The Pesky Reality (LA home prices):
The Ignorant REIC Quote:
"I think we will see months of gains and then maybe retreat a little bit. I think we will be bouncing along a bottom for a while"
- Leslie Appleton-Young, the shockingly still-employed chief economist for the California Association of Realtors, June 2008
(So, how many months or years will the realtors keep calling bottom until they realize they have absolutely no credibility left?)
Trillions have been lost.
Trillions more will be lost.
And big SoCal lenders like WaMu, Wells Fargo, Indymac, GMAC, First Federal - and Fannie and Freddie who bought the junk loans - are in a heap of trouble.
It's not subprime folks. It's everything. And it's one ginormous Housing Ponzi Scheme that blew up in spectacular fashion.
No matter what discredited California REIC shills like Connie De Groot, Gary Watts, Leslie Appleton Young and Tom Adkins would have you believe.
Hat-tip to SoCal Bubble for the latest #s. Hat-tip Casey Serin for crashing the market.
Man, renting was never better than it is today.
Losing $3000 a f*cking week? That's gotta suck. $13,000 a month in capital depreciation, combined with $5000 a month or so in carrying costs, and you've got a $18,000 a month problem. And that's why millions are just going to say f*ck it, f*ck the bank, and just turn in the keys.
Yup, should've listened to HousingPANIC instead of idiot realtors on commission, or the biggest fraud of them all, Leslie Appleton-Young at the California realtors Association.
Hey, we were only trying to help. Meanwhile, California is now going to have a budget shortfall and economic downturn that will shock the world.
California freefall: Home prices fell 26% in February
Signs of distress are piling up in the California housing market, where prices are falling at three times the national rate of decline.
--Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed's interest rate-cutting campaign "will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market."
"It's bad. It's really bad," market analyst Nima Nattagh told the Daily News.
The California Association of Realtors reports median prices fell 27.2% from year-ago levels in the hard-hit Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, 30.9% in Sacramento, and 39.1% in Santa Barbara County.
Ouch.
Suzannnnnneeeee!!!!! (enjoy the new remix!)
Home Prices Plunge Across California
The median price in a six-county area of Southern California fell to $408,000 -- the lowest level since October 2004, when it was $402,500. That median is 19.2 percent below the region's peak price of $505,000 last summer, and it's 1.7 percent below January's median, the firm said.
In the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area, the median price fell 11.6 percent to $548,000 compared to a year earlier and 17.6 percent from the region's peak median price of $665,000 last summer. Bay Area prices were essentially flat from January.
That great sucking sound you hear now is California, as the state hurtles toward a housing-led depression. California seems cursed - earthquakes, fires, riots, mudslides, illegals, Britney Spears, and now a massive housing crash.
A giant wave of defaults and foreclosures is now hitting their shores, and it's getting ugly. As predicted here, the state is now facing massive deficits, home prices are in a death spiral to the bottom, and "for sale" and "foreclosed" are the new signs of the time.
Why?
Because California home prices detached from all known metrics - price to income, price to rent, historical price trends - and the Ponzi Scheme made California housing gamblers do really really stupid things - namely take out interest-only and negative-am loans they had no chance of ever paying back, while hoping against hope that the mad appreciation continued.
And then it didn't.
So who gets hurt the most? It's not the homedebtors - having put nothing down they just turn in the keys and walk away, and it wasn't their home anyway, it was the bank's. So it's the banks and CDO buyers - the bagholders and their shareholders, who'll get reemed.
And these toxic avengers are led by Washington Mutual, Countrywide, Wells Fargo, First Federal, IndyMac and CIT Group. The Great California Housing Crash is going to destroy 'em, along with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae who bought up the junk, haven't marked-to-market, and now can't sell it off. And the US taxpayer is gonna be on the hook.
And that's the way the cookie crumbled.
Report: California foreclosures up 421% in Q4, hit 20-year high
Foreclosures in California hit a 20-year high during the fourth quarter of 2007, a real estate research firm reported Tuesday.
DataQuick Information Systems said 31,676 homes ended up in foreclosure during the quarter ended Dec. 31, the highest number since the company began tracking such numbers in 1988.
The foreclosure figure is a 30.8 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 421.2 percent jump from 6,078 foreclosures in the same the same period of 2006. Homeowners received 81,550 default notices during the quarter, up 12.4 percent from the previous quarter and more than 114 percent from the year-ago period.
One day on this blog, I'll say "OK folks, that's it. The fundamentals are back in line, you can buy a house now and rent it out for positive cash flow, and the Late Great Housing Bubble has been deflated. Go out and buy homes again (but don't use a realtor!)"
So what calendar date do you think that will that be (be specific)?
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. housing prices may not start recovering until 2010 or 2011, according to a Barron's report that quotes bond fund manager Jeffrey Gundlach.
The report in the October 1 edition cites a Gundlach forecast that U.S. home prices may drop an average of 12 percent to 15 percent annually and not reach a trough until late 2008.
According to the report, Gundlach sees particularly sharp declines in bubble markets of California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona and areas in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, with price drops of 30 percent to 40 percent in those areas.
Found this over at piggington - neighborhood in Temecula.
Want a tip - get into the "For Sale" sign business...
And then here's just one of the homes for sale. Don't forget the "Wow!" factor.... he he he...
