bubbleinfo.com

This will be extremely boring for most viewers, especially those who hate salespeople. If it gets deleted, you’ll know why:

Thanks to swm for the idea – let’s make it an ice cream social!

Plan to come this Saturday, August 7th from noon until 2pm at the La Costa Ave Park-N-Ride on the border of Encinitas – convenient for all!  There will be more details posted here on Friday, but here is the link that maps the location:

This morning Maureen Cavanaugh and the staff at KPBS were nice enough to include me on their radio show, “These Days”.  They will have the full transcript later today or tomorrow at their website: Link to KPBS website

Here’s how it looked to Jim TV:

Thanks to those who listened, and to shadash for calling in!

Tomorrow (Monday) will be my local KPBS radio debut at 89.5 FM, and before you start…..I’ve already heard it a million times….that I have the perfect face for radio!

Maureen Cavanaugh is the host of These Days, which begins at 9am Monday through Thursday.  I’ll be on the show with SDSU professor and mortgage broker Mark Goldman.  Our portion will start around 9:20am, and it is a call-in show.  If you’d like to try to get past the screener to heckle me, the phone number is 1-888-895-5727.  Good luck!

Here is the link to their web page:

http://www.kpbs.org/news/these-days/

It looks like once the show is complete you will be able to listen to the show, and read the transcript.

Nick at the Wall Street Journal has captured the current market conditions, and adds some anecdotal evidence to the The Big Cancellation coming later when sellers give up, rather than lower their price – here’s an excerpt:

Reports should show that completed transactions of home sales held up through June. But newly signed contracts in May and June have plunged.

To be sure, some housing markets show signs of healing. Home-sales activity in New York, Washington, D.C., and parts of California continue to improve. But other markets, including Tampa, Fla., and Chicago, face rising foreclosures and weak job growth.

Low mortgage rates and falling prices have made homes more affordable in many markets than at any time in the past decade. But those affordability gains have been offset for many buyers by tighter lending standards, particularly for “jumbo” loans that are too large for government backing. Banks are requiring down payments of 20% and more and strong credit scores because they must hold jumbo loans in their portfolios.

More broadly, the housing market faces two big problems: too many homes and falling demand. More than seven million borrowers are 30 days or more past due on their mortgage payments or in some stage of foreclosure. Rising foreclosures will keep pressure on prices as banks put more homes on the market.

Last month, nearly 39,000 borrowers received government-backed loan modifications, but more than 90,000 borrowers fell out of the program, the Obama administration said on Tuesday.

Moreover, the pool of potential buyers remains constrained by the unprecedented number of homeowners who are underwater, or who owe more than their homes are worth.

That’s making it particularly hard for traditional “trade up” homeowners like Maria Billis to pull the trigger on a home purchase. Ms. Billis can’t sell her townhouse in Boynton Beach, Fla., because its value has fallen by a quarter. That puts it below the $160,000 that she owes the bank.

The 31-year-old human resources consultant, who married last month and wants to start a family, found a half-dozen homes in her price range but doesn’t want to sell her current home for less than the amount owed. She has considered buying the new home and renting the townhouse, but concedes, “It’s a big risk.”

Mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also are starting to push more repossessed homes onto the market. The companies owned 164,000 homes at the end of March, up 80% from a year ago.

Another reason inventory is rising: “Unrealistic sellers have flooded the market” after reports of bidding wars and home-price increases earlier in the year, says Steven Thomas, president of Altera Real Estate, a brokerage in Orange County. The amount of time that homes there have sat on the market there has swelled to 3.78 months, up from 2.35 months in April.

“The sellers think the market’s coming back. They’ve tacked on an extra 5 to 10 to 15%. The buyers aren’t going for it,” says Jim Klinge, a real-estate agent in Carlsbad, Calif. Over the next six months, “it’s going to feel like a double-dip because sellers are going to have to lower their prices.”

Not all sellers will take that step. Jerry Anderson has listed his four-bedroom home in Dana Point, Calif., on and off the market for the last two years. He’s cut the price to $1.25 million, down from $1.75 million, but hasn’t had any offers on the home, which has four bedrooms, three fireplaces and ocean views.

Mr. Anderson, who bought the home in 1987, says he’ll take it off the market in December if it doesn’t sell rather than cut the price.

Matt Carney listed his Moreno Valley, Calif., home for $337,000 in February, and lowered the price on Tuesday for the third time, to $297,000. He says he can’t go any lower because he owes $274,000 on the home and doesn’t want to dip into savings to pay for transaction costs.

I mentioned in the previous post’s comment section that I thought my advice was conservative in nature.  It sounded vague, so here’s more detail.

It’s hard to believe that buyers overlook the low comps created by realtor shenanigans.

Here’s an example, one of many being inflicted on the marketplace every day.

First off, I struggle with the thought that there are still million-dollar houses in La Costa Greens.  It’s a neighborhood built and sold at the peak, and the school districts are split between Carlsbad and San Marcos, which means that many potential buyers who may like one school district, but not the other, will likely write off the whole neighborhood.

There have been several homes foreclosed, and many more on the f-list.  In short, a neighborhood where you would think buyers would need to be very conservative.

I showed this 3,652sf house to the Cable Girl the other day, listed for $1,095,000:

Active listing on Verm

It has some nice features, even it’s own putting green with real grass.

