Because they are comps…just the same as the fraudulent sales (zero-down, no-doc, neg-am garbage…including “flips”) were being used as comps on the way up. Now, those fraudulent sales that made prices shoot up in the 2001-2007 era are being foreclosed on, and they are impacting the comps on the way down.
If we determine that short sales and REOs aren’t comps, then can we determine that all the sales made with loans that could never be paid back shouldn’t be used as comps, either?
It’s one or the other. We can’t have it both ways.[/quote]
CA renter, I agree with what you’re saying. “We can’t have it both ways” is one of my favorite sayings these days.
However, our “values” have dropped considerably here because of the increase in supply caused, in large part, by the lenders suddenly doing their jobs and being vigilant about extending credit. I’m not thrilled with that, but I never really believed that my house value had tripled after I had lived there for 5 years, so I’m okay with that.
But here’s the scenario I’m having a tough time with. Say that I bought a house (new construction) in 2002 for $400K. By mid-2006, the “value” is up to $800K. Beginning in mid-2007, the banks are almost tapped out as well as the citizenry, and sales of houses stall. Values begin to slide steadily, and within 2 years, the houses in my neighborhood are down in the mid-400s. While the neighborhood is relatively stable, there have been a few short sales during that time that have also contributed to the fall in prices. Hey, that’s the way the cookie crumbles. I’m probably not going to be able to use the house to be able to help fund my retirement that’s still ten years down the road, but let’s face it: since I chose to live in it and not sell it, my house was never “worth” $800K.
However, we’re now halfway thru 2009, and there are fewer lenders, and lots more repossessed properties. So, in large part due to their lax vigilance in screening prospective mortgagers, the lenders are awash in repossessed properties. So while there are 5 or 6 homeowners who are selling their homes for nonfinancial reasons, and have them listed at around $400K to $450K, Chase has an REO that they need to unload from their huge backlog of repossessed properties, and they offer it at $300K. There’s your new “comp”.
That’s my problem. When a lender puts a price on a property that is soooo much lower than what houses have been selling for , I don’t consider that a “comparable”. I’d term it a fire sale. Just as accepting ridiculously high appraisals caused instability in the 2002-2007 “golden era” of real estate speculation, forcing appraisers to use fire sale prices as comps will create even more instability in the declining market.
Worse yet is what I mentioned in my earlier post: the lenders are pressuring the appraisers to “cherry pick” comps, and overlook recent valid sales in favor of fire sale prices from months earlier. And it’s not just resulting in foreclosures on the houses bought with risky loans. People who bought within their means with stable financing, and didn’t rob the equity from their houses, are now losing their jobs. When they are unable to get new jobs that pay their mortgage, they find they can’t sell their houses because they’re worth less than they paid 10 or 12 years ago.
While I do firmly agree that the “worth” of a property is what someone is willing to pay, I don’t believe that this is the dynamic at work when a lender preemptively sets a price that is far below most of the recent sales in a neighborhood. And forcing appraisers to cherry pick sales is not a way to “normalize” the market – no more so than when it was done when prices were on the upswing.
Sorry it took so long for me to state my concerns. I really should do this during the day, instead of 1 am, when it takes me 5 times as long to form a cogent argument (or perhaps not quite cogent).
