The more of you we have believing in the mantra of “bottom is here”, the worse real bottom will be in about 5 years.

Unless you have 500K in cash, I am not sure why people are dying to buy a house. The reality is if you finance your mortgage, you are not buying. You are renting! You are renting from the bank rather than the owner of the property. Anyway, all those waiting on the sideline, please buy now! Buy as many as you can. Thanks for making the real bottom much worse than it should be.

How doe the banks actually decide which agents get to list/market their REOs?

Thanks

They do this to limit the losses they take in a quarter. If they took all of the losses now, then many of the banks would be insolvent and have to be taken over by the FDIC. Unfortunately, the FDIC is not staffed up to handle this flood of insolvent banks. They FDIC is working on it and hiring like crazy in their Irvine office and Dallas office (the central location they use to liquidate the assets).

Also, the banks use this delay to help limit their losses they occur in each quater in the hopes that the spread they earn between their deposits and thier good assets will help them absorb those losses. In other words, they are trying to earn themselves out of the position. This can work but it takes a long time and hurts a lot during the interim period.

So if the banks have a good enough quarter they will list more REO’s for sale and foreclose on more loans. To them, it is about timing of the losses.

I too think that the median selling price will be up (18% is a good bet), since the mix of housing that will be selling one year from now will be quite different. Many more formerly $750k houses selling at $500k than formerly $500k houses selling at $200k. Remember median is the middle sales price.

But if you look at the Case-Shiller paired sales number, I predict that Del Sur Renter will be correct.

The CS index will be *down* 18% next year.

(Actually, I’m hoping for more than an 18% decline, but not holding my breath until the fed and state gov’ts butt out of FCs and stop with the moritoria.)

For Zip 92037, HouseRebate.com reports:
Detached: 11 pendings
Attached: 21 pendings

Usually HouseRebate.com’s numbers are accurate. However, I checked a few other zips. They are all lower than your pending counts. Probably a timing issue. Things are moving pretty fast right now.

Today’s MLS detached count for 92037 is:

40 pendings
14 contingents

Are you saying there are some shaky escrows???

P.S. Check your mail today!

La Jolla currently has only about 10 detached homes in escrow. Their act/pend ratio is similar to RSF.

Thanks for the happy faces.