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Sales dip below last year with fewer repos on market

Monday, July 20th, 2009

After 14 months of year-over-year sales gains in the Sacramento region, June’s home sales fell below those of June 2008. Market watchers say the frenzy ignited last year by an abundance of bank repos in the market has waned some. But short sales are starting to pick up.

Here is today’s story with the region’s June statistics from MDA DataQuick.

Here is a more detailed sales and price chart by ZIP Code.

homsales

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Posted in Real Estate News | 1 Comment »

Repo business soars as Sacramento area home sales slump

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

At the beginning, Alejandro Maybuena lost the Sacramento house he bought in April 2005 for $350,000. At the end, in early 2009, Kim Gish bought it for $109,000.

Stories like this have happened more than 40,000 times in the Sacramento area. Still, the tale in particular of one house in California’s capital region shows the sweeping change in a real estate industry that once involved mainly a mom-and-pop seller, a buyer and two real estate agents.

Today, an alternate universe – the repo business – dominates. And business is very good.

As the U.S. foreclosure crisis grinds on, the detailed work of processing, repairing and selling thousands of homes repossessed by banks is real estate’s new gold. In the past year, repo-related business has rapidly grown to national scale, fueling job growth in Colorado, Texas, Ohio and elsewhere to service the meltdown in markets like Sacramento and the Central Valley along with Phoenix, Las Vegas and Florida.

The nation’s housing collapse also has upended the pecking order of local real estate agents. Former top earners are on the sidelines, unable to move expensive homes. The new royalty is making good money in a real estate economy where things fall apart, where trackers can count almost a half-million repos on the U.S. market.

For Alejandro Maybuena, 60, and his wife, a three-bedroom house near Sacramento’s southern edge in 2005 represented a long-delayed accomplishment – their first house.

Remember how you felt when you purchased your first home.

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Posted in Real Estate News | 4 Comments »

C.C. Myers’ ex-golf course community back on market

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

The posh golf-course community that bankrupted C.C. Myers is up for sale again.

A tentative deal to sell Winchester Country Club in the Sierra foothills community of Meadow Vista has fallen through because of a disagreement over price.

An Arizona development firm named Granite Mountain Capital won an auction for the right to buy the project from Wells Fargo & Co. late last fall. But the Arizona firm has backed away because of pricing issues, said Granite Mountain managing director Mark Isakson.

“Their opinion of the price, and the market’s opinion, is probably a little different right now,” he said. He said Granite Mountain hasn’t given up entirely on Winchester.

“We still like the property,” he said.

Myers, the famed Sacramento-area highway contractor, lost Winchester to Wachovia Bank in a foreclosure proceeding last year. Wachovia has since been taken over by Wells Fargo.

Still owing about $45 million, Myers filed for personal bankruptcy under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy laws several months after the foreclosure. The bankruptcy doesn’t involve his contracting company.

Myers spent nearly 20 years planning and developing the 1,200-acre project, on a former hunting preserve near Interstate 80. He envisioned Winchester as a high-end haven for Bay Area and Los Angeles refugees willing to pay up to $1 million for a home lot.

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C.C. Myers lost the Winchester Country

Club in a foreclosure to Wachovia Bank last year.

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Posted in Foreclosures | No Comments »

Is it time to freak out???

Monday, June 29th, 2009

If you watch the nightly news, listen to the politicians and surf the net on a regular basis, you might as well get it over with and have a complete and utter meltdown. Although I have a desire to be informed, do my research and stay current with the market trends, I’m developing an allergy to the media and the messages from these outlets. And as much as I try to stay positive and focus on my attitude, I found myself recently being surprised with good news.

One of my mentors who knows a contractor who informed me he’d been contacted in the last three weeks about building a couple of really large homes. And I found myself being surprised by that. My friend Hilary and I went out to dinner last week at a cool little Mexican restaurant in Sacramento. When we asked the waiter how was business, we were prepared to provide compassion and empathy for their slowdown. “Business is really good,” he said, “we’re opening up next door to expand our capacity.” I hate to admit it but both of us were surprised.  Why am I surprised? Because I’ve allowed the negative voices to creep in to my thinking and heard too much from the self-serving authors and media pundits who need drama to make money.

