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A Tale of Three Markets
2007-08-20 00:32:00
There's been a lot of hoopla lately about the median home price in OC bumping up close to historic highs. The data, such as they are, seem to indicate that is the case, but remember here, that's true only if you're looking at the county-wide median price.In the past, you've seen me and others deride the county-wide median price stat because of the sheer size and/or heterogeneity of OC. Talking about the county as a whole, particularly when using the flawed median as a metric, just doesn't tell one a whole lot. Parts of the county could be collapsing, while other parts rise, but when you throw every neighborhood in the county into one big bucket, all of that movement is washed out, all of the uniqueness statistically smoothed over. County-level stats just aren't granular enough to truly convey any meaningful information.For the vibrancy and dynamism of the market to be seen, we need to analyze the market by segment. Simply by bucketing areas of the county together by similar ch...
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How Many Can You Find?
2007-07-23 05:10:00
Fourteen for sale signs (and two others)at the corner of Saybrook and Heil last weekend. Seems though HB's Harbor area is getting a little, if you will forgive the pun, liquid.My guess is that this intersection has got to have the highest concentrations of for sale signs in the county, but I bet there are some that have nearly as many or maybe more.If you find an intersection, stretch of road or a street corner with a lot of for sale signs, send it to hbbear at ocpredicts dot com and I'll post it on the site.
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HB Joins the 1,000 Club
2007-06-16 01:18:00
Huntington Beach has joined the ranks of infamy by passing 1,000 real estate units for sale within its boarders. To get just a little idea of how happy this makes your blogger, click on YouTube vid below...the video is fun, but the music conveys, partially, the joy in my heart!
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Are They Sure It's "A Good Time to Buy"?
2007-05-26 18:13:00
We've been hearing a constant stream of propoganda from the NAR, NAHB and unscrupulous agents that it's a good time to buy. I submit it is time for them to put their money where their mouths are.We've seen the ads in the paper and on TV and also heard them on the radio where those who benefit to profit from housing transactions are claiming it's "a good time to buy." You've seen me write about how absurd and unethical I believe their claims are, but yet the assault on our sensibilities continues. Go figure.Clearly these salespeople must know something we don't. Maybe huge amounts of inventory, increasing defaults and foreclosures, historic credit-tightening and affordability actually don't matter and all those years of studying finance and economics have be, in fact, for naught. Apparently, these guys are on to some big secret that they aren't willing to articulate outright, but that feeds their certainty that real estate is still an excellent investment. But they aren't sh...
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Mission Viejo Breaks 1,000 Inventory Units
2007-05-24 20:29:00
Congratulations to the newest member of the One Thousand Club, Mission Viejo!According to ZIP Realty, Mission Viejo joined the infamous ranks of inventory-laden cities this morning at 1,007 units of inventory for sale. If you're shopping for a home in that city, be sure to whack an extra 10 or 15% off of your offer.Mission Viejo sellers, gird your loins, you officially have lost ALL leverage in any price negotiations. Good luck.Vivo los Osos!
More About: Inventory , Sion , Breaks , Units

OC Inventory Passes 18,000!
2007-05-20 20:10:00
ZipRealty shows that there are more than 18,000 units for sale in OC.We all have already heard that cities like Anaheim, Santa Ana and Irvine has more than 1,000 units for sale, but did you realize that there are other OC cities getting ready to join the 1,000 Club? Leading the pack are Mission Viejo at 993 units and Huntington Beach at 930 units; that these cities will pass 1,000 units for sale this year, is a foregone conclusion. At over 650 units for sale each, I would say that Garden Grove (732), Fullerton (681), Orange (753) and San Clemente (692) have a better than even money chance of passing 1,000 units this summer.20,000+ units and unrestrained seller panic, here we come!
More About: Inventory , Pass , Vent , Tory , Inventor

Deja Vu All Over Again
2007-05-17 17:02:00
If past is prologue, then bears have a lot to celebrate and recent buyers have much to mourn. The graph above shows the historic and futures prices for the S&P Case-Shiller price index for Los Angeles-area homes inclusive of Orange County through the end of this year. The vertical lines in the body of the chart, demarcate the beginning of the futures contracts prices and as you can see, traders in that market have a pretty grim view of prices going forward.But what's most striking is how similar the curves look when we compare 1990-1991 to 2006-2007: Eerie, isn't it? Now I realize it's impossible to predict with any certainty that this housing cycle will be will turn as ugly as it did in the 1990's, but when the beginning's of two cycles line-up as well as these two do, you have to believe that they are going to, at least, be similar.Will this time be better? Will it be worse? That's anyone's guess, but if we look at history, we know one thing: it's going to be bad. From pea...
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Everyone Selling a House in OC, Raise Their Hand!
2007-05-16 16:39:00
According to ZIPRealty, the total number of properties for sale in Orange County is 17,779 which is already higher than the peak amount seen last year of 17,758. Not bad, considering it's only May16th and last year's peak happened at the end of August. Looks like it is going to be a long summer for sellers.All of this is great news for buyers. Though it's still far from a good time to buy, things are lining up for some real bargains, maybe as early as next summer. Be patient, you will be rewarded.Vivo los Osos!
More About: House , Selling , Ever , Sell , A House

