Another over-improvement property praying for a knife catcher. Are there any left?
Asking Price: $729,000
Address: 4535 Sandburg Way Irvine, CA 92612
Another dream that will never come true
Just to compliment your sorrow
Another life that I’ve taken from you
A gift to add on to your pain and suffering
Another truth you can never believe
Has crippled you completely
All the cries you’re beginning to hear
Trapped in your mind, and the sound is deafening
Prayer — Disturbed
I have profiled a number of properties that were over-improved for the neighborhood. One of the more recent was You Must Be Joking back on April 1. There is also that monstrosity in University Park. Everyone believed that no matter how much you paid or how much you spent on improvements, someone would come along to pay even more to make you a flipping genius. It doesn’t work that way.
{book4}
Profiles like this are important because people need to see that the flipping craze of the Great Housing Bubble was an abberation. That is not how the housing market works. The Home and Garden channel is not going to chronical many of these because their ratings depend on people believing it can be done (they have done a few shows like this). Personally, I think these shows would be well served by showing the complete train wrecks where people lose $250,000 or more after busting their butts improving a home. I would tune in to that, and so would many readers here.
Asking Price: $729,000
Income Requirement: $182,250
Downpayment Needed: $145,800
Purchase Price: $595,000
Purchase Date: 7/28/2006
Address: 4535 Sandburg Way Irvine, CA 92612
| Beds: | 4 |
| Baths: | 3 |
| Sq. Ft.: | 2,300 |
| $/Sq. Ft.: | $317 |
| Lot Size: | 3,840
Sq. Ft. |
| Property Type: | Single Family Residence |
| Style: | Other |
| Stories: | 2 |
| View: | Greenbelt |
| Year Built: | 1968 |
| Community: | University Park |
| County: | Orange |
| MLS#: | S579242 |
| Source: | SoCalMLS |
| Status: | Active |
| On Redfin: | 2 days |
thought out floorplan features 2 master bedrooms, one on each level in
addition to 2 spacious secondary bedrooms on main level. Gorgeous
kitchen with granite counters, 42′ refrigerator, double oven, gas
cooktop, walk in pantry and remote controlled skylight. Custom casings,
baseboards and crown moulding throughout. Loft area on upper level is
perfect for home office/tech center. Large, open living area leads out
to extra spacious patio. Gated front courtyard. Every room is wired for
Cad 5 computer hook up. New vinyl dual glazed windows and doors, new
plumbing, new electric, new heating, insulation and central air
system…. too many extra’s to list…hurry on this one! Steps to
association parks and sport courts.Walk to shopping, close to 405 Fwy,
University High.
How can an addition be AMAZING?
That oil painting effect on Photoshop is becoming more common. realtor see, realtor do?
Figuring out what is happening with this property is very difficult as the property records are incomplete. The property was purchase at the peak on 7/28/2006 for $595,000. The buyer used a $416,500 first mortgage, a $100,000 HELOC and a $78,500 downpayment. It is likely that this guy actually put $178,500 down and opened the HELOC to fund the renovation.
He must not have though much about his chances for success flipping this beast:
Foreclosure Record
Recording Date: 07/30/2008
Document Type: Notice of Sale (aka Notice of Trustee’s Sale)
Document #: 2008000362192
Foreclosure Record
Recording Date: 04/28/2008
Document Type: Notice of Default
Document #: 2008000197601
Here is where it gets strange. There is no foreclosure sale recorded. On 2/3/2009 — more than a year after the owner stopped making payments — the property was transferred via a Quit Claim Deed to a woman. There is no record of the sale amount or what happened to the mortgages. It seems most likely that the woman bought this property at a foreclosure auction by outbidding the lender. If this is what happened, then this is a flip for profit. Good luck with that.
Does anyone think this is a particularly good time to flip properties in this price range?
I hope she finds her knife catcher before these prices sever her hand….
Tivo recorded a few of those Flip This Piece of Crap shows from HGTV recently. The wife and I watched these overly optimistic “professionals” spend way to much money fixing up these properties at the early stages of the bust, with the lofty goals of flipping for $120k profit.