Is business booming like 05 and 06? Absolutely not and I hope we never see days like that again where people were taking equity loans at a record pace to spend money they didn’t have, on things they didn’t need to impress people they didn’t know. So yeah, it’s time to freak out. It’s time to get the messages from the freaked out media, the politicians and the pundits out of your head and life. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. I choose the good, I see the best and I believe my best days and yours are still to come. You should too!!

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Posted in Motivation, Real Estate | No Comments »

The Smith Team awarded TOP LISTING TEAM

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

top-player-award2

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Posted in Awards, Publicity | 2 Comments »

East Sacramento Real Estate Market Update: June 2009

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Foreclosures are drying up in East Sacramento. Year over year, we see a drop of 43% in foreclosure sales along with an increase in non-distressed sales of 35%. This has led to the tables turning from last June when 53% of all sales were distress sales to this June where 66% of all sales are now non-distressed. Overall unit volume is down by 4.7% for the same period.

For all this news however, prices haven’t fared that much better. Average price per square foot is currently $215.40 – a few dollars lower than last month and 6.8% lower year over year from a high of $231.12. Average sales price is $289,099 down 11.8% from last June’s high of $327,834. But the more accurate representation of the market is the average price per square foot since homes that sold this June were also 5.4% smaller. Median sales price is at $310,000.

Inventory in east Sacramento is at 3.7 months no matter how you look at it. Foreclosure inventory is at 0.6 months.

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Posted in Real Estate, Real Estate News | No Comments »

The 3rd wave of woe

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Economists call rising delinquencies and foreclosures among prime borrowers the third wave of trouble. The first two waves were housing speculators going bust and subprime borrowers — those with poor credit histories and some version of no-down or low-down adjustable-rate mortgages — getting into trouble.

 

Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, calls the third wave a “significant threat” to the economy. “It is gathering momentum,” he says. “The problem is now well beyond subprime and deep into prime.”

It will cause at least three problems that could shrivel the “green shoots”:

  • Mounting foreclosures among prime borrowers will destroy their credit ratings, making it tough for them to contribute to growth by spending on credit.

 

  • Rising foreclosures will add to an already high level of housing inventory on the market, pushing down home prices even more. That will make people feel poorer, so they’ll spend less. It also will tempt more people to walk away from mortgages, adding to the problem.

 

  • Foreclosures will mean more loan losses at banks, deepening the problems in the financial system.

 

Do you think this will affect your home prices, tell us what you think.

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Posted in Foreclosures | No Comments »

Get Ready! Free Fall In Home Prices Soon

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

If you think home prices are low now, just wait because we have an encore.  Here’s why:

If we use California as an example, we know that the average price of a home was around $436k in 2006.  We also know at that same time that affordability was less than 13%, a historic low.  Take this combination and you have people getting into loans they couldn’t afford called sub-prime loans.

Most of these sub-prime loans have worked their way into the system but not through the system.  In fact, an enormous number of them (that means the majority) have been held back due to moratoriums.  The goal of the moratorium was to keep people in their homes but the programs didn’t work.  Over 60% of people re-defaulted on their loans after a modification, ergo the recent demise of the moratorium.

 

After the moratoriums expired it allowed banks to continue the foreclosure and eviction process, which typically takes 2-3 months at least.  The moratoriums ended in late March so what we have is a housing sale boom coming this Summer, keep your eyes open for June-August but…

There’s more!  Don’t think that after we get through this bulk of inventory that prices are going to rise again because they’re not and probably won’t in our lifetime (that’s inflation adjusted of course).

There’s more defaults to come in the form of alt-a and adjustable rate mortgages that are due to reset all the way through 2012.  With that in mind, there will be inventory for several more years.  Only after that inventory is worked through can prices begin to stabilize.

Back to California, we’ll have thousands of homes hitting the market in hard hit areas like Sacramento and Elk Grove, arguably the start of this crisis as determined by several national news agencies. So if you think there are lots of empty homes on your block now, wait until August because it will get worse.

If you’re in the market to buy a home, do it this year for the tax breaks.  There’s an $8000 federal tax credit and more available through your state.  In California you can get an additional $10,000 for buying a new home.

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Posted in Real Estate | 6 Comments »

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