Real Estate Posting

RE this week: 105 existing homes and 7 foreclosures. That's an interesting move in a week!

Also I saw an excerpt from an article about the north Texas RE market. I'm thinking that posting it in full is better than making fun of the logic and paraphrasing. So here goes:

The supply of unsold new homes in North Texas is less than half what it is in hard-hit markets in California and Florida. But that doesn’t mean the housing industry here hasn’t suffered. Single-family home starts have fallen more than 60 percent since the peak in 2006. And several prominent homebuilding firms in the area have gone out of business.”

“‘We’ve seen some fallout and are likely to see some more,’ said Texas builders president Ron Connally of Amarillo. ‘There are a lot of good builders out there who haven’t done anything wrong who have been caught.’”

“The National Association of Home Builders has seen its membership decline by almost 50,000. ‘Our biggest obstacle is getting the financing,’ Connally said. ‘We very well could wake up and see shortages in the market by the time this thing sorts out.’”

I mean, come on! The Homebuilder's Association has lost members (naturally) and the big concern is that at some point in the future, we'll not have enough new real estate to meet our needs. Talk about drinking the KoolAid in Jonestown; There's no going back to the easy credit of the 1990s and 2000s, and without that easy credit (which is also easy foreclosure situations, as the current economic crisis has made clear), there will likely not be a need for new inventory in a general way (not to say that specific area or regional development, say waterfront on the Chesapeake, will not continue to be built) for the foreseeable and then some future.

What also bothers me is the notion that something is stopping the tough-guy homebuilders from north texas from plying their trade. Yeah, it's called an insolvent banking industry that received part of its deathblow from you vampiric developers.