Bressi Ranch…16 new homes to be auctioned off 10/21/06

[Bugs]

I wonder if the makeup of the audience had any influence on the bidding?

I don’t think the sellers need to take $200k losses. They’ll probably just go back to marketing the homes in the MLS, probably at the current list prices -10% discount. Maybe throw in a car as an incentive to keep the recorded price up. Those prices probably would drum up some impatient suckers.

One thing’s for sure – this group basically has to sell and get ou, and sooner is going to be better for them than later. These properties have nothing to do with providing shelter for the owners group. It’s strictly about the money and I’m pretty sure they’ve figured out that the longer they wait the more they’re going to lose. They wouldn’t have owner-occupancy financing terms on these homes as they were not purchased for owner-occupancy. For all we know their loan terms may have a short term call date on them.

The rents they were getting from Lennar were probably enough to cover the payments going in, but there is no rental income coming in right now, so how ever many partners there are would be covering the entire mortgage payment out of pocket between them. If they try to rent the homes out alls that does is reduce their out of pocket losses. Of course, those payments would all represent permanent losses once they’re paid out.

Just wait until 16 fully-decked out homes in Bressi Ranch do end up selling for 15% or more off their 02/2005 sale prices. I’ll betcha anything that prompts a few other flippers in the project who are already upside-down to walk, too.

[wawawa]

Bids less than the cost of property, you think banks or the seller would accept it. I do not think so.

No matter how you look at it, the owners are short. They lose money anyway.

[barnaby33]

What numbers did the bidding start at? Did it vary for each house, or did they start at $1?

Josh

[dny]

I showed up with my $25k knowing it was unlikely that I–or anyone else–would end up submitting a bid that was successful. For me the purpose was to survey the market, and to see if there would be any people willing to pay the ridiculous prices I was expecting. I had read that the reserve would be close to the bank loan amount, which was near %80 of the purchase price. This is why I knew there would be no “deals”.

The crowd was about 100+, but I would guess that there were only 25-35 bidders. The crowd makeup was heavy on the ethnic side (about 40% asian/indian and middle eastern), with most of the bidding done by a few ethnic families–especially this one Chinese family (Funny story about them: The main monkey who I imagine owns the auction company (Piratelli?) and two other guys would maneuever through the crowd trying to encite bidding. Also, let’s not forget about the token spotter who leaps forward and screams “YELP!!!” when he sees a hand go up. Anyway, in regards to the Chinese family, they were the high bid or runner up on a few homes. They did this becaue none of their previous bids were accepted as meeting the minimmum. During a stretch of about 4 homes–10 mins–the old guy is practically standing on top of the matriarch (older woman) of the family. He continues to work her over as she is one of the few people bidding. At one point when she is second in bidding on a home at around $800k, and this is what I thought was funny, he says, “I’ll even throw in some kim-chee”. Kim-chee is of course a Korean dish, like a pungent cabbage or radish. I know these people were Chinese because I heard them talking in Mandarin.).

I knew the auction was going to be a bust when he OPENED the first house-the biggest I think at 4600 some sqft at $1.5M. This elecited a small chuckle from me and a few others. He backed all the way down to $1M before getting ending up at $1.05M.

Quick Recap of high Bids:

sqft–price
4600–$1.05M
3700–$1.00M Great BY and View
4091–$1.1M Great BY and View
3384–$900k (1 bid)
3094–$700k-$900k “a little shy”–probably 100k or so off
3094–$700k-$825k
2812–$550k-$750k
2666–$750k
2461–$700k
2336–$700k
2506–$775k
2178–$775k
2775–$650k

Again, they did not accept any of the bids, but they did say some were close (maybe $100 or $200k would be my guess as to what close means), and they would negotiate with the high bidder. Some others had nice yards and views too. All the houses were extremely well appointed. No complaints there. According to them, 2 of the 16 in total that were to be sold are in escrow. I didn’t stick around for the last one.

Seeing this farse only convinced me further that things are going to get ugly. There were probably only about eight people who bid. The auction guys did their darndest to keep things lively, but it was a tough sale giving the prices they were trying to pull off. Hope this helps those who were curious.