Ever notice how there’s no actual sale shown on those shows? They always just list the expected profit or potential profit.
That’s the great thing about the internet…all this information right at your fingertips. Each of the properties we saw that weekend with “projected profits” were sold at a loss. Generally a $20k loss or more. That’s a lot of hard work and effort to fix up a place and take a loss on your capital.
I would be interested to watch a show where they actually showed the sale amount, especially in this market. If there are flippers making money still, they have to really know what they’re doing. Those would be the ones worth watching.
Sadly, that’s like expecting “Antiques Roadshow” to show someone actually paying those outrageous assessment prices presented on the program. We also won’t see any “Flip This House” programs that show someone taking a massive hit for the same reason why “Writer’s Digest” won’t publish any articles on how to beat delinquent payments out of deadbeat publishers: it ruins the illusion that this is all easy money.
that is why I LOVE BBC Cash in the Attic – just love BBC tv better in general!
Flip That House isn’t on HGTV. It’s on TLC.
IrvineRenter:
HGTV does have new shows to match the current market. They are shows like: The Unsellables, Buy Me, For Rent, Real Estate Intervention, etc. They do point out how much the properties have depreciated in value and try to bring the owners out of fantasyland.
Watching these Flip This House shows are funny. Their math for projected profit in the end is ridiculous. They don’t mention all the costs of buying, owning, renovating and then selling a house. Most of these jokers are do it yourselfers…the show doesn’t mention the financial impacts of not having a job or paycheck for months on end while you are flipping the house. It is funny watching the occasional train wrecks where the flippers run out of money and thrown in the towel.
“…the show doesn’t mention the financial impacts of not having a job or paycheck for months on end while you are flipping the house…”
They do sometimes, but in most cases, just like you suggested, the flippers are “jokers” who have not much else going on, so they’ve decided to flip. e.g. school teachers in the summer, artists, self-employed, etc.
It makes sense though. Why would a Dr., lawyer, or MBA, waste time flipping when money can be made easier elsewhere?
I like to watch Wheeler Dealers, where they buy old cars and restore them and sell them. It seems like almost every episode they either (admittedly) lose money, or make a tiny profit, not worthy of all the effort.
Great comment Dan..
The past shows I have watched rarely ever showed a closing and the net profit.. some have even mentioned the sellers couldn’t sell and ended up renting out the homes. Even those that had them up for sale, the shows seldom mentioned the closing costs and Real estate commissions in these estimates of profit.. not to mention the fact many of these “Investors” quit their jobs making say, $5000 a month.. if it takes 6 months to sell, there’s more lost $$$$$$$… oh, then there are TAXES on the profit.. ouch..
I’m excited for another day of unemployed realtor ramble, minus the unemployment check, let Nancy out of her cage already…
Mav, only chiming in with an encouragement for a train wreck?! You can provide thoughtful comments…you used to…why no more?
i’m sorry, i’m bored of it all at this point, the housing market is a train wreck and will be a slow bleed for 10 years, where is the entertainment value in that?…. as unemployment rises and pressure on incomes drags on…
I hear ya, fair enough. Please do chime in when you feel like it. Mish’s blog is entertaining – some interesting characters there, at times. The “slow bleed” is annoying, for us impatient types (hurry up already!). Maybe things will accelerate “unexpectedly”…and things will get more…exciting!
“I’m excited for another day of unemployed realtor ramble, minus the unemployment check, let Nancy out of her cage already…”
She certainly has made the comments more interesting.
You know, we haven’t seen Kirk in a while. Perhaps he has refined his craft and instead of winding everyone up with Right Wing Religious references, he has mastered Realtorspeak and kool aid intoxication.
Nancy has been an interesting reminder of where we were in 2007 when this blog started. Back before any markets were falling significantly, kool aid was everywhere, and the kool aid intoxicated were the norm. The comments Nancy has been making would not have been out of the ordinary in 2007.
Assuming she is genuine — and I have no reason to believe otherwise — she represents a homeowner in one of the last neighborhoods to fall, so she has not have to endure kool aid detoxification yet.
