Please post your local house search updates, MLS finds, on-topic ideas, and links here.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Northern Virginia Real Estate Statistics
REAL ESTATE SEARCH
County Assessment Websites
Buy/Sell Without an Agent
Local Real Estate Agents
Housing Economics Blogs
Local Interest
Housing Bubble Links
Eastern Regional Blogs
Western Regional Blogs
- Bakersfield Bubble
- Bay Area Real Estate Blog
- BubbleInfo (N. San Diego)
- Burbed (San Francisco)
- Dr. Housing Bubble (SoCal)
- Patrick.net (San Francisco)
- Portland Housing Blog
- Professor Piggington's Econo-Almanac
- Rancid Truth (Orange County)
- Sacramento Land(ing)
- Seattle Bubble
- SoCal Real Estate Bubble Blog
- Socket Site (San Francisco)
Real Estate Blogs
REAL ESTATE AUCTIONS
8 comments:
Think housing is recovering? Think again.
Quote:
Government life support
Indeed, first-time buyers accounted for nearly half of the homes purchased in April. Buying has also been spurred by historically low mortgage rates, which have been kept modest by the Federal Reserve's recently expired $1.25 trillion mortgage-securities purchase program and by lenient lending standards at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). In all, the US government, through Fannie Mae (FNM, Fortune 500), Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500) and the FHA, underpins about 95% of the mortgage market. "This is a market purely on life support, sustained by the federal government," noted FHA's head, David Stevens, at the Mortgage Bankers Association conference yesterday. His agency is tightening lending -- which could take more buyers out of the market.
It's always a great time to buy a home.
When the market is hot, you need to buy because you'll soon be priced out. You should never rent. When the market is lukewarm you need to buy so you can ride the wave of building wealth through equity growth. When the market is tanking, you need to buy because only foreclosures with mold and nuclear waste will be left at the bottom of the cycle. And when the market is absolutely down in the gutter, how can you lose by buying in at the bottom?
And on the other side:
It's never a good time to buy a home:
You should never buy at the bottom when only the dregs of listings are left. You're better off renting. You should never buy when the market is starting to recover because doom is just around the corner and you could be upside in your mortgage in mere days. You should never buy in a flat market because a dip is just around the corner. And you should never ever buy in a strong sellers market because all it takes is one dip and you'll lose all that equity you just didn't earn.
Is that it or did I miss a segment?
My rules are simple. When I understand the market *and* it makes sense, I feel confident enough to make a 15 or 30 year investment. My analysis is long-term irrespective of the current market conditions.
And when I don't understand the market, when the talk is a cacophony of opinions with no clear consensus, then I am reluctant to buy because that in itself is a sure sign of lack of confidence in the market.
When the people are scared they talk their fears out on blogs, columns, and talk shows. When they aren't fearful, their lives move on in silence. Or as they used to say back home "When the sun is shining...make hay."
For personal home ownership, the the skill to acquire seems to be to find a deal that makes sense to you personally and financially. When it makes financial sense, you should do what is best financially. And when it doesn't, you shouldn't.
Have no debt.
Pay cash.
Live like no one else so you can live like no one else.
And don't buy a home for the wrong reason. Buy it for the right one.
Harriet et al.,
Here is the WaPo's Ombudsman's column on the protest at the bank official's house that you posted about recently:
Ombuds column
It would have been nice if he had sorted out some of the factual disputes (e.g., does Easton have these ties?), but maybe that's not part of the ombuds. role. I don't think the ombuds. is as effective as s/he could be without getting the factual discrepancies out of the way and focusing on remaining issues, e.g., even if Easton had those ties, is what she reported true, and if so, why didn't the WaPo report on this story? Or some reporter should have been assigned to follow up, if that's not the ombuds.'s role. Help the public understand what happened by finding out the facts, not just reporting one side's story and then the other side's.
The Fred Phelps case that the USSC will review may answer some of the questions Alexander raised.
Military funeral protests
Texas Native,
Part of the problem is that there ARE better times to buy than others (financially speaking, aside from personal reasons to buy or not), but speaking only for myself, I can't see them except in retrospect. Same with the stock market. I don't know what predicts markets' trends upward, downward, etc. The experts seem divided on predictors.
For example, now we can all see that late 2006 was not a great time to buy in most neighborhoods in NoVA, and some said that at the time.
So while some speakers' self-interest determines what they say ("buy (my listing) now; it's a great time to buy!"), sometimes it's just different predictions about what the future will bring.
Ace,
Thanks for the link. This sums up perfectly how I felt about the matter and why I brought it up:
"To survive, The Post needs to own its local audience. Readers lose faith when there's news in their backyard but not a word in their newspaper".
I would like to see the Washington Post do a better job on reporting in general. I worked in publishing in D.C. when I was out of college, and to do that I had to be a member of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. I felt at the time that it wasn't easy to be outstanding or a go-getter in that environment. With so much Internet competition, I think there's an uphill battle for a union shop in the publishing industry. Bloggers work for pennies an hour.
This article is probably worth reading for those who are interested in pursuing short sales. It was written for California specifically, though much of it may hold true in Virginia as well.
c,
That's in interesting article. Personally, I have decided to stay away from SS a while back because of its known issues and complexity involved.
When I see SS get listed at 10% above its 2004/2005 purchase price just goes to show the scale of speculation that occurred around here. Usage of homes as ATM machines has been no less than what you see in other regions such as CA/NV/FL.
spider,
Use of houses as ATMs has been "no less" than in CA/NV/FL??
If you think that you haven't been watching CA very closely. Percentage-wise that's just factually incorrect. HELOC abuse leading to eventual inevitable foreclosure has also pervaded here, but I'm pretty certain that on a percentage of homeowners basis, the prevalence differs by at least a factor of two from urban areas in CA to our urban area.
If you were just being hyperbolic, fine, we all do that, but
if you disagree, and think that the percent of homeowners who took out their maximum allowed amount of available equity at or near the peak is the same here as say LA, then go find some numbers to back that up.
Post a Comment