RE

I was thinking as I drove around town over the last couple of weeks that there seemed like more for sale signs were out by the road than usual, but a check of Yahoo real estate shows 18 foreclosures and 109 existing homes for sale, which is pretty stable with the last few weeks. So I guess appearances can be deceiving and a simple check of the facts is often needed for any kind of "common sense": DUH!

I've been wondering if I should try to find another rubric for measuring the real estate market.  

Interactive Map Showing Unemployment Rates And Housing Boom Locations

Found something interesting in a link to the NY Times:

"Job losses have been most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing and those that already had the highest unemployment rates. (Updated March 19 with January data.)"

You'll love the map, which shows Chester County's unemployment rate at 5.6 (I believe) and Cecil at 9.1. Wow, and what with Elk right along that line, I wonder what southern Chester County's unemployment is.

Trip Across Country PIcs and RE

This is out the window of the plane, looking north, just west of Fort Collins, Colorado. If you look closely, you can see that there are two giant buttes down there in the front of the image.

This is an image of examples of the largest trees in the world. 400 feet high and almost 3,000 years old. 

This is the view from a restaurant called the Cliff House, where I had a glass of wine and watched the sun go down into the Pacific. The hill two miles or so across the water is Marin County, CA. Want to talk about expensive real estate?

Let's talk about our local real estate (once again, as always, using yahoo real estate for the metrics):

18 foreclosures and 106 existing homes for sale, and it's nice to see the FCs under 20 again. I was thinking about that jump to 23 FCs last week, yesterday as I was driving around: probably that temporary spike in FCs was caused by the long lagtime it takes the banks to unravel liens, etc. when a property moves from NOD (notice of default) letter to bank-owned REO. How three jumped off the radar like that is anyone's guess. It wouldn't surprise me if there were listing agents who listed REOs for a day to a week and already had under-offers from fellow Realtors (another word for liars), as this is a scam that has been ongoing on the west coast and in FLA.

Cool sunny morning today--a quick frost last night, but the grass is greener since last week and the crocuses (croci?) are up. We're in what I would definitely call spring. 

PA Wine Laws: A Disgrace!

I would love to order a case of very good CA wine, but because we live in taliban central, I can't get any winery to send wine into PA (or MD or DE, for that matter). What a joke!

Why is it that buying a case of beer is acceptable (and to whom is it acceptable) but buying a single bottle or a six-pack is not acceptable?

Is there any group that actually thinks that the PA booze laws make any sense at all or serve any purpose at all? 

I rarely buy booze, wine, and beer in PA; I drive over the border and get it there. Sometimes it boggles the mind that both parties talk about the invisible hand of the market and all that bullshit, and obviously this state needs more tax revenue, but they don't think about how much money they could make if they stopped their anti-market based little booze cartel.

Here's the reason I got so peeved: http://wi.shipcompliant.com/Home.aspx?SaleTypeID=1

Here's a toast from a bottle of wine that comes from a case I bought last summer for almost 400 bucks--tax money that's right in the MD coffers. Cheers!

RE This Week

104 and 21, which is a few more FCs than last week but about the same number of existing homes.

What is somewhat surprising to me is that I think we will see a rise in inventory as we enter the spring/summer selling season. I hadn't thought that foreclosure numbers would rise since they have been fairly stable for the last year. FC, you'll remember, are comp killers and not just in some facile Ayn Rand "Oh the market will work things out" kind of way. In fact and very specifically, a FC within a few miles on a similar home will cause a mortgage lender to ratchet down the amount it will lend. For instance, say I'm selling a four and three and a half on an acre, and there's a similar home--like the longtime FC on Morningmist, which is a ten or so year old development of nice colonials just off 472 and Glen Dale (or is it Glendale?)--the bank is going to look at all recent sales and sales activity as it prepares the mortgage analysis, and the "value" of the home will be held in comparison to the FC. Oftentimes, I have heard that mortgage banks often ask the buyers to make up the difference between the sales price and the comps, and this difference can be pretty noticeable if there is a FC in the comparisons.