Everyone believes their neighborhood is immune until proven otherwise. So far, her observations of flippers and knife catchers buying everything on the market in these neighborhoods is accurate. If this trend continues, her neighborhood really will not fall in value. Of course, we all do not think that is going to happen, but we could be wrong (I doubt it.)
In her world, none of the dire economic problems causing housing markets everywhere to collapse has made prices fall near her. Prices should fall, but they haven’t. Under those circumstances, it is easy to see why kool aid intoxication persists and even gets stronger. If these neighborhoods do not get completely crushed, the prices will really get bid up to the stratosphere. Imagine if there really was one neighborhood where prices could not fall. Wouldn’t you buy there? So would everyone else.
They probably aren’t falling much where the Goldman Sachs employees live either…yet. I’m still surprised at the lack of outrage…when GS touts that they had one of their successful quarters ever (feeding off of the taxpayer-$-thru-AIG they got), and are giving out massive bonuses once again…while each week jobless reports come out indicating a continued rapid decline in employment nationwide…where is the outrage? Are people so numb that they can’t speak? Until there is widespread outrage at the imbalances (and until people widely connect the dots between Wall Street successes and Main Street job losses), some neighborhoods will probably stay inflated.
From Bloomberg…no doubt the GS people will be scooping up the remnants. Since MSM is still mostly NY based will see if they suddenly wake up to what has been happening in the rest of country.
“Manhattan apartment prices dropped for the first time since 2002 in the second quarter as the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. caught up to property owners in the nation’s most expensive urban market.
The median price fell 18.5 percent from a year earlier to $835,700, New York appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and broker Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate said today. The number of sales plunged by half, the most since Miller Samuel began keeping data in 1989.
“The standstill that existed after Lehman Brothers has been broken, and it was the sellers that cried ‘Uncle,’” Pamela Liebman, chief executive officer of New York-based property broker the Corcoran Group, said in an interview.
Values are falling broadly in Manhattan for the first time in the almost four-year U.S. housing recession, with declines now seen in co-operatives and condominiums of every size and price. Private-sector employment in the city dropped by 91,200 jobs, or 2.8 percent in the 12 months through May as Wall Street losses and asset writedowns topped $1.4 trillion.
The price of studio apartments declined 16 percent from a year ago to a median of $405,000, according to Miller Samuel. One-bedrooms dropped 17 percent to $650,000 and two-bedrooms fell 23 percent to $1.27 million. Three-bedroom units fell 37 percent to $2.35 million and four-bedrooms plummeted 47 percent to a median of $3.92 million.”
In defense of Goldman, at least they were smart enough to take the side of these toxic trades that went up when housing crashed.
If they should have been made whole on their CDS contracts, that can be debated.
Goldman has been smarter then the heard through this crisis. I do not hold this against them.
And do remember Goldman paid back the TARP $:
WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–The U.S. Treasury Department confirmed in a report Friday that 10 big banks are repaying $68 billion in federal government aid.
The firms are JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), BB&T (BBT), U.S. Bancorp (USB), American Express Co. (AXP), Capital One Financial Corp. (COF), Bank of New York Mellon Corp. (BK), Northern Trust Corp. (NTRS) and State Street Corp. (STT).
The report follows a Treasury Dept. announcement last week that big lenders had met the necessary requirements to repay funds they received from the government’s financial-rescue fund.
The roughly $68 billion was repaid June 17.
The Troubled Asset Relief Program was started in October to rescue Wall Street. Nearly $200 billion has been doled out to banks around the U.S.
-By Jeff Bater, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-9249; jeff.bater@dowjones.com
There is no real rationale for a neighborhood to completely decouple from the surrounding area, unless the neighborhood really were “special”, as in it was right on the water or a low density neighborhood, or all the homes were 3.5k+ sq ft with the latest building technology and amenities.
It seems Nancy and her ilk are trying to argue that their neighborhoods are special because they are not distressed, and therefore prices will not drop significantly. That’s a tautology. “The price is stable because no one has to sell, and when they do sell people pay up to live here because our prices our stable.” At its core, it is circular reasoning. People who pay up to buy in an inflated neighborhood only get an inflated house and pay more. Buy what you can afford, and only pay what is a fundamentally sound price.