Sorry So Long
2007-05-03 01:36:00
Dear Readers,As I write this from Terminal 'K' at Chicago Ohare Airport, I want to apologize for the long absence, but the day job has me on planes, trains and automobiles frequently. With that, and trying to be a good dad and husband and the desire to have a modicum of a social life, I just haven't had the time post lately. Hopefully soon I will find the time to catch up on the market and post a little analysis and commentary.I have to be honest as well that I've lost a little of the steam behind my motivations for posting. You see, I started this blog to debunk the idea that housing prices were going to continue to rise in LA/OC. Now that I consider it a foregone conclusion that prices are set to drop and the bulls have been acting more like geldings, some of the passion's gone. But don't lose heart. I am certain that some some bovine idiot will say something stupid in the days to come and that will stoke my ire, causing me to make the time for the odd posting now and again...
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Buyer Demand: Running on Empty!
2007-04-09 05:03:00
With the best of intentions, I asked readers in March's poll to tell me the price level at which they were very likely to buy a house, but things didn't work out exactly as planned.You see, I posted the poll to test a theory that I had where buyers would be willing to buy at prices points much lower than I had anticipated. In fact, I had already begun writing (at least in my head) a story about how sellers could access significant incremental demand, just by lowering their prices a little. Well, the data didn't work out that way. Here's a graph of the responses:The results of our poll indicates that nearly 80% of people responding will not seriously consider buying a house until prices drop below $450,000. The balance of the responses fell between $475,000 and $600,000 with a very pronounced skew toward cheaper prices. The way I interpret these data, is that people believe that prices are set to drop very significantly over the next few years. The other thing I see in the data i...
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Housing Inventory Spikes! Demand at 11-Year Low.
2007-04-07 18:25:00
Just a quick bit of news, prompted by a phone call from an old friend. Thanks, Tom.Going largely unreported, inventories of homes have continued to sky-rocket with the month-over-month increase in inventory of an amazing 11.8% between the end of February and the end of March. 11.8%! If that rate holds, we will see inventories double from their current levels by Aug, 30.Also going unreported, is the fact that at the end of March this year, we had more homes for sale than we did at the end of May of last year where we are generally well into the selling season. Clearly, the intelligent bearish sellers are trying to beat the Summer rush, beating their neighbors to the punch.Have a look at the source data by clicking here.On the flip side, Lansner is reporting on his blog that home sales are at their slowest rate in 11 years here in OC. Clearly, buyers are utterly rejecting the absurd prices asked for by sellers and are waiting until the inventory situation comes to a head before consid...
More About: Inventory , Housing , Sing , Spike , Vent

Pricing Weakness Epidemic in OC
2007-04-02 04:03:00
I took a look at a handful of pricing metrics for Orange County and I have to say that even as a died-in-the-wool housing bear, I was pretty shocked by what I found. Let?s start with our three key metrics:% of ZIPs with median price down year on year: 77.3%% of ZIPs with median price down from 2006 median: 80.0%% of ZIPs with price per square foot down: 62.7%.Astounding. Fully four in five ZIPs show price declines between February and all of 2006 and nearly that number on a year on year basis. Four-in-five. I can remember not long ago when that number was closer to two in five. Things certainly have changed.Looking at the data another way, fully 92% of OC ZIPs showed weakness in at least one of the three above metrics, with five lonely ZIPs having been spared the from pricing contagion: Laguna Beach?s 92651, Trabuco Canyon?s 92679 , Fullerton?s 92835, Newport Beach's 92660 and Villa Park?s 92861. If you don?t live in one of those four ZIPs, PRICES IN YOUR AREA ARE FALLING by one me...
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Inventory Threat Level: What Color is Your City?
2007-03-29 17:56:00
Sorry I haven't posted in a while, my day job has me on planes, trains and automobiles lately. I'm still slammed, but I want to get out this post on inventory threat levels.I've spoken in my last two posts about inventory levels and how they might be leveraged in negotiating prices with sellers. In order to synthesize those posts together, I've developed a simple scoring and rating system that can be used to determine how inventories for given areas compare to the county as a whole.It's a pretty simple system, it takes into account the "month of inventory" and "percent of home listed" stats and creates a compound ranking out of them and then classifies them into a "inventory threat level" grouping. The inventory threat indicates, in my sometimes humble opinion, the amount of risk of significant price decline a city may endure in the medium term. If an area is classified as as blue or green (there are none at this point) there is no or little risk of a significant price decline....
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More on Orange County Housing Inventory Levels
2007-03-20 04:56:00
In a prior post, I wrote about the surprising inventory data I found out on Homeseekers.com. Today, I am going to continue looking at inventory, but I've also pulled some census data so we can not only look at the months of inventory on the market but also the total percentage of homes on the market. We saw in my last post that there appears to be a lot more inventory on the market than has been reported. We also saw that within the county, the amount of inventory on the market varied very, very widely with some areas like Seal Beach with just a couple of months of inventory and others like San Clemente with over a couple of years of inventory. But months of inventory is only one measure, so maybe some areas aren't really getting a fair break.With that in mind, I decided to pull some demographic data and have a look at the proportion of homes for sale, settling on Total Housing Units the most "fair" basis for comparison. Here are the results:You will note many of the areas with th...
More About: Inventory , Orange , Orange County , County

