Housing Demand Drys Up In Southern California
According to Hagerty’s article in the WSJ, Mortgage Woes Force Banks To Take Hits to Sell Homes,
An auction of nearly 100 foreclosed homes here Saturday showed that mortgage lenders are having to accept huge discounts in some cases to unload such properties.A surge of foreclosures over the past year or so has left lenders struggling to sell a growing backlog of homes.
At the San Diego sale, houses and condos typically sold for about 30% below the previous sale or appraisal prices. In a few cases, the discounts were around 50%.
But Ramsey Su, a San Diego investor and former real-estate broker specializing in foreclosed properties, said prices were surprisingly low on some homes and the auction showed that “demand is not that strong.”
The soaring prices of the first half of the decade priced many people out of the market, and lenders’ recent tightening of standards has made it harder for others to get loans. A glut of condominiums also is weighing on the market. Peter Dennehy, a senior vice president at Sullivan Group Real Estate Advisors, a research firm here, estimates that at the current sales rate there are enough condos on the market to last about 29 months.
Unfortunately I was in El Centro for the weekend so I missed the auction that was held at the San Diego Convention Center. (But I did see premium gas selling for $3.99 in El Centro, sand dunes, and a gas station for sale with an estimated cash on cash return of 38% that my friend was buying).
I’ve been harping on and on for nearly 2 years how the market here is ripe for a correction. Finally, some real validation!
If you found this post helpful, consider donating to my coffee fund!- More On Real Estate Research In a previous post, I had explained how I research real estate market cycles.At the time (around september 2005) I was looking for a place to invest the proceeds of my california properties which I thought had peaked. I chose Salt Lake City because it looked primed to start appreciating.......
- Housing Update Interesting update on some markets from the Real Estate Journal. Utah homes worth their salt Utah apparently has missed the news about the end of the housing boom, with median selling prices on the way up. For example, Utah County's Alpine area saw median selling prices rise 57.2% to $529,000......
- Real Estate Forecast 2009 As a member of the school's Real Estate Club, I got a pretty interesting update on the real estate forecast for 2009. This is just the summary. The whole article was signficantly bigger. A lot of it is obvious, but it's still a good comprehensive list. Serious dislocation has resulted......
Related Websites
- The Number One Mistake that Would-be Real Estate Investors Make I met with my friend's wife this weekend to learn more about her thriving real estate business. She helped to confirm what I suspected to be the number one mistake that new investors make: they expect to make good returns by paying "retail" prices for real estate. By "retail" prices,......
- The Continued Slow Deflation of the Housing Bubble The stock market perked up last week. Does that signal the beginning of a return to the good old days? After all, the Obama economic team is feverishly pulling out all of the stops in its attempt to restart the residential real estate markets in a positive direction. Although the......
- The Mortgage Crisis and Investments in Real Estate According to regional and state real estate analysts, the factors which previously fueled the housing boom of the last few years are easy to explain. The factors that fueled this boom in the real instate industry ranged significantly, including: - Interest rates that were historically low. - Flight-Risk Safety Investments......
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