but almost every week since last summer). Once bundled, different types of mortgages could be sold to different groups of investors.”

Read article here.