Are Inventories Actually Higher than are Being Reported?
2007-03-17 00:47:00
I decided to pull some data yesterday from Homeseekers.com to have a look at what their data says about the housing inventory situation here in Orange County. They have a feature that lets the user pull lists for cities either including or excluding properties that are in escrow; so, coming up with "in escrow" counts is a pretty simple, if time consuming, process.What I found blew me away:First, note that there isn't data for all cities, just the largest, those for which there was a decent sample size of listings and those where the data made sense (there were very few homes listed in Fraudera Ranch.) But once you get past that, the data is pretty amazing.If the Homeseekers.com data is correct, there are a total of 13.9 months of inventory currently available in OC largest cities. This is more than double what is being reported in the media elsewhere and over a year's worth the homes already on the market! I have to wonder what a seller might think if he were to know that number-...
More About: Report , Port , Tories , High , Repo

Prudent Bear Renter Savings $70,000
2007-03-16 04:14:00
With the aberration of housing prices rising as they did last month, renter savings dropped a little month on month, but are still extremely strong at over $70,000 since June last year. A drop in interest rates also benefits bears.Congrats prudent bears, you've managed to save over $70,000 by not buying the RE-industry rhetoric, sticking to your guns and waiting to buy a home on your own terms. Here's a quick break-out of your savings since June of 2006:Saving s on Purchase Price $ 47,300Total Closing Costs $ 7,705Rent Benefit $ 22,844Investment Income $ 1,742Tax Benefit ($9,254.13)Total: $70,337 dollars.For the details click here.In an interesting turn of events interest rates for "typical" home also dropped an eighth of a percent, meaning that if we were to buy today, (which no one is planning to do, right?) we would also have saved tens of thousands on the life of the loan. So all things considered, the savings we've incurred are actually up month over month. More good news for...
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Prices Down in All So Cal Counties!
2007-03-15 16:12:00
On a price per square foot basis, prices are down in all So Cal Count ies both in nominal and real terms.WTF with Santa Barbara?
More About: Rice , Price , Down , Prices