So it's been a wild ride sof ar. Let's see what happens this selling season.

Oh, by the way, how many times have you heard this phrase recently (and not just about real estate): "There's never been a better time to buy"? American cars and other high priced goods are being wrapped in the "Buy: it's your patriotic duty" mantra now more than ever.

New BLS Unemployment Stats

from here, so you can go verify my work:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm

Unemployment data from that page:

Pennsylvania ...................| 4.6 | 7.0 | 2.4
The first number (4.6) is January 2008 unemployment; the second (7.0) is from Jan 2009, and the 2.4 percent is the calculated increase, which a table at the bottom of the page tells us translates into 72,000 lost jobs in that one year period.

MD and DE went up 2.6 and 2.8, while the two Carolinas top the job loss with both up 4 and a half or so each.

Real Estate and Job Loss

This is a chart produced by Speaker Pelosi. Now I know some of you just hate her and all... Whatever. OK, are you over your little flash of anger. Now look at the chart above. Click on it for better detail. It shows job loss in this recession compared to other recessions. Job loss is the big concern for me in this post, especially as it plays out against average home prices. 

105 and 18. That's almost a double in the number of foreclosures in about a week.

Here's some information from ZIllow, the RE site:

Oxford Home Values and House Prices
Population: 5,226
Zindex® $249,500 (Average home price)
Average prices are down 7.4 percent from last year.

The first figure is the OXFORD figure, and the second figure is the national average. I'll bold the OXFORD figures.
Zillow Home Value Index: $249,500 $202,522
1-Yr. Change: -$20,000 -$26,130
Zestimate Per Sq. Ft.: $143 $258
Flips (Sold Twice Within the Last Yr.): 0.0% 2.3%
Turnover (Sold Within Last Yr.): 2.3% 2.2%
Property Tax: $3,708 $2,861
Median Condo Value: $267,500 $216,500
Median Single Family Home Value: $266,500 $234,000
Median 1-Bedroom Home Value: $180,500 $196,500
Median 2-Bedroom Home Value: $198,000 $205,000
Median 3-Bedroom Home Value: $243,000 $231,500
Median 4-Bedroom Home Value: $300,500 $337,500

Just from what I observe, I think that the Oxford prices for 2, 3, and 4 bedroom houses is a little inflated. Maybe Zillow gets this info from the LISTING prices as opposed to the SALE prices.  Either way, with only a 2.3% turnover rate, there isn't exactly a lot of sales from which to garner info. Think about it for a second: we've looked at a figure of about 100 existing homes for the last several months. Zillow is telling us that only 2 of those have sold in that time period! Talk about anemic sales.

To say the least, it's a buyer's market, and with the most recent jobs report (down another 600 thousand jobs nationally) and the insanity of the big banks (which should be "nationalized" in exactly the same way that sinking banks are "nationalized" by the FDIC), potential buyers are about as scarce as the mortgages they might want to apply for. 

Sit tight, folks, it ain't at the bottom yet.

RE News from Maryland That Might Be Pertinent to our Area

"“The problem for a number of potential first-time buyers - and thus for all sellers - is that prices are still high compared with incomes. After doubling between 2000 and 2007, the average metro-area home price dropped to $306,000 last year. To swing that, a first-time buyer with a 10 percent down payment would need a salary of about $70,000. And $306,000 was the average for all homes, from condos to Colonials. Most single-family homes are more expensive.”

“People who can’t sell their starter homes can’t buy a bigger place, and the owners of those bigger places can’t go anywhere, either. That’s why economists say home sales probably won’t increase until prices fall even more, as they have in other parts of the nation. ‘The buyer’s going to win this game of chicken,’ said Anirban Basu, a Baltimore economist.” "

From: http://thehousingbubbleblog.com/index.html March 4, 2009

This excerpt was from a Baltimore-based article, but I think it portends a grim RE future for us in southern PA because, except for the DC area, which has seen some slippage but is still a pretty good market (in comparison to other places, or this is what I am told), many areas in MD didn't see the same bubble inflation, just as we here in southern PA/Chester County saw prices increases but not at the same rates as other places.