You obviously haven’t been to some of the nicer neighborhoods in L.A. You literally go from crack houses to > $1 million homes by crossing the street. Don’t ask me why, but we have friends in Hancock Park and that’s the reality. The same happens in Venice. So while not quite islands and decoupled from all the surrounding neighborhoods, they are definitely peninsulas out there. In Orange County it seems to be the other way around, we have islands of crack houses (west side costa mesa) surrounded by nice neighborhoods.
Riverside is like that as well. There’s one street that has an old bridge over a canyon (Victoria Avenue). On one side of the bridge, you have shacks that sell for $50k. On the other side of the bridge, you have mansions that sell for fifteen times as much. Price per square foot triples too.
Did Nancy say which neighborhood it is that she (or he) is in? It would be interesting to see if IrvineRenter could find a screwed bagholder in the same neighborhood and shatter the bullish assertions.
Take the challenge, Nancy. Prove all of the bears wrong.
She’s from Westwood in LA, apparently.
The hacker or the real one?
“Imagine if there really was one neighborhood where prices could not fall. Wouldn’t you buy there? So would everyone else.”
“Ugly, cramped, dingy, old condos are an acquired taste.”
I’m going to put these two statements together – the latter is pure gold, in my opinion – and weave an investment strategy out of them.
There are a few condo developments up in the Lakewood ‘burbs here in Denver, just east of the foothills – where Rancho Del Stucco and Willow Oaks offer stylish and graceful Florentine single-family living. The essence of these condo patches is that they’re near the main grungy boulevards, fairly quiet, fairly cramped, and fairly cave-like. As in Sunset Hollows, Maple Creek, and Meadow Glade (no meadow, no glade). I stayed in one briefly while I was looking for a rental downtown, and it was an experience.
The 1992 crash here saw stuff like this going for $20K cash, and idiots were still, as of last summer, paying $165K for these units.
You speak of a neighborhood where prices cannot fall, which clearly does not exist, but these condos may, at some point in the not-too-distant future, be a neighborhood where prices cannot fall any further.
My mission is clear: await the implosion, hold my nose, write the check, accept that my girlfriend will dump me within hours of being told where I plan to live, and jump on in to rent-free cave condo living for several years.
The only obstacle to my fiendish plan is acquiring the taste for one of these. I think the lifestyle will require frequent vacations.
The best part about Flip This Piece of Crap was that at the end of each episode, they would get some credulous retailer with oily hair to attach a ridiculous price on a property, and then everyone would pretend that the flipper would actually get that price. The “profit” figures were totally specious, and of course they never included the commission that the credulous retailer would insist upon.
One of the reasons I liked “Property Ladder” on TLC was that they frequently featured idiot novice flippers who made terrible decisions and took a bath on their flips even at the height of the bubble. These people would buy tiny homes for $100K, add nothing of redeeming value (like closet space, bathroom storage, etc.) but put in a lot of granite and Bellawood, and then try to pass them off as $300K houses. Best part of the show came at the end when they would throw up a slide that said “So-and-so’s house has been on the market for 130 days with no offers. He plans to flip again.”
lol
Please don’t feed the troll.
That’s a really large refrigerator.
And it’s CAT 5. Not CAD 5.
Which is already obsolete. Cat5 will do gigE on short runs, but unless they laid it within conduit (to fish the upgrade later) and/or laid out multiple drops and runs it will be old in four years.
I should know, I laid out 1500 feet of Cat5 with over 200 feet of conduit to define a delta backbone. Heck, I got “dark” ethernet. ;-D
$375 per sq. foot in UP is dreaming.
Whoa… What? Your post makes me wanna bust out some Latin to represent for my profession!
Latin? I took latin in school too.
Rosa, rosae, rosa…
Lupus, lupi…
It went on Ad Nauseum, those priests were evil.
We took french also. My favorite line was:
“Je veux achetez un kilo de poisson”
Or something long those lines.
Now, what parts of my earlier post lost you?
Cat5= Category 5 twisted pair cable.