Would You Buy a House from this Man?
2007-03-11 18:01:00
The CEO of the nation's #1 builder, D.R. Horton's Donald Tomnitz, told Wall Street analysts, according to The Associated Press: "I don't want to be too sophisticated here, but '07 is going to suck, all 12 months of the calendar year."You have to love this kind of candor from a CEO. Let's face it, the guy has the balls to call it like he sees it, damn the torpedoes. Him, I like. But, more importantly, I find myself thinking that I could TRUST him.Unlike most in the RE industry at this point, he's not trying to sell me some BS, pie-in-the-sky rhetoric about why I should buy a home now so he can land a couple of transaction. He's looking at the longer term, recognizing the fact that what he says today will be remembered tomorrow. He KNOWS that his reputation and credibility are on the line and he's behaving like a professional and telling like it is. There is one huge lesson here for everyone in the RE industry.There's a saying in the Sales profession:You buy from people you t...
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Are Buyer Demographics Skewing Home Prices?
2007-03-10 19:01:00
The Orange County Register reported that the median price for an existent home inched up to $675,000. Some bulls seem to be rejoicing.Like I predicted in a prior post here, the price for existent homes is starting to inch up a bit. My theory is that due to the tightening of non-prime credit, the "typical" buyer has become more "upscale" than in the recent past. Buyer s today are likely more affluent and have better credit ratings than the average buyer last year and are also buying larger, nicer and most importantly more expensive homes. I'm not alone on this, Jon Lansner over at the Register would seem to agree. This skew toward higher-end homes, I'd offer is hiding the fact that home prices here are much weaker than they appear.With ever-tightening credit markets and sales volumes reduced to a trickle, this skew is going to continue to worsen, possibly to be point where looking at the median says almost nothing about the underlying value of the typical home, but only serves to de...
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New Poll: At What Median Price Would You Buy?
2007-03-09 00:20:02
I?ve been talking a lot lately. Today, I?ve decided to take another opportunity to listen.I?ve posted a new poll that asks another pretty simple question which is essentially at what price level would you seriously consider buying a the ?typical? home in Orange County. The median price for last month was $600,000 and sale transactions were at a trickle, the slowest sales pace since 1995, so clearly that price level isn?t very motivational for most of us. Would you be very likely to buy at $575,000? $550,000? Are you holding out for $500,000 or less? Take our poll and let us know! As feel free to add a comment or two about your response and your reasoning behind it.
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A Modest Proposal for the NAR Marketing Team
2007-03-09 00:20:02
There I was, sitting on the couch, feet up on the ottoman, relaxing with a nice glass of single-malt, watching a little Letterman before bed and then it happened...a commercial from the NAR came on.There were attractive families from an inclusive range of demographic groups, touring well-staged houses with up-beat music and some fairly good production values. The families all appeared happy and ready to sign on the dotted line for a home. The voice over for the ad among other things said that "When you have a family it is always a great time to buy", "prices are favorable" and "interest are at historic lows", but thankfully I'd only had the one Scotch and was able to resist the temptation to phone up the local 24-hour broker and place a bid on a home.This bit of theatre was brought to us by the National Assocation of Realtors as part of their public awareness campaign titled: "Good Time to Buy." This multi-million dollar print, radio, outdoor, web and television campaign is designe...
More About: Marketing , Market , Proposal , The N , Team

Stocks Down Sharply, Fear Up Sharply, But Some Good News for Bears
2007-02-28 12:18:05
As most of you are already aware, stocks suffered their worst lost today since the tragedy of 9/11. In total, more than half a billion dollars in stock value were wiped out. Markets were down world-wide indicating a broad scope of weakness. Bears, it looks to me that our stock market just got a whole lot riskier. But don?t take my word for it.There?s an interesting index that you can trade called the CBOE Volatility Index that measures option prices on one of my favorite investment vehicles the S&P 500 index. This volatility index is often referred to as the ?investor fear gauge?, a whitepaper from the CBOE explains why:?Historically, during periods of financial stress, which are often accompanied by steep market declines, option prices - and VIX - tend to rise. The greater the fear, the higher the VIX level.? This index rose 64% today on extremely heavy volume, indicating a dramatic and wide-spread decrease in investor sentiment related to the stock market. And an increase in inves...
More About: News , Stocks , Good News , Stock , Sharp

Wither February Sales?
2007-02-27 00:17:02
Are February 's Sale s on track to be the worst in several years? I'm not sure, but it sort of looks that way.DataQuick reported 2,400 All Homes sales in the month of January (a full calendar month.) They also reported for the 22 business days ending Feb 7th sales of 1,335 (again the equivalnent of a calendar month, just starting about a week later than the Jan data.) Can it be right that for a rolling four week period, sales are down 865 units? Am I missing something here? Does anyone know if real estate transactions are massively, no profoundly, back-loaded to the end of the month? If they are, then this may be no big deal. If they're not, February could end up being an absolutely abyssmal month for sales, possibly under 1,500 units. Is this the first massive escalation of the buyer versus seller Mexican stand-off? I am freaking dying to know.Anyone with information regarding backloading (what percentage of RE transactions typically happen in the first, second, etc. week of the m...
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A Call for Data and a "Data Commons"
2007-02-26 18:17:01
As part of our effort to level the informational playing field for buyers, OC Prudent Bears is looking to expand the set of data that we use to perform our analyses. So far, we've been able to find some fairly good published data and have posted what I believe to be useful and beneficial analysis and commentary on that data, but when we're foraging (foraging bears, LOL!) for data we can only get so far. Frankly, I'd like to up the game.With that in mind, I'm putting out a request to the community at large to share data. If you or someone you know has data on pricing, inventory, rental levels, demographics, housing stock, closed deals, current deals, terminated deals, square footage of homes for sale/sold or any other data, I'd like to hear from you.We are primarily looking for this data at a county and ZIP level and the more years of data the better. It doesn't matter if the data is culled from the web, taken from some kind of publication, the census, a university study, somet...
More About: Data , Common , Call , Comm , Mons

