It won’t be long before you see this sign in Las Vegas, Palm Desert, Seattle, Tampa/St Pete, Bend Oregon and every other resort or overbuilt neighborhood in the U.S. Florida is seeing drops of 38% to 42% in home sales and close to 50% in condos. The NAR can’t whitewash this anymore.
“Across the country, the National Association of Realtors chalked up slow housing sales to unusually bad winter weather. However, Florida economists and real estate brokers couldn’t easily blame frigid temperatures. Here, the housing market is being hurt more by a huge oversupply of houses, as well as fear of sky-high home insurance and property taxes by would-be homebuyers.
Carlos Fuentes, president of the Greater Tampa Association of Realtors, said many condo investors put down payments on their units but never closed on the properties. When insurance and taxes escalated and sometimes grew larger than their mortgage payments, some investors forfeited their down payments and fled, Fuentes said.
Stan Geberer, an economist with economic consulting firm Fishkind & Associates in Orlando, said that from 2003 to 2006, builders in Florida produced at least 100,000 residential units above market demand. Just to clear out all those extra homes, new construction would have to come to a grinding halt, Geberer said.
Here’s the latest gimmick from Lennar to help them get 25 Palm desert area homes off the market. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had 15-20 of these types of promotions over the next couple of months.
They have three different price points – here’s one:
8 fully-furnished villas in La Quinta, Calif.
First condominiums to be sold at this newly-constructed community
Previously priced at $429,000 to $432,000
Online bidding will begin at $250,000
There are THOUSANDS of empty homes out there already and it isn’t getting any better. Friends of mine had a very good offer on a 20 year old golf course home which they passed on 6-8 months ago and are now sweating bullets hoping that they can sell it soon. New home developers are throwing in all kinds of freebies to sell their inventory. I was in Washington, Oregon and Idaho a few weeks ago and saw tons of homes on the market with reduced signs everywhere. The hotel tv’s in Bend run a continuous loop of hundreds of EMPTY homes as well as occupied for sale at every price point imaginable.
The really telling sign for a nationwide slump is the Google link below. No one is being spared. This talk about a rebound in 2008 is just that – talk. Where are they going to find the buyers in a tightening credit market and more inventory coming up monthly? It ain’t gonna happen folks. No way – no how. One of our R.E. broker friends specializing in foreclosures attended a seminar in Palm Desert last week. He said its going to get very ugly over the next couple of years and thinks we’re in for a big housing RECESSION. He’s been in the biz for 30+ years and has never seen anything like this.
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