Check out this video on Canadians swooping into housing crash and foreclosure-central Phoenix Arizona to pick the meat off the bones

It probably looks tempting for the maple-syrup-eaters flocking in Phoenix. All those half-off deals, the sea of foreclosures, the ruined families to take advantage of, the thousands and thousands of bank-owned debt-traps. But it's still not close to the bottom. Not even close. It's the P/E stupid. It'll always be the P/E stupid.

You just know there's a bunch of Phoenix ramen eating realtors who have moved all their advertising and cold calling to north of the border. They ran out of suckers in the US, time to import.

Here's the CBC video. Enjoy.

The Great Phoenix Housing Bubble and Crash will be one for the history books

Good post on doom the other day about the historic Phoenix crash. We saw it coming, but to see the death spiral in full bloom is stunning.

As long-time HP'ers know, Phoenix was REIC-infested Housing Ponzi Scheme ground central, and an obvious one at that.

Phoenix was the town that inspired a good share of the leading bubble blogs. A town full of get-rich-quick scamsters and fraudsters, fly-by-night flippers, lying and ignorant realtors, illegal Mexican laborers, greedy builders, corrupt appraisers, incompetent "rolodex-of-realtors" REIC-bribed media, corrupt realtor politicians and scum mortgage brokers. A nice town in the 80s and 90s that got killed by a corrupt and out-of-control REIC.

The post-crash Phoenix area is now littered with foreclosures, blighted neighborhoods, jobless illegals, unpaid credit card bills, and years worth of unwanted homes for sale. Phoenix based its fake economy on housing, the people went along for the ride, and now that its #1 industry has blown up in spectacular fashion, Phoenix will become the new Detroit.

And that should come as no surprise to HP'ers.

HousingPANIC Quote of the Day

"We paid $585,000. It was the peak of the market, but no one told us. We would probably have to spend the next 20 years trying to get right on the mortgage. That's crazy."

Joan Shaffer - Screwed Phoenix homedebtor, failed housing gambler, realtor and now jingle mail sender, April 2008

FLASH: Housing crash over! Phoenix has year-round golf and pro athletes!

Since we recently published the Time magazine "goo goo for housing" cover, and the Century 21 "Suzanne" commercial, I thought I'd hit for the trifecta and remind HP'ers of the stupidest realtor we've ever seen, and his now-hilarious 21 reasons why the Phoenix housing market wouldn't crash.

The chart above is for all of Phoenix (Maricopa County) c/o zillow.com. F*ck that's ugly, and it's gonna get worse. I guess the good news is the golf might get cheaper...

Damn, I pity that clueless realtor's clients. If he has any. They likely lost everything by now, all because they listened to a realtor who had no idea what he was talking about, except for his commission.

Here's reasons #20 and #21 - you'll have to google to find the rest. And please feel free to add to the "21 Reasons the Phoenix Housing Crash Will Be Historic" list.

20. A significant number of active and retired professional athletes maintain homes here, in no small part because the Phoenix/Scottsdale area has… 21. Year-around golf.

This one's just funny. Arizona Cardinals QB loses $500,000 on his Phoenix home in one year

Remember that clueless Phoenix realtor's "21 reasons to bank on Phoenix real estate"? One of them being that professional athletes have homes in Phoenix (as if that had anything to do with anything)?

Well, of of those professional athletes just got slaughtered by listening to a realtor on commission, and just took a massive loss on an Ahwatukee home (that's South Phoenix btw). No biggie, he makes millions, so to lose $500k in a few months must suck, but he'll be OK.

But the rest of Phoenix? They won't be OK. Their town's fake economy was propped up by real estate and the REIC. They HELOC'd their homes to the hilt. They overconsumed when they should have saved. And they'll be the poster child of the Great Housing Ponzi Scheme. People around the world will laugh at the people of Phoenix.

(Oh, one more thing. Any realtor who mentions "Beverly Hills" and "Chandler" in the same sentence should be given a wedgie)

Amare Stoudemire has purchased Arizona Cardinals' quarterback Matt Leinart's Ahwatukee home for $1.9 million, about $500,000 less than what Leinart paid for it last year.