Dark Ethernet = unused ethernet connections.. in my case, unused Cat5 cable to I plan to use for link aggregation. -I’m borrowing the term “dark fiber” which refers to fiberoptic cables laid out by the telcos but not in actual use.
Telcos- Telephone and Telecommunication Companies.
Link Aggregation – In Ethernet, using multiple ethernet cables between routers/switches in combination to gain more bandwidth.
The rest, you really should understand if you’re on computer hooked up to the Internet.
Homo homini est…
Cad 5 – Badly installed Cat 5 that cheats you out of bandwidth?
Actually, CAT5 only uses 4 of the 8 wires to do 100 Megabit Ethernet anyway. You can use the other 2 pairs for something else, phones and fax for instance. I stream full HD video from my video server to my TV over mine and it works fine with 4 wires. It is limited to “only” 100 meter runs however, so I guess that is a limitation in those Irvine mansions I see profiled here. You do need all the wires to do Gigabit Ethernet, but I have no idea what you would do with that much bandwidth at home.
I dunno know. I got terabites of RAID5 and lots and lots of bandwidth.
I guess, it’s there?
My numbers were to store at least 1000 DVDs (7GB per) and 4000 LP (24/96 => 1.2GB per) and then to plan that BlueRay/HD-DVD would come in at around 20GB each.
Plus streaming no less than four HDTV 1080p simultaneously from edge to edge of my home network.
Bandwith and storage are getting very cheap, so I installed lots of wire when I had the walls opened.
Wired will always surpassed wireless by at least two orders of magnitude.
wow, using bounce flash for those photos. haha
Bring it on boys, as I sit here in West L.A. living on 20 dollars a day.
Is this snark?
Come on Jill, please don’t diss Nancy. She has a good point on renting vs owning a home.
To paraphrase the quote from Jon Stewart, “If I’d only followed Nancy’s advice, I’d have a million dollars today.”
No…food…for…troll.
I like Nancy, although I am guessing that it’s a guy in women’s naming based upon the testosterone in the astute observations.
It was getting way too quiet around here after all the bulls lowered their heads in shame and left the blog as they painfully became aware of their foolishness as the recession has grown worse and worse.
Even if he is not being genuine and just yanking the chains of the bears in order to amuse himself – there are plenty of bullish readers in the shadows who are like-minded.
I toy with the idea of 25 straight years of price declines. I know that the ARM resets will be off our backs by late 2013, but HELOCs and pergraniteel were such a driver of the economy that I don’t know where we’ll get the capital to rebuild our economy and banking system.
We’re worse off than Japan in 1990, and they managed 16-18 years of home-price deflation in a country with little land to spare. We have undeveloped land everywhere, and much of our developed land is only “near” anything in the sense that cheap gas makes it so. Will gas remain plentiful?
25 years of housing deflation: Why not here?
I am betting that the fast food industry will remain strong for the next 25 years as all the remaining jobs are exported to other countries. The “old money” Oligarchy will continue to be just fine while the average working men and women sell cheese burgers to each other in order to make their payments. Incomes shall remain flat and decline and the government shall continue to engineer affordability programs and implement various tax-incentive-voodoo in order to keep their corporate business partners flush with interest payments by the Proles.
The above was not from my account – “Nancy” has been hacked. That’s what they’ve resorted to… and it’s low.
I’m Nancy. Now go back to your hovel you dirty filthy renter.
I am the real Nancy, all you fake Nancys hit the road. Living large on 20 large.
No you’re not.
When they can’t attack my message, they will attack the person, hack her alias, and misrepresent my ideas. That just goes to show the honesty and fairness in this blog and it’s sounding more like a real scam; could it be the IR crowd are flipping Irvine RE agents telling you don’t buy, stick with formulas that *NEVER* apply to prime properties in good neighborhoods, to give themselves an unfair advantage? Maybe.
I think Nancy-boy is schizo…
Don’t worry, they will apply eventually.
Whoever has taken Nancy’s name and pretended to be her, please stop. She has an opinion, and we welcome it here.