Also, they usually started the bidding extremely high and then worked their way down, and then got bid up by a hair. A few houses in they just said who wants to start it and soebody shouted $500k. On a few homes were this or close to it was the starting bid, there was actually some action, but not nearly enough to get the prices they wanted. Never did they just start at $50k and move up. I would hardly call this an acution format outside of the crazy Mo’s screaming when a hand went up out and the typicaly fast tongued auctioneer.

[wawawa]

“did they start at $1?” hell NO.

First 4 houses had starting bid of $200K more than the purchase price of Feb. 2005, and slowly came done and went down below purchase price and still noe body bid on them, I think bidding down went to about $300K below Feb. 2005 price.

Fifth house and other houses had stating bid of $300K below purchase pirce of Feb. 2005, some went up but still stopped far below the Feb. 2005 price. At this point they called it “subject to approval”.

Believe me fellows, this auctions are Bu!! Sh!!t. Do not think that you are going to buy anything cheap.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the excellent photo gallery. This is what we call down here “Peckerwood Retro”. The group of homes displayed exhibits a greater concentration of bad taste than can be explained by virtually any assemblage of even the “Don” Trumps worst condo excremental offerings.

These homes, in most housing markets would, sell at between $70-100/SF. The furnishings are so insipid as to not warrant mention.

It seems that this auction seeks to remedy a case of enormous bad judgement encountering extreme bad taste seeking irrational resolution with a hope of financial recovery in spite of speculative idiocy. This investment group is comprised of a group of attorneys. Correct?

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered…

This has to be the beginning of the very bad outcome of a market correction.

Goldie Oldie

[SD Renter]

A “Dutch Auction” is where the auctioneer starts the bid at a high price and slowly lowers the price a set amount, say $10,000, every 10 seconds or so. The FIRST person to bid wins. Apparently this method is used in the flower market.

From what I’ve read hear it appears the Bressi Ranch auctioneers did both a Dutch auction and then tried to conduct a regular auction with that first highest bid as the opening bid – very odd! And then they plan on ‘negotiating’ with the highest bidder? Good grief! I’m sure the auctioneers are licensed so the $10k earnest money checks are safe. Any chance they’ll try to strong-arm someone into paying too much with the threat that they hold the bidders earnest money indefinately?

I’m a Realtor trying to get some lenders to approve some short sales, and, I must confess, the more stories of severe financial pain I have for these sorry lenders, the more likely the buyers short sale prices will be accepted. Thanks for your help, all!

[PerryChase]

SD Renter, what is the volume of short sales you’re seeing out there?

[bubble_contagion]

None of the 16 houses sold. Those L.A lawyers that bought them as an investment should be very worried.

From the U-T

[Nancy_s soothsayer]

Before the event, Jim the Realtor said, “I’m guessing they won’t sell one of them at the auction.”

Jim the Realtor is psychic. Way to go. I’m looking forward to his next prediction.

[jimklinge]

My next prediction?

That the sales guys at Bressi make deals with the few remaining potential buyers and slip quietly out the back door. Real quietly.

They probably won’t even report them in the MLS, we’ll just see them on the tax rolls over the next 30-60 days, probably at or a little below the existing loan amounts.

They know they have a problem, and it’s time to bail.

Jim the Realtor

[Bugs]

The most pessimistic prediction (Jim’s) came true. Good call, BTW. I think this could be the shape of things to come. You almost can’t get too pessimistic about the pricing in a declining market.

I’m sure the sellers are motivated to get out. I can’t understand why they didn’t have a Plan B and a Plan C in place to deal with the possibility that the bids were going to start off coming in a little shy. It seems like they almost would have been better off selling the lowest price home first to it’s highest bidder no matter what just to set the psychology in motion. Starting off with the big house and the big price, only to come up a little shy and then refuse to sell at all established a we’re-not-that-serious attitude that probably hardened the resolve of the remaining bidders.

I mean, if there were only 8 active bidders then they didn’t have enough buyers to go around in the first place.