Leinart put the 6,800-square-foot Ahwatukee home on the market in June for $2.4 million, after he moved to a $2.3 million home in a gated community that real estate agents have nicknamed "the Beverly Hills of Chandler."

But the real estate market's slowdown has hit everyone, and the home sat on the market.

Welcome to real estate hell - Phoenix Arizona has 20,000 empty homes for sale, with failed flippers unable to find renters now desperate to dump

But what about the 21 reasons to bank on the Phoenix Ponzi Scheme?

What about the year round golf and sports stars?

This story should remind everyone reading why you should NEVER listen to a realtor on commission. Especially the stupid ones.

Note in this article is by the Arizona Republic's "Rolodex-of-Realtors" Catherine Reagor (remember her and her incompetent bubble reporting?). And yes, she quotes a couple of ramen-eating-realtors desperately trying to spin. But now it's all just so laughable.

Of Valley homes for sale, a third sit empty - 20,000 vacant homes pushing prices lower

Vacant homes are a big reason why Valley home prices are falling.

At least one out of every three homes for sale across metropolitan Phoenix is empty, and owners are motivated to cut prices to sell.

Many empty houses are owned by investors who can't find renters and need to sell. Others are owned by people who moved to other houses in the Valley or elsewhere and can't afford two mortgages. Some empty homes for sale are new houses that home builders are offering deals on. And a growing number of vacant houses are owned by lenders that foreclosed on the properties and want to cut their losses by selling them quickly and often cheaply.

"There's a whole collection of must-sell sellers in the Valley's housing market now," said Jim Sexton, president of the Phoenix real-estate firm John Hall & Associates. "It's a great time to buy, but sellers have a lot of competition now."

Everything to do with The Great Phoenix Housing Collapse encapsulated in one horrific article. Ah, the end of a classic Ponzi Scheme. Classic.

Ya gotta love those ramen eating Phoenix real estate bloggers on commission who were either too naive or too addicted to their commissions and NAR cheerleading PR to understand the factors at play that made the Phoenix housing market a classic unsustainable financial mania. The jobs! The immigrants! The weather! The golf! And they ain't makin' more desert!

Well, one thing they are making more of in Phoenix these days is foreclosure signs. Lots of 'em. Lots and lots and lots of 'em.

And the Ponzi Scheme ends.

Phoenix: Boom, Bust in Area Beset by Foreclosures - Real Estate Bust and Foreclosure Boom Comes Home to a Neighborhood Built on Easy Credit

Out on Phoenix's suburban fringes, where cement mixers are fast colonizing what's left of the hay and cotton fields, the day is winding to a close. The home hour has arrived. But sundown gives away a troubling secret: Behind dark windows and many unanswered doors, it's clear nobody is coming home.

The ranch home on Via del Palo where the newspaper in the driveway has been sitting unclaimed since April. The house at the corner of 223rd Court with faded fliers stuck in the door. The two-story on Via del Rancho with the phone book on the step.

They're all empty, left behind by a rising tide of foreclosures.

This neighborhood has a still-unfolding story to tell, and it is not always a comfortable one to hear.

Not long ago, builders were raising home prices here thousands of dollars week after week. Families pitched tents in front of sales offices and waited for Saturday morning lotteries to win the right to buy. Buyers -- including more than a few speculators -- gambled with loans whose risks were obscured by euphoria.

This is the tale of how America's real estate boom came to a seemingly ordinary subdivision called the Villages at Queen Creek, where the whipsaw of easy credit has led to some extraordinary times.

They were the best of times, for a while. The empty homes, though, raise serious doubts about what comes next.

"You drive around this subdivision and there are 'For Sale' signs everywhere,"

"Sometimes the neighbors don't like you so much because you're one of the reasons the values are declining,"

Housing Crash Poster Child Phoenix Arizona to post nearly 50% drop in home sales for September, and 18 month supply of unwanted homes

Housing Doom posts the shocking numbers for September (which really aren't so shocking, and they're gonna get worse). A 18 month (at least) supply of homes on the market, and a 46% drop in year over year sales for September.

* But what about all those people moving to Phoenix?

* But what about all those idiot Phoenix realtor bloggers who said there was no housing bubble, and people who thought there was were brown shirts and chicken littles?