They did produce a beautiful home. I’ll take it for $300K. Now, I must go read TMZ (because Nancy told me to yesterday). So Wacko Jacko used a drug for ansthesia so he could sleep. I guess it worked so well he didn’t wake up.
“So Wacko Jacko used a drug for ansthesia so he could sleep. I guess it worked so well he didn’t wake up.”
Shhhhhh…..please don’t advertise this to any former Wall St. bankers and home flippers.
Oh shoot, I also forgot the CNBC followers.
While in Chicago last week, I took a stroll over into Gary Indiana to witness the circus out in front of the old Jackson house.
I thought to myself, “We could put some granite counters in this thing and sell it for a couple million to an Irvine transplant”
http://www.crackthecode.us/images/2300Jackson.jpg
The logic of flipping is mistaking the source of the price increase of past successful flippers. If you extract out the price increase absent flip, the profit due to the flip would be small. It is like Alcatel buying Lucent in 1999 @ $20/sh, saying ‘let’s open a factory in France’, voila the stock is at $80/sh and it must be due to the new factory – not the tech bubble
The real value in flipping is in the next buyer not having to put up with not having a kitchen, bathroom, etc while the remodeling takes place. Neglecting that premium, putting in granite counters should never return more than the cost to put in. .
The other thing is that you can look at the appraised value. @560 it is $60k home, $500k lot. Doing anything to the home doesn’t budge the lot value. If the lot value goes down 50%, you can put $100k in and still end up selling for less than you paid.
When the market is priced correctly, you can make money buying distressed real estate, rehabbing it, and renting it.
But making money doing this is about keeping your costs down, doing the work quickly, having access to good subs, and working as your own general contractor.
The transaction costs for flipping are so extraordinarily high that it’s very difficult to imagine anyone actually being successful at this without a rapidly rising seller’s market.
U.S. Mortgage Applications Fall 19%, Defying Obama
July 1 (Bloomberg) — U.S. [slavery]mortgage applications fell last week by the most since February, defying efforts by President Barack Obama’s administration to [prop up and]revive the [overpriced]housing market.
The [slave-trade]Mortgage Bankers Association’s index of applications to purchase a home or refinance a loan dropped 19 percent to 444.8 in the week ended June 26 from 548.2 the prior week. The group’s refinancing gauge declined 30 percent to the lowest in seven months, while the index of purchases fell 4.5 percent.
Unemployment, which touched a 26-year high in May, and rising borrowing costs discouraged [fake]homeowners from refinancing, while a growing number of foreclosures sidelined potential [slaves]buyers waiting for house prices to stop tumbling. Pending home sales showing contracts signed in May rose 0.1 percent, compared with a gain of 6.7 percent in April, the National Realtors Association Cartel said today.
“The run-up in mortgage rates is exacting a toll in terms of [increasing affordability and]depressing [slavery]mortgageapplications,” Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts, said in an interview. “The economy is in a phase of attempting to find a bottom. Anything that comes in the way [like increasing affordability and] of that, like higher rates, is going to mean it takes longer.”
Barriers to Recovery
Home loan rates climbed above 5 percent the week of May 29 for the first time in three months, according to mortgage bankers’ data, and have remained elevated relative to 10-year Treasuries.
The percentage of [foolish]people who said they plan to buy a home in the next six months fell to 2.7 percent in June from 2.8 percent in May, the Conference Board in New York said yesterday.
Still, rising foreclosures that sell at [fair market]discounted prices are flooding the market and [making affordable]depressing [overpriced]home values, according to Lawrence Yun, chief [fake]economist of the Chicago-based Realtors’ group. This year the number of foreclosures may rise to 2.5 million, the highest on record, Yun said.
Lower Prices
Existing U.S. home sales in May rose 2.4 percent to an annual rate of 4.77 million, lower than forecast, and the median price was down 16.8 percent from the same month in 2008, according to the Realtors.
“The worst is behind us(LOL!) but we’re a long ways off from a recovery in [overpriced]housing,” said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Inventories are still elevated. We’re not expecting any strength in housing until the second half of 2010(LOL!).”
Builders Struggle
Builders including Los Angeles-based KB Home are slashing prices and reducing the size of houses to compete with foreclosures.