Long story short: There are a lot of upper-end colonial development homes on the market right now--many of them in the high 300s/low 400s--and the very people that those sellers are trying to attract are likely trying to sell their lower-end homes to no avail.

Another article mentioned that incomes need to rise or prices need to fall to get to a sweet spot where having a twenty percent downpayment will be more common as we move forward. Folks, the days of Liar loans/No Docs and No Downpayment loans are definitely over. As a matter of fact, I bet it's pretty damned tough to get a regular thirty or forty year fixed rate even with twenty percent down.

RE This Week, Snow Story, Potholes, and Some Nice Aesthetic Improvements

The photo on the left is off the first farm on the left heading east on Stricklersville Road (down a little and across the street from the old schoolhouse that's now a hairdresser's place), which I was told was close to becoming a development. I don't know if you can make out the farm equipment in the field, but, once again, I doubt that this farm-owner is going to develop any homes here this year. 

The second, middle pic is of the abandoned farmhouse on Lewisville, where Brick Meetinghouse Road (I'm pretty sure that's the street name) ends and meets 841/Lewisville Road, just south of Stricklersville Road. It's a nice place but has been unoccupied for the last four, five, six years now. Someone put a little paint on it and cleaned it up recently, and it's looking better; although, it would be nice to see someone living there.

The photo on the right is the real news. That's the apartment house on the corner of Stricklersville and Lewisville, which was for sale last summer (I don't know if it ever traded hands), but when it was for sale, there were some improvements done to it, and the biggest improvement, I think everyone will agree, is the coat of blue paint on it. I wouldn't say that this little intersection area (Stricklersville, Lewisville/841/Brick Meetinghouse) is densely populated, but the houses are a little closer together than other areas of Elk and it's sort of the back-end of the old village, and it's an area that has several really nice places, and there's just one more that looks like it's a rental currently that needs a new coat of burnt umber/yellow paint to make it more presentable.  

OK, let's talk about real estate.

Yahoo Real Estate: 110 existing and 10 foreclosures. So the inventory is down slightly; this is no surprise: I'm betting a couple to three dozen went off-market when the holidays came around, and I'm betting we'll see about 40 homes come online sometime next month when the spring buying-season begins. My guess is that this will be another buying-season that has few sales and mostly adds inventory into the game. I don't know if I'll recall, but I guess that with the big banks still struggling and making huge mistakes with our tax money (thanks George Bush! for that first trillion dollar smash and grab of Treasury funds) and unemployment high and the economy lagging (we're down to 1997 Dow numbers of below 7000 today!), there will be 170 homes and 15 to 20 FCs killing comps come Memorial Day.

Hell of a snowstorm last night and this morning. We got about 6 inches with winds about 25 MPH and temps down in the low 20s. Last week was pretty nice, and it looks like this weekend the temps are back into the normal range of 40s and low 50s during the day. The sun is certainly powerful now, and the driveway, which I shoveled around 11:30 this morning, is now almost completely dry. Can't say anything about the snow removal for this storm since I haven't left the house. I did see a truck driving along the streets at about 5 am this morning, and the road looks pretty cleared out right now. So let's chalk up yet another good job to whoever is taking care of the roads here in Elk last night and today. Good work, Guys!

On another note, the potholes are getting out of hand in some places around town. On Saturday I commented to the passenger in the car with me that none of the Supervisors must notice the giant pothole on southbound 472 about fifty feet from the southernmost end of 472. It's right outside the township building, and it's growing by the week, but I guess I'm the only one who bangs through it when I forget to navigate around it.