* But what about the great and balanced Phoenix economy?

Folks, the housing crash underway in Phoenix and cities around the country (and world) will be the most important financial event of your lifetimes. Cities like Phoenix based their fake economies and budgets on homebuilding, home selling, home furnishing, illegal immigrant labor, property taxes, home improvement and always-increasing home prices.

And then the whole Ponzi Scheme caved in.

Phoenix may one day rise from the housing crash ashes, and rise up as a better place, but watch and bewilder as the greatest housing crash in US history unfolds in Housing-Ponzi-Scheme-Central Phoenix Arizona.

FLASH: Moody's forecasts 86 US housing markets will crash by over 10%, with Phoenix crashing 18% and Stockton 25%. A little conservative I'd say...

Got some bad news for idiot realtor bloggers in Phoenix and around country, and for any of the sheeple who believed the housing cheerleaders and bought a house these past couple of years:

Leverage sucks on the way down.

Also, after being in Vegas for the week, one thing stands out about the new homes they've built in the Southwest during the bubble:

Damn these garages, err, I mean homes, are butt-ugly.

Here's the down and dirty. Look out below. And watch out for falling knives.

Double digit home price drops coming

Over the next few years, more than three-quarters of the nation's housing markets will suffer some decline in home prices. Many will experience double-digit hits in a forecast that has worsened considerably in recent months.

According to an analysis conducted by Moody's Economy.com, declines will exceed 10 percent in 86 of the 379 largest housing markets. And 290 of the cities will experience price drops of 1 percent or more.

The Stockton, Calif., metro area, where Moody's predicts a 25 percent price drop, will be the hardest hit among the 100 most populated cities surveyed.

Just a tick or two behind Stockton in the Moody's survey were two Florida metro areas, Palm Bay/Melbourne (down 24.9 percent) and Sarasota/Bradenton (down 24.8 percent).

Six of the nation's 10 biggest cities face price declines of 1 percent or more with Phoenix, at a 17.8 percent loss, undergoing the worst reversal. The San Diego area will suffer through a 10.9 percent fall, Los Angeles (down 10.6 percent), New York, (down 5.3 percent), San Jose, (down 4.4 percent) and Philadelphia (down 3.1 percent) will also fall.

Phoenix Housing Crash Parody Youtube Video - "Free Falling - Now I'm Defaulting"

Gotta love stuff like this. "Free falling - Now I'm defaulting... gonna have negative equity for awhile" - love it. Thanks again doom for the link.

Anyone still believe Phoenix realtors on commission?

The Economist Magazine launches a nuclear attack on Phoenix Arizona: "Phoenix - Into the Ashes"

Wow.

In the end, HP'ers, what happened to Phoenix these past six years is truly sad. They had a great canvas to work with, and it could have become a great American city. But the REIC, a corrupted REIC-led government, and its clueless undereducated population simply f*cked it up. I absolutely loved Phoenix in the mid-90s, but it's no longer that town. It changed for the worse - much much worse.

Phoenix, thanks to the housing bubble, quickly became a crime-ridden, fake-economy, uneducated, soulless, cheap, plastic, poser-filled, realtor-infested, illegal-immigration-run-amok hellhole. A perfect example of what happens when the REIC gets hold of a major metropolitan area and uses it for their short-term gain. And a perfect example of horrific urban planning, or lack thereof.

Phoenix may very well become the new Detroit of the Southwest. A town based on a single industry (real estate - 40% of the Phoenix economy) while run by a corrupted government, that slipped into the abyss when the industry blew up.

No matter what clueless Phoenix realtors on commission try to tell you, no one American city will be destroyed by the Housing Crash more than Phoenix, Arizona (and it's urban cancer of suburbs). New Orleans had a hurricane. Phoenix had mortgage brokers and a massive housing bubble and crash. Foreclosures will be everywhere, and the crash in home prices will shock and awe.