Original article
I locked in a 4.5% rate back in April 2009, and closing has been delayed due to the backlog at my lender (major TARP recipient). They did get an appraisal straight away that showed a value of $450k on my home. I have the closing scheduled next week but given the passage of time they relooked at the appraisal and lowered it to $435k. I’m nowhere close to an 80% LTV so it really doesn’t matter to me. However you have to wonder how many people are in escrow for say 60-90 days given the backlog at the mortgage companies only to find that the bank has lowered the appraisal and will lend 80% of the lower amount.
We lucked out. We got a 5.25% on a “conforming jumbo” refi and closed it within a month back in March.
Just before the rates shot up.
We were, of course, nowhere the 80% LTV, more like 50%. And, since the house next to us had just sold, plus another near by, we had solid numbers for the appraisal.
Phew.
That’s a 3.33% drop in appraised value in 60 days. Extrapolated out, that’s 20% in a year.
Yeouch
Probably closer to 90 days than 60 between appraisals but yes,still ouch. We here in the Middle Atlantic States are just beginning to see what CA/AZ/FL/NV have been dealing with the past couple years. When I tell people around me that the median house can’t stay at 6 ish times median income (especially when a lot of jobs here are tied to Wall Street so income is, at best, flat if not falling) and there is further to go I am looked at as if I have two heads and get the ‘but real estate never goes down” rebuttal. We are still in earliest stages of denial in this part of the country.
About year ago the TV has a chiropractor that had high income and tried to flip houses as a side business. She made some large profits and started to work less as chiroprator, but then got trapped on the last few flips. Since the loans are likely recourse, she may need to pay up. It was like a drug to her. She’s in recovery.
The fellow with in the N.Korean towers wrote to IHB about his early sucess and profits but got caught on his last flip. Anybody knon the rest of the story? Recovery or Relapse?
Did they really put a 2,300 square foot house on a 3,840 square foot lot? Are you kidding?
New to Irvine, are we? This is completely typical. In fact, I’m not completely sure this is really a house and not a condo/townhouse type thingy.
The lease on my rental ends later this month. I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for other houses to rent. It seems like there are very few house rentals available up here in Thousand Oaks. Fewer than were available a few years ago.
What would this be a sign of for the housing market? Could it be a sign that there are more houses that are currently sitting vacant due to foreclosure, and are not ready to be sold or rented?
IR
Nancy is to IHB
as
Hillary Clinton was to Rush Limbaugh
WoW what happened last night. I got to start sending these posts to my crackberry again.
Nancy is to IHB
as
Rush Limbaugh is to sanity.
There, fixed.
And, has Nancy admitted he is a guy yet
Not that it matters.
I’m all woman, sweetie. And in a superbly happy marriage.
People who plan and execute for the long-term mode invariably reap their rewards in time; the short-term flippers live for the rush of the moment and you’ll find they’re always in a state of crisis, regardless of whether they own or rent;
I’m not a psychologist but believe there is a disorder called Borderline Personality Disorder that parallels their behavior amazingly accurately. Sufferers are extremely impulsive, see the world in black-and-white terms, don’t grasp the gray shades, have significant memory/perception issues, have a sense of entitlement, and blame everyone but themselves for their constant state of crisis.
Homeownership was one of the best decisions I’ve made, along with my marriage. Perhaps people with success stories, not tragedies, should prosletyse the precepts of good long-term planning.
BTW, this blog including IR doesn’t really get the gist of my message… they morph it to their benefit, perhaps unintentionally.
Were you in California for the R/E crash in the early to mid 90s?
Hi Nancy,
I’m a lurker on this blog and I agree with a lot of what you’re saying:
1. Not looking at the world in black and white
2. Not being overly attached to formulas
3. Taking a conservative/responsible long-term view
I’m not sure how long you’ve watched this blog, but I just want to point out some of the benefits. With the data and information made available here and through other sources, I made the call to sell my condo in early 2008 (purchased in 2000). When I buy my home later this year or early next year, it will be with a much larger cash cushion than I would have had without the information found on this blog and others.