I wonder how much the advertising and auction costs were?

[no_such_reality]

Anybody find any updates on the Bressi Ranch auction or subsequent sales? I’m not seeing anything on UT or SOSD.

[Anonymous]

I was so thrilled to find you folks. I write for a paper up here in San Francisco called the San Francisco Bay View, published in the San Francisco Bayview Hunter’s Point neighborhood, which is now occupied by the Redevelopment Agency and the Lennar Corporation. Our Democratic mayor, who was fraudulently elected the same year that George Bush was, stealing the election from a Green, is now in control of something like 1400 acres of property in the Bayview, with the power to force people to sell at what the Agency deems reasonable prices. (Eminent domain.) Bayview Hunter’s Point is 91% Black and Brown, the last mostly Black neighborhood in San Francisco.

The Bayview held a hugely successful petition drive to force a referendum on the Bayview Hunter’s Point Redevelopment Plan (“RecolonizationPlan for the Urban Removal of Negroes,” in the words of Willie Ratcliff, publisher of the San Francisco Bay View. Then City Attorney Dennis Herrera declared it invalid because they had not attached 200 pages of illiterate Redevelopment Agency prose which the wealth and power in this city spent $1.5 million on to justify this impending crime.

The most unbelievable part of all this is that Lennar is also planning to go into the Hunter’s Point Shipyard in the middle of Bayview Hunter’s Point, to build condos and a retail shopping mall right on top of an old nuclear waste dump, fallout hauled back from tests in the South Pacific, and this nuclear waste dump is right next to Parcel EEEE!!!!!!! in that radioactive federal Superfund shipyard of ours. Parcel E is the site of the former top-secret National Radiation Laboratory, from 1945 to 1969.

No one seems to know how much or what all radioactive crud is still in there, but it seems quite possible that once Lennar starts uranium mining, they could well hit a motherlode of plutonium 239. That Rad Lab was testing the effects of all sorts of radiation exposure on animals, (which are dead and, if not buried on Parcel E, dumped in the Bay.)

However, the Navy never bothered to tell the neighbors who had migrated north and worked 24-7 in the shipyard to win the war that the National Rad Lab had come to their neighborhood, not even afterf cancer rates soared among women under 40. Cancer and prostate rates are now epidemic at all ages in Bayview Hunter’s Point, especially on Hunter’s Point Hill, which has fabulous view of the Bay, more sun than any place else in this city, and the worst radiation from Parcel EEEE!!!!!!!

Parcel EEEE!!!!! is not only highly radioactive but toxic in just about every other way as well, because everyone who wanted to dump or manufacture anything really disgusting for the past fifty years went out to dump or manufacture it inside the shipyard, especially on Parcel E, or elsewhere in Bayview Hunter’s Point. Parcel E once caught fire underground and burned for weeks, with no air monitoring, before the Navy even sent anyone out to look at the sparks jumping off of the ground and all the weird colors rising above it into the night sky.

And now, the Lennar Corporation is poised over that nuclear waste dump Parcel A, right next to Parcel EEEEEEEE!!!!!!! with bulldozers, jackhammers, drills, backhoes, and whatever other uranium mining equipment one of the three largest manufacturers of manufactured housing in the country can command.

It’s gonna be worst for Bayview Hunter’s Point but there’s no telling which way the winds this stuff lands in will blow or which way the water currents will flow when they shake that stuff loose. Some have already dared to suggest that the radioactive waste that the Navy dumped near the Farallones marine sanctuary, caught some ocean currents that took it to the beaches of wealthy, natural, organic lifestyle Marin County, causing its breast cancer rates to siar till they equal, surpass or rival those of Bayview Hunter’s Point’s, depending on whom you ask. In either case, Marin and the Bayview’s breast cancer rates top the nation’s. (See “Fallout,” http://www.sfweekly.com/webextra/fallout/index.html.)

But we’re fighting and we have one especially bright hope next week: Marie Harrison could be elected here in District #10.. Marie is running for Supervisor there, against the also Black but totally corrupt Sophie Maxwell, who has not only arranged to let Lennar loose in the shipyard and in Bayview Hunter’s Point, but has now arranged to aim three gas turbine peaker plants straight at them.