Into the ashes - PHOENIX

From The Economist print edition

Phoenix was once hailed as a model city. It grew fast. Its streets were new and shiny, and housing was cheap. Beginning in 1950, the National Civic League voted Phoenix an “All-American City” four times. In 1993 an international competition rated Phoenix, along with Christchurch, New Zealand, the world's best-governed city. Forbes recently ranked it as America's second-best job market, thanks to its buoyant property market and rapid urban growth. In the past five years metropolitan Phoenix's population has grown by almost a fifth, to over 4m.

But in the past few years the awards have mostly dried up and things have started to go wrong. Burglary, theft and car crime are among the highest in the country. Newcomers who left Los Angeles to avoid smog and commuter traffic find that both are little better in Phoenix, and the area scores embarrassingly low in national education ratings. In October the Morgan Quitno Press, a research group, credited Arizona with the worst public education in the country, thanks to overcrowded classrooms, poor test scores and low salaries for teachers.

Phoenix's Native-American art shops and taco restaurants offer pockets of variety, but generic food chains such as International House of Pancakes and Pizza Hut still dominate. The property market is white-dominated too, Ms Koptiuch says, with its suburbs policed by homeowners' associations which insist on a certain uniformity of style.

What does a housing crash look like? Just check out Phoenix Arizona

Here's Phoenix unwanted homes for sale inventory on the MLS, and as you can see minuscule sales and growing foreclosures, courtesy of bubbletracking.

Remember this doesn't include the thousands and thousands and thousands of new homes builders can't move, the thousands and thousands of FSBO's, and the thousands that Desperate Homedebtors would put on the market if they thought they'd have a snowball's chance in hell of selling.

Students will study the Great US Housing Bubble for hundreds of years. And Phoenix will have it's own special chapter.

Phoenix housing crash underway - follow the little blue line... where will it stop?

Anyone want to predict how far Phoenix median asking price will fall before we see bottom?

But real estate never goes down! It's always a good time to buy! It's different this time! So many people are moving to Phoenix! Phoenix has a great robust diverse economy!

Guess not.

For city by city graphs go to housing-watch.com

Rolodex of Realtors Catherine Reagor writes advertiser-approved fluff-piece, reader comments are telling

R-O-R-Reagor wrote this piece, which I'm not going to waste your time with. She doesn't mention that the price data is 100% BS and unreliable as builders don't report the value of incentives in final price, and even she knows the cash-back fraud craze that took over Phoenix (that doesn't get subtracted from selling price). But she forgets to mention that.

Phoenix housing prices drop, but freefall not expected

But more importantly, read through the reader comments - and add your own. There are two camps -

1) Desperate Homedebtors and ramen-eating REIC that want the Arizona Republic to stop with any reporting on housing conditions - the "you're ruining it for everyone" crowd

2) Bitter Renters or concerned citizens who just want the Arizona Republic to report the truth.

What people are forgetting is that Arizona is one of the top 3 markets for the risky interest-only option-arm loans, almost all of which convert this year. Convert means the payments at least double or even triple, meaning tons of people who were already living paycheck-to-paycheck will go into foreclosure. Nothing crashes a market like a high foreclosure rate, and there's no escaping it here. - Frank1927

Did you see one builder offering $142,000 discount. Most house sit on the market for 3 to 6 months and all have had "Reduced" added to the sign and still don't sell. The foreclosuers are building up. The ARMs and Sub prime loans are coming home to roost. The Cash Back deals are headed for a little jail time. I look for our area to have what Denver had last year, 19,000 repos. If you have the cash in hand you can buy at a big dicount. I have seen about 4 of these bust in the USA,and it isn't fun. From all I hear and read it will be September or October before any thing picks up. - Ben5239

I am a 20 year veteran Phoenix Realtor, with over 1000 sales, and here is my take on the current and near future residential market in Maricopa County. APOCOLYPSE NOW baby! I don't buy into the rosy soft landing theory. The story will be far uglier than even the Republic can paint. Home prices will drop. 3 factors effect real estate: wages, home prices, and interest rates...nothing else! Are your wages going up?..........NO. Are mortgage rates declining?.....NO. Are home prices declining?.......YES. We have a huge supply of over-priced homes that will take years to work through. - charles8643

Yes the sky is falling. How can one tell? Simple. There are at least 5 houses for sale in about every neighborhood, and not one is selling for their asking price or has been sitting around for ages. Anyone who disputes this is either related to the real-estate industry, or just plain blind. Too much speculation happening the last few years.. payback time awaits. - Cards Fan