I don’t care about formulas or models for how the world ‘should be’. I *do* care about spotting a down market in time to sell ahead of it. This blog (and others) helped me to do that. Like you, I care about raising my family in a sane, sustainable economic situation.
This information source, helped me sell put me a solid 5 years of savings ahead of where I would have been. To me, that equals less time and worry slaving away for dollars and more time with my family.
For that, I am grateful.
What’s up with the light fixture on the beam of the loft ceiling? I wanted to post the photo but didn’t know how….. perhaps AZ can post it?
Indeed.
http://www.crackthecode.us/images/vac_carpet.jpg
Nice lipstick, David!
Seems this blog’s calls to “not buy” aren’t being heeded in the OC. Read the story about reduced inventory of distressed housing here:
http://mortgage.freedomblogging.com/2009/07/01/distressed-housing-inventory-down-46-since-december/12951/
Also check out the linked article within on demand for OC homes… there’s really informative tables and data, e.g.:
* For under a half-million, it theoretically will take 1.58 months to sell off all inventory.
* Half-mil to $1 million? 2.75 months.
* If it’s a 7-figure listing, it’s 13.08 months.
Whoever’s buying now is not reading this blog. A week or so back one of the seller’s came on. “Property Owner”. IR had profiled him partially because he had taken out little to no home-equity in loans (I don’t recall if it was next to nothing or nothing). He came on and was nice and countered people’s arguments against his neighborhood and the citing of his house well. Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to help because pretty much, people who are on here don’t like today’s prices. But, given the comps in his neighborhood it shouldn’t matter, he was priced appropriately for the market.
Did you ever find the spreadsheet of closings in Irvine? If you click on forums and search for spreadsheet you’ll find it, directly in excel format.
IR, Ipop, anyone, IR has contended that the size of downpayments is decreasing. But there’s so much scatter in individual transactions that that’s not visually clear from the excel file in table form. Can someone please make it into a scatter plot by date with a running average or something and post it to the main blog? You could break it down by price tier, or do it both by percentage DP and by dollar amount. Thanks!!!!
one of the biggest mistakes people make when deciding what to invest in and when…. is transaction data….. it is virtually worthless, and will lead to bad decisions, better to look at future outlook. The unemployment picture, income pressures, and notice of defaults will give you the data you need to make your decision.
Cat5 ready too!
http://www.crackthecode.us/images/cat5_ready.jpg
That last picture . . . “Can’t sleep . . . geek will eat me!”
Thanks AZ!
Here is one more suited to your question:
http://www.crackthecode.us/images/WTF_Is_This_Light_On_Beam.jpg
Hmmm, every room wired for ‘Cad 5?’ You mean they bought Autodesk licenses for every room? That’s a lot of aspiring computer assisted drafting peeps for one house. Perhaps the realtard meant ‘Cat 5’ as in Category 5 computer cabling. %-P
Hello the year 2000 called, they want their technology back. Seriously, one word: wifi!
Not really, you can not do GigE over 802.11n.
802.11g/n are fine for client machines that won’t do too much heavy duty file transfers… YOu should always wire your servers for performance and security.
Hi!
I read the blog for few months now and still can not figure out what would be “good” price for a property that could be rented for 3000-3500$?
We are a couple that itemize w/o mortgage interest, just because of state and city taxes are higher than standard deduction. We are in 28% percentile for federal taxes and approx 11% state+city.
Thanks in advance
Meet with a local tax accountant to run some numbers for you. Some will have a good feel for the market and the economy and some not so good. Much of Sch A deductions can be canceled by AMT. The account will be able to show you how much. So much of the sales pitch of deductions don’t work out as the RE agents estimate. Other costs of ownership are non-sch A expenses such as HOA, repair, condo fees, utilities, replacement cost, etc.
Some other factors to consider are freedom remodeling the place to your desire, no evictions, lack of liquidity or ability to move easily, and cost to sale the place.
Some people use a gross multiplier of 15 times the yearly rent.
“http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090702/bs_nm/us_usa_economy_26”
More green shoots.
The worse is behind us.
The economy is getting better.
Green Shoots = Bear Trap