Sophie Maxwell is twisted beyond belief; I can only imagine she suffers from some sort of horrid internalized race hatred.

But Marie Harrison? Marie has the potential to be the next Fannie Lou Hammer. I don’t live in Bay VIew Hunter’s Point but I wrote to the paper to beg them to send her to City Hall, and I’m canvassing it for her later this week. See electmarieharrison.com. If anyone there could send $5, $10, anything to help get Marie Harrison to City Hall, her voice would begin to be heard–believe me, it would–by a larger audience. This woman fired the head of San Franacisco General Hospital, though she did not even work there; she works for Greenaction, an environmental justice organization, when she found her grandson and other children suffering from asthma caused by the power plants Bayview Hunter’s Point is also blessed with just because his mother was on Medicare. She walked up to his office and said, “OK; by tomorrow I’m havin’ your resignation or I’m bringin’ this hospital down, in flames.

Then she stood in the doorway till he wrote out and signed his resignation.

I think Marie might help us all do the same to Lennar, not just here but elsewhere. Check out electmarieharrison.com and if you can give even $5, it would be a huge help. If not just sign Marie’s guestbook and tell her your own stories about Lennar, which is actually owned by the LNR Corporation, which is owned by some big ugly hedgefund which does most of its tax-dodging offshore.

Like I said, Marie has the potential to be another Fannie Lou Hammer. I think she might help us fire Lennar, not just here but all over this country where they’re destroying old, real communities to manufacture new, phony, and even radioactive ones, and rooking people right and left in the mortgage lending business and property management business as well. I’d suspected that appraisal scam described at the beginning of this blog. And we should all be talking to each other, not just to Marie. I tried to get on a site full of complaints about Lennar in Dallas last night but the registrataion process was a pain. Thanks for makin this easy.

And yes, Lennar is in New Orleans. In a big way, though rarely using their own name. I’m going back there after the election.

So, good luck from–
KatrinaWithoutBorders, and again, glad to have found you all.

[Anonymous]

I was so thrilled to find you folks. I write for a paper up here in San Francisco called the San Francisco Bay View, published in the San Francisco Bayview Hunter’s Point neighborhood, which is now occupied by the Redevelopment Agency and the Lennar Corporation. Our Democratic mayor, who was fraudulently elected the same year that George Bush was, stealing the election from a Green, is now in control of something like 1400 acres of property in the Bayview, with the power to force people to sell at what the Agency deems reasonable prices. (Eminent domain.) Bayview Hunter’s Point is 91% Black and Brown, the last mostly Black neighborhood in San Francisco.

The Bayview held a hugely successful petition drive to force a referendum on the Bayview Hunter’s Point Redevelopment Plan (“RecolonizationPlan for the Urban Removal of Negroes,” in the words of Willie Ratcliff, publisher of the San Francisco Bay View. Then City Attorney Dennis Herrera declared it invalid because they had not attached 200 pages of illiterate Redevelopment Agency prose which the wealth and power in this city spent $1.5 million on to justify this impending crime.

The most unbelievable part of all this is that Lennar is also planning to go into the Hunter’s Point Shipyard in the middle of Bayview Hunter’s Point, to build condos and a retail shopping mall right on top of an old nuclear waste dump, fallout hauled back from tests in the South Pacific, and this nuclear waste dump is right next to Parcel EEEE!!!!!!! in that radioactive federal Superfund shipyard of ours. Parcel E is the site of the former top-secret National Radiation Laboratory, from 1945 to 1969.

No one seems to know how much or what all radioactive crud is still in there, but it seems quite possible that once Lennar starts uranium mining, they could well hit a motherlode of plutonium 239. That Rad Lab was testing the effects of all sorts of radiation exposure on animals, (which are dead and, if not buried on Parcel E, dumped in the Bay.)

However, the Navy never bothered to tell the neighbors who had migrated north and worked 24-7 in the shipyard to win the war that the National Rad Lab had come to their neighborhood, not even afterf cancer rates soared among women under 40. Cancer and prostate rates are now epidemic at all ages in Bayview Hunter’s Point, especially on Hunter’s Point Hill, which has fabulous view of the Bay, more sun than any place else in this city, and the worst radiation from Parcel EEEE!!!!!!!

Parcel EEEE!!!!! is not only highly radioactive but toxic in just about every other way as well, because everyone who wanted to dump or manufacture anything really disgusting for the past fifty years went out to dump or manufacture it inside the shipyard, especially on Parcel E, or elsewhere in Bayview Hunter’s Point. Parcel E once caught fire underground and burned for weeks, with no air monitoring, before the Navy even sent anyone out to look at the sparks jumping off of the ground and all the weird colors rising above it into the night sky.

And now, the Lennar Corporation is poised over that nuclear waste dump Parcel A, right next to Parcel EEEEEEEE!!!!!!! with bulldozers, jackhammers, drills, backhoes, and whatever other uranium mining equipment one of the three largest manufacturers of manufactured housing in the country can command.

It’s gonna be worst for Bayview Hunter’s Point but there’s no telling which way the winds this stuff lands in will blow or which way the water currents will flow when they shake that stuff loose. Some have already dared to suggest that the radioactive waste that the Navy dumped near the Farallones marine sanctuary, caught some ocean currents that took it to the beaches of wealthy, natural, organic lifestyle Marin County, causing its breast cancer rates to siar till they equal, surpass or rival those of Bayview Hunter’s Point’s, depending on whom you ask. In either case, Marin and the Bayview’s breast cancer rates top the nation’s. (See “Fallout,” http://www.sfweekly.com/webextra/fallout/index.html.)

But we’re fighting and we have one especially bright hope next week: Marie Harrison could be elected here in District #10.. Marie is running for Supervisor there, against the also Black but totally corrupt Sophie Maxwell, who has not only arranged to let Lennar loose in the shipyard and in Bayview Hunter’s Point, but has now arranged to aim three gas turbine peaker plants straight at them.

Sophie Maxwell is twisted beyond belief; I can only imagine she suffers from some sort of horrid internalized race hatred.

But Marie Harrison? Marie has the potential to be the next Fannie Lou Hammer. I don’t live in Bay VIew Hunter’s Point but I wrote to the paper to beg them to send her to City Hall, and I’m canvassing it for her later this week. See electmarieharrison.com. If anyone there could send $5, $10, anything to help get Marie Harrison to City Hall, her voice would begin to be heard–believe me, it would–by a larger audience. This woman fired the head of San Franacisco General Hospital, though she did not even work there; she works for Greenaction, an environmental justice organization, when she found her grandson and other children suffering from asthma caused by the power plants Bayview Hunter’s Point is also blessed with just because his mother was on Medicare. She walked up to his office and said, “OK; by tomorrow I’m havin’ your resignation or I’m bringin’ this hospital down, in flames.

Then she stood in the doorway till he wrote out and signed his resignation.

I think Marie might help us all do the same to Lennar, not just here but elsewhere. Check out electmarieharrison.com and if you can give even $5, it would be a huge help. If not just sign Marie’s guestbook and tell her your own stories about Lennar, which is actually owned by the LNR Corporation, which is owned by some big ugly hedgefund which does most of its tax-dodging offshore.

Like I said, Marie has the potential to be another Fannie Lou Hammer. I think she might help us fire Lennar, not just here but all over this country where they’re destroying old, real communities to manufacture new, phony, and even radioactive ones, and rooking people right and left in the mortgage lending business and property management business as well. I’d suspected that appraisal scam described at the beginning of this blog. And we should all be talking to each other, not just to Marie. I tried to get on a site full of complaints about Lennar in Dallas last night but the registrataion process was a pain. Thanks for makin this easy.

And yes, Lennar is in New Orleans. In a big way, though rarely using their own name. I’m going back there after the election.

So, good luck from–
KatrinaWithoutBorders, and again, glad to have found you all.

[Author]

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