California prices...Arizona wages... The market is WAY over-valued and overbuilt. You can spend 500k on a nice place in Phoenix or you can spend 500k on an equally nice place in San Diego where wages are at least 10-15% more than they are here. People will wake up..Prices will fall... anyone 'round here in the late 80s? - ScottsdaleNative

In my opinion...the articles regarding real estate -across the board- in the Republic are an embarassment to the professional journalism industry. Not only are they not accurate, they also induce the general public into notions that the sky is falling. The articles are hidious, get someone who knows something about real estate to write the @#$%& articles, and forget the capitalist crap about selling papers and tell the truth about the market. - rich4311

What was it about Phoenix?

The biggest housing mania (followed by the biggest collapse)

Rampant cash-back mortgage fraud

Rings of corrupt realtors, mortgage brokers and appraisers

Out of control homebuilders now stuck with massive dead inventory

Home of get-rich-quick con-men and liars

A fake economy propped up short-term by scummy REIC

And the inspiration behind three of the most popular bubble blogs

So, what was it about Phoenix?

Asking prices in the Phoenix area have dropped about 25% this year, says David Khalaj, an agent at Realty Executives.

Existing single-family home sales tumbled 34% in the first nine months of the year compared with the same period last year, and condo sales were off 24%.

Construction permits for single-family homes were down 23% through August.

The declines appear so dramatic because Phoenix's housing market last year (and for the past several years) was so hyperinflated.

"Last year was just one of those atrocities that happens rarely," in terms of bidding wars and soaring prices, says Camille Sullivan, also an agent at Realty Executives. "I've never seen it before, and I've been doing this for 25 years. It was a very difficult time."

Swann-Dive: Phoenix and Las Vegas housing ponzi schemes and REIC fraud will now crash the world financial system

Combine massive mortgage fraud, incredible leverage, and a corrupt REIC and you get Phoenix and Vegas, the epicenters of the Late Great Housing Ponzi Scheme, and now the leading cause of the worldwide financial meltdown.

Thank you Phoenix. Thank you Las Vegas. Historic housing bubbles followed by devastating meltdowns. Couldn't have scripted it any better.

Millions will now go unemployed in Phoenix and Vegas. The local homebuilding-based economies will be destroyed. Housing prices will plummet. The illegal immigrant labor force used to build the homes will either go home or go on a crime spree. And hopefully Phoenix and Vegas will go a generation without another bout of stupidity and greed as seen in 2005.

First this note in my International Herald Tribune today:

Off the Charts: U.S. house price pain may be just starting
In the autumn of 2005, the biggest boom in home prices in the United States was in Phoenix. People stood in line just to get on lists to buy new homes. It was possible to make lots of money selling a place on a list well before the house was actually built.

At the peak of momentum in that market, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home prices index, house prices in Phoenix rose 49 percent in one 12-month period.

That was then. When S&P issued its final 2006 price numbers this week, it reported that Phoenix home prices rose just 0.3 percent in 2006. And it said that home prices peaked in June and fell 2.6 percent in the final six months of the year..

Las Vegas, with a 53 percent year-over-year rise in the autumn of 2004, set the mark for best annual performance. In 2006, prices there rose just 0.9 percent.

Then this word from the Arizona Republic today (thanks swift). Will Greg Swann go to jail?

Lawsuits targeting mortgage schemes

Big lenders and Wall Street investors are going after Arizona mortgage brokers, appraisers, real estate agents, title firms and home buyers for fraud.

Dozens of civil lawsuits alleging the gamut of mortgage fraud, from cash-back deals to lying about income on loan documents, have been filed against Valley firms and individuals during the past few months.

Fraud experts and regulators say the lawsuits are only the beginning as the fallout from mortgage fraud starts to hit the Valley.

Cash-back scams involve getting a mortgage for more than a home is worth and pocketing the extra money. The deals inflate home values and leave lenders with losses from loans worth far more than the house itself.

"Banks are going to force mortgage brokers to buy back bad loans, and mortgage brokers don't have the money so they are going to go under," said Richard Hagar, a national mortgage and real estate fraud expert with American Home Appraisals based in the Seattle area. "This is the beginning of the wave of lawsuits, lost licenses and criminal indictments in Arizona."

Arizona housing bubble and mortgage fraud funder shut down by regulators, 75 offices closed, untold damage done

Eagle First was just one enabler of the biggest ponzi scheme ever to hit Arizona, which as many of you know became the flim-flam-scam-o-rama-fake-economy-state during the Late Great Housing Bubble.

This company was just one of many unregulated mortgage broker firms promoting the "cash-back" fraud, and now that politicians and the MSM in Arizona have woken up to the fact that their housing market was all a sham, you'll start seeing company shut downs, arrests, new laws and one hell of a clean up.

Arizona property prices will crash 30% to 50% over the next 36 months, I am sure of it. Their 55% 2005 bubble was a fraud, a scam and a joke. Hundreds of thousands of REIC connected jobs will disappear, the Arizona economy will be devastated, and stucco home ghost towns all over Phoenix and Tucson will emerge.

And the walls come tumbling down. The money ain't gonna get paid back. The Great Unwinding is here.

Mortgage company shut down - Mesa-based firm caught in state's fraud crackdown

Regulators have shut down Mesa-based Eagle First Mortgage and its more than 75 Valley branches, citing illegal lending practices.The Arizona Department of Financial Institutions pulled the license of the mortgage firm and its broker, David Sanchez, last week.

Regulators described more than 100 illegal money transactions, loan activities and hiring practices. The firm, one of the largest that Financial Institutions has shut down, has until March 14 to finish any outstanding loans and close its doors

A wave of mortgage fraud started spreading across the Valley last year that could cost lenders millions of dollars and erode values and confidence in Arizona's real estate market and economy. Most of the fraud is coming from cash-back deals that involve obtaining a mortgage for more than a home is worth and pocketing the extra money. But there are other types of fraud such as faking and forging documents and lying about income and other personal information for loans.

It's estimated there are as many as 18,000 unlicensed people taking mortgage applications, negotiating rates and getting loan commissions statewide.

Will the housing crash lead to the death of the exurb (and the financial ruin of exurb homedebtors)???

Did anyone really want to live 50 miles out of Phoenix? Or 30 miles out of DC? Because they sure built a lot of damn homes and Wal-Marts out there, and I do remember lines and lotteries for these horrific monuments to urban planning run amok (and a disgusting waste of resources).

It was truly sad to see the houses in Maricopa Arizona go up. Families driving so, so far away, forced out of Phoenix by the stupid investor-caused ponzi scheme, only to get suckered into buying a home far, far away that now is getting more and more worthless by the day.

This happened in many cities around the country, and now that housing has crashed, the value of these exurb homes is plummeting, and they're going to quickly become new foreclosure ghost towns and a collection of financial ruin and misery.

And yes, we predicted it all, over a year ago. And read here and here .

Here's a MSM story on the trend. How sad. And how obvious.

Far-flung exurbs hard hit by housing downturn

While the housing downturn has depressed once-thriving real estate markets around the nation, far-flung suburbs of major cities have suffered the most abrupt market correction.

Home construction in these distant exurbs has slowed and prices and sales have fallen more than those of close-in suburban neighbors since a five-year housing boom ended in the summer of 2005.

Average home prices in Loudon County, Virginia, 35 miles outside of Washington, D.C., fell roughly 11 percent in 2006, according to the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors. By contrast, Virginia's Arlington County, which hugs the nation's capital, saw a price decline of only about 2 percent.

"It's been hard for sellers to comprehend, and I'm usually the bearer of bad news," said Mike Wagner, a real estate broker who works in Loudon. "The news is: Your home is worth $100,000 less than it was a year and a half ago."

The same holds true for California, where exurban housing markets have softened more than those close to urban centers.

Now, real estate agents in the exurbs trying to sell a glut of new homes, along with the inventory of previously owned houses.

"I think it was easy for builders to think that there were real users in these fringe areas far from jobs and entertainment," he said. "In fact, we found that purchases in those areas over the last three years or so ... were speculators and not users."