But we know about this recent 4,193sf sale around the corner.  The for-sale sign went up early, the typical “pre-marketing” done by many listing agents, and a couple of days later it went down.

A month later it pops up on the MLS as a sold listing, closed May 28th for $815,100, and marked as a round-tripper:

Sold on Lapis

My job is simple – convince the listing agent to sell the $1,095,000 property in the low-$800,000s – after all, the most recent and bigger comp closed for that right around the corner, isn’t that the new standard?  So I get the agent on the phone….

He sold it over the weekend for more than a million!

Mozart is the only guy who was willing to go out on the limb last year and call bottom.  If buyers are so motivated that they continue to justify and/or ignore comps like this, he might be right.

Other components of why I am conservative about the real estate market

1. Buyers have access to all the comps - that should make for smarter decisions.

2. There is no easy money – everyone who finances must qualify.

3. I don’t think buyers believe the realtor-mantra, “buy, buy, buy, it only goes up” anymore.

These three items are opposites from the peak, and the additional realtor shenanigans rub salt in the wound.  Will the inventory stay tight, mortgage rates stay ultra-low, and plenty of “good-enough” deals come along that even the skeptical stay engaged?

Is there a real estate revolution available, beyond just a fancy new MLS website?

Zip Realty has blazed the trail.  They offer:

1. Their own search website
2. Rebates
3. Phone Apps
4. Salaries to agents
5. Catchy name, and national exposure

Their website is of particular interest.  They mention:

Our ZAP technology also includes a customer relationship management system that identifies and analyzes user behavior on our website allowing us to provide more relevant information and service to clients and a business management system that allows our managers to monitor the activities of our ZipAgents to verify a high level of client service.

They monitor your usage of their website.  They track the houses you’ve viewed on-line, and how long you spend looking at each house - figuring the longer you look, the more you like it.  Then they send a report to your designated Zip agent.

It sounds a little creepy, but from the agent/broker perspective, it is a very effective way to identify the clients who are motivated, and keep the agents focused on productivity.

If you were thinking about how you might create more than just a fancy website, and wanted to change the business, you’d admire Zip’s model. Redfin is another company that publicly set out to revolutionize the business with a very popular website and rebates. How is it working in San Diego?

Zip Realty started in 1999, so you’d think by now they would be gaining traction, but in 1Q10 they lost $6.2 million. Redfin is privately-held, but according to wiki they’ve poured $20 million of venture capital into their company.

Yet based on the number of sales, neither has been able to revolutionize the real estate world as we know it, at least not in San Diego. There have been 12,320 detached, attached and 2-4 unit sales in 2010, year-to-date.

Why? Because the more-experienced agents are able to beat the others to the punch – they recognize the best buys faster, their clients tend to be better qualified, and the respect/camaraderie between the veteran agents will trump the less-experienced agents in a close race.

Any revolution would have to embrace the more-experienced agents, or over-run them. A company like Google would have to set up an auction house with full transparency to topple the old guard.

P.S. I have never had a bad experience with any Zip or Redfin agents, and I mention my stats as a middle-of-the-road example – there are agents who sell a lot more houses than I do. Because it’s been mentioned here several times that the sales history of each agent should be out in the open to assist consumers with evaluating realtors, let it start with me.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!

When it is so competitive for the good buys, how does a buyer compete when he’s out of town?

Do you jump on a plane for every new listing?

There were multiple offers on this 3,454sf house, and according to the seller/agent, they were all very similar.  Typically when a buyer hasn’t seen the house they get eliminated immediately.  But in this case, I showed this video to the sellers too, and convinced them that it was close enough to a personal visit that my buyer was very comfortable proceeding.  They agreed!

He came in for the physical inspection and had the same impressions of the house as he did from the video.  He still liked it! We did the final walk-through by video too, and it closed escrow Friday for $685,000, with the buyer having to come to town just once.

I appreciate all the car support from readers! 

I’ve been doing my own research project too, see the youtube review below. But in the video I screwed up – I was blabbing about the ‘69 Camaro Indy 500 Pace Car model and by mistake called it a California Special, a real insult.  I apologize to Camaro lovers everywhere.

Clarification:

A white ‘67 Camaro convertible paced that year’s Indy 500 and some 100 examples were built for speedway use, but it wasn’t a special edition.

When the Camaro again was invited to pace the ‘69 race, Chevy determinedly exploited every aspect of the expensive opportunity. Thus was born regular production option Z11, a $37 striping package that recast a Camaro convertible into a Pace Car.

That $37 price is deceiving, because the RS trim package (which included hidden headlamps) and the SS trim package (with the Z/28-style Cowl Induction hood and decklid spoiler) also were required. Furthermore, the Pace Cars had their own special interior with orange and white hound’s-tooth upholstery complementing the orange stripes and white paint. Buyers could choose either the 350-cubic-inch/300 horsepower small-block V-8 or one of the four 396-cubic-inch big-block V-8s with outputs ranging from 325 to 375 horsepower (the latter with aluminum cylinder heads and an 11.0:1 compression ratio). The car 1960 Indy 500 winner Jim Rathmann drove at the head of the 1969 Indy field was powered by the 375-horse 396, but the vast majority of the 3675 replicas were 350-powered.

The plan for the Big Daddy Caddy unraveled: