For those who are looking for home-building ideas, or for those who just like pretty pictures, click here to see the WSJ’s featured homes from around the country.
They include stories about the homeowners, and why they are selling – the justifications are very creative, and, you guessed it, nobody is giving it away.
A gallery of outrageousness!
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is selling some seized homes in the Cleveland area for as little as $100.
HUD announced an agreement last week with an Ohio nonprofit in which the department will sell hundreds of homes to stabilize neighborhoods hit hard by the foreclosure crisis.
HUD will first inspect newly acquired foreclosed properties in its inventory and give the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp. the opportunity to buy the homes at deep discounts. Homes valued at $20,001 to $100,000 will be sold at a 30% discount for an initial five-day period. After 60 days, the homes will be sold at a 50% discount. Homes worth less than $20,000 will be sold for $100, HUD said.
The nonprofit, which was set up by the state, received a $41 million grant from HUD this year to purchase and redevelop foreclosed or abandoned properties.
I imagine any house worth less than $100 is a total fixer in a bad neighborhood.
Errr…less than $20k, sold for $100. Whatever.
I love the story about Montana Ranch Auction home, Jim. Some tidbits from the article:
1. 10,000 sf/ 9 bedroom/2 bath
2. The owners are selling so they can move out of state.
3. 400-ton stone hearth fireplace in main area.
4. The listing agent says she has had the listing for about TWO years with an UNCHANGED asking price of $13.9 million.
5. The owners have now decided to try an auction (July 7).
6. There is a published reserve price of $4.5 million. (guaranteed to sell once bidding hits that price).
And I just love this quote by the lady at the auction company: “They just haven’t been able to generate the price that they wanted, and they want to sell by a certain date”…
I’d love to hear if they sold it yesterday and for what price! The $4.5 million reserve price is a 67% decline from the price they held onto for two years…
According to information provided to HousingWire by Ginnie Mae, total guaranteed MBS issuance is up to $306.9bn in the first three quarters of fiscal year (FY) 2010.
This builds on growing issuance at Ginnie, to $418.9bn in FY 2009, from $220.6bn in FY 2008 and $85.1bn in FY 2007.
(looks about the same as last year)
From the NY Times:”Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich – Wealthy See Loss of Home As One Bad Investment and Walk Away”.
Full article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38158763/ns/business-real_estate
Nine bedrooms and only two baths? WTF?
Two baths? Fewer toilets for the undocumented workers to clean.
I thought that article Susie provided a link to sounded interesting, but the journalists didn’t do their job. All those off the cuff statements without any pretense of checking the facts!
The actual statement is that “more than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars is seriously delinquent.” It’s a jump to speculate that those people must be “rich”. Maybe they are, or maybe they were just buying far outside their supportable means.
Another entirely plausible theory is that the more value a home has lost, then the more likely the owner is to walk away. For equal-percentage drops, you’d see people with high-value mortgages walking away much more than people with cheap-value mortgages.
They could have proved their point if they found an association between the owner’s net worth (exclusive of the property in question) and the rate of mortgage delinquency. It would have been too much work to figure that out though.