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This is the office restroom equivalent of flushing after a fart. Sure, it seems like progress but everyone else in the restroom will still be gagging on the smell.

I like looking at the slope of the inventory 1-YR MA. It’s like looking at the short/long interest.

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My wife just looked at 3(!) mid-300k SFR REOs in a SGV zip east of LA. There’s more of these coming on-line. They’re all trashed, of course (one had “I already miss this house” scrawled on the wall).

REOs are hard to look at when they’re freshly listed. Too many remnants of another family’s desperation to be found on the property.

Curiously, one of the agents is still talking about doing 0 down financing! On a REO!

It’s just starting to get ugly in the areas where the loan sharks cruised the waters, taking the ARMs and legs of Spanish speaking swimmers with wet backs. Those sharks are living large in their SLKs while the foreclosed get to pack the F-150 with what will fit in a 2/1 crap-trap apt.

“Sell now or be priced in forever!” – The anti-NAR quote of the week.

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My wife just looked at 3(!) mid-300k SFR REOs in a SGV zip east of LA. There’s more of these coming on-line. They’re all trashed, of course (one had “I already miss this house” scrawled on the wall).

REOs are hard to look at when they’re freshly listed. Too many remnants of another family’s desperation to be found on the property.

Curiously, one of the agents is still talking about doing 0 down financing! On a REO!

It’s just starting to get ugly in the areas where the loan sharks cruised the waters, taking the ARMs and legs of Spanish speaking swimmers with wet backs. Those sharks are living large in their SLKs while the foreclosed get to pack the F-150 with what will fit in a 2/1 crap-trap apt.

“Sell now or be priced in forever!” – The anti-NAR quote of the week.

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Mr. Clemens (Twain) was not known as a successful investor so I’m somewhat amused by your use that quote in the context of this conversation.

It’s looking like the February drop was simply a shot across the bow of the big movers in the markets. They’ve altered course a bit but I’m not expecting the kill shot into the markets’ boilers. Rather, the subprime loss coupled with the tighening of easy big-money credit will ground the ship The shoal waters can look deceptively calm…

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If it were a Dow systems glitch then I wouldn’t expect all the other indices (4Q,R2k, S&P, etc.) to all show the same pothole at the same time. But they do so I call BS on that. Besides, QQQ did 3B in volume today without a real problem and supposedly the Dow clearinghouse has more CPU cycles and more network bandwidth available.

There’s a divot in all their charts within a few moments of each other. THAT looks like a robot trader that barfed sell orders onto the floor. The major indices are not that tightly coupled.

We’ll see over the next week or so if this is the much-anticipated unwinding.

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I think they’re from “Crestline Funding”. Soon to be named “Crustline” in honor of what all those neg-am ARM holders will find in their shorts after they receive those nice payment adjustment letters in the mail…

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“I’m waiting for a 100-year loan,” he said. “My heirs can worry about paying it off.”

— But, wait! Earlier in the article it is mentioned that he has no kids. What heirs is he talking about?!?

Another poster child for NAR.

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Have a look at this analysis of the recent Dow highs. I’ve been following the Dow for awhile and I’m still amazed at how many people use that brand as a barometer of the overall market. When I was at CBOE I always looked to R2k and S&P deriviatives for overall health indications…

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Isn’t the CEW rate psychological? I would think that comparing CEW numbers to inventory and DOM would show the mood of the sellers, no? High CEW/sold rates with a high inventory over the same period and a smallish DOM (~90, say) would tell me that sellers are willing to sit out the market in the hopes of a recovery in their favor. Low CEW/sold rates with a high inventory over the same period would show motivated sellers?

See, I think that the CEW numbers add something to the squishy side of a market analysis. They could be used to make some sort of “want to sell” vs. “need to sell” metric maybe.

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That makes perfect sense from the lender’s point of view. If they shock enough into selling now then the lender has a better chance of recouping most, if not all, their investment.

Better a possible short sale now than a foreclosure later.

Speaking of WTF, all you “6+ figure” software architects would do well to visit The Daily WTF for reminders of the fleeting nature of common sense. I subscribe to the RSS feed and encourage my pet programmers to do the same.

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It was the lead story and yes, they interviewed an Agent, her client who was selling a home near DC (IIRC) and some blathering MSNBC in-house economic “expert” whose name I did not catch. Sorry, I don’t put a lot of stock in media-funded SMEs.

There were no predictions cast, just data on the drop in sales and a passing remark about how “patience, like inventory, remains high on the part of the sellers.” The client that they profiled has had her place on the market for several months now. The Agent did make a telling remark (paraphrasing): “The home is worth what the buyer will pay…” I swear that she had that deer in the headlights look about her during the interview.

A sea change from the “Real Estate can only go up” mantra!

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Consulting’s always a good place to start if you can scrape the client list together. I’m in IT and do a fair amount of side business this way. I’ve been growing clients for a few years with an eye towards doing it full time. The jump is hard to calculate, of course…it’s always a leap of faith in your abilities.

Any kind of knowledge-based service business will weather a recession better than a retail or manufacturing business, I think. Sounds contrary, I know, but in a recession we’re all trying to cut corners and piece-work consultants can cost less than keep staff on-line AND you can control your costs to a finer degree with not-to-exceed work contracts or the simple expedient of pulling the plug on a consultant.

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Heck, yea!

I’m renting from someone who quit his job so he could wheel-and-deal full time in the LA RE market as an agent and a loan officer. The place I’m in is heavily leveraged (an 80/20 no-down deal that was re-fi’d to get funds for other purchases) and my rent is only about 60% of the monthly PITI expense. He’s got four other properites like this and he bought a new construction SFR for about $1M last year. I know all this becasue his wife is a little too loose with her tounge when it comes to their dealings…I think that she thinks that she’s showing how smart he is.

Last year my rent checks cleared about 14 days after they were sent. Since May my rent checks have been clearing 1 or 2 days after they were sent…hmmmm.

But I’m not worried. He’s still making money hand over fist selling homes and doing re-fi’s, right?

I got out of the LA market and sold in summer 2003 when I saw that things were going crazy and I made 100K on the SFR I bought in 1997. Hindsight’s 20/20 but any profit’s better than no profit and I thought that things wouldn’t climb much higher back then.

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