Inventories at 23,000+ in August 2007?
2007-02-26 06:16:03
I got offered a bet by a real estate agent friend regarding housing inventory levels for this year. He wanted to be me $100 that OC real estate inventory won't pass 20,000 units at ANY point this year. I didn't know if that was a good bet or not, so I built a crude (yes, crude) forecasting model to see whether or not I ought to take the bet.The results were a little surprising: The bars are color-coded in two ways, first by season (red is Summer; Orange is Fall, Blue, Winter and Green, Spring), and then the darker bars are actual figures where the lighter are the results of the forecast (also with an E at the front of their label.) Cool, huh?I took as an assumption that because sales are so strongly seasonal, that one might be able to take the January inventory levels and use it as a "baseline" inventory number for the year. So I compared to inventory levels in Jan 2006 to each of the respective months, giving me a relative inventory increase from January by month. I then used a t...
More About: Tories , Tori , August , August 2007 , August 2

OC Inventories Up for 6th Report in a Row!
2007-02-26 06:16:03
In a break from our regularly scheduled programming...I read an article and saw some associated postings where real estate agents have been claiming that they have seen rather significant increases in buyer interest and traffic at open houses. So, I go to wondering if either of these factors was actually translating into an increase in sales and a subsequent reduction of inventory.So, I clicked over to my favorite inventory blog and see what the folks at Bubble Markets Inventory Tracking were reporting and found the following data:A quick look at this data shows that inventories have been consitently trending upward since the beginning of the year. That leads me to be believe that the increase in traffic really isn't translating into many deals. Must be a lot of looky loos, or maybe a little wishful thinking on the part of some realtors desperate for a little good news.A couple of other interesting nuggets from the Bubble Markets Inventory Tracking site.Inventories compared year on...
More About: Report , Port , Tories , Repo , Tori

Media Stats Hiding Blood in the Streets?
2007-02-26 06:16:03
In my last post, I wrote about how sellers may have reacted to prices changes as reported by the media. Today, I?m going to have a look at how sellers might be reacting if the media were to report those figures just a little differently.In my last post, we had a look at the price performance here in OC by comparing January 2007 price levels to those in January 2006.We noted that the data looked relatively neutral for the most owners but that there was some relatively bad news for flippers and condo owners. All in all, sort of a mixed bag.This kind of year-on-year monthly comparison seems to be very widely reported and sort of the sweetheart stat of the media when it comes to reporting on housing price trends. In addition to, or maybe as a result of that fact, the YOY stat seems to be the stat mostly often referred to in discussion around the blogs--for or whatever reason, the YOY comparison seems to the gold standard of price comparators.But what if the media reported the figures di...
More About: Media , Street , Stats , Blood , Tree

January Data Bad News for Flippers, Condo Owners
2007-02-26 06:16:03
Normally, I focus my posts around pricing trends with the commentary centered around buyer behavior. Today, I wanted to shift gears and speculate about how sellers might be behaving in the coming months based on the Data Quick January numbers as reported by the media.If we look at pricing performance between Jan 07 and Jan 06 prices look relatively flat on average. The Median All price is exactly flat at 0.0% and SFDU eked out a gain of .7%. Condo s didn?t fare well, dropping about 3% which was bad news for condo sellers, but new homes zoomed up 14.9% after dropping precipitously last month which may have been heartening to the builders. On the whole, one could rightly come to the opinion that prices as reported last month were flat.I think many potential home sellers picked up their newspapers last week, saw the zero-appreciation headlines and felt while it wasn?t any good news for homes; there also wasn?t any bad news either. But this news wasn?t good news at all for three groups: f...
More About: News , Bad News

OC Bears "Holistic" Savings Nearly $79,000, So Far!
2007-02-26 06:16:03
In an effort to offer an accurate a picture as is possible of the benefits of renting in the current housing market that is OC, I have decided to build a more comprehensive set of calculations for OC renters.This new model incorporates the effect of inflation on "real" housing prices, interest expense costs, property taxcosts, tax benefits of ownership and the changes in the DataQuick pricing history methology. I believe this new savings number reflects a more inclusive, comprehensive and accurate estimation of how much we bears have saved already by not buying at the price peak. In an effort to be as unbiased as possible, we have pulled the pricing data from the OC Register and loan specifics from Eloan.com.Let's have a look at the summary of the numbers for the seven-month period since the peak:Nominal Amount Saved Since Home Price Declines: $ 42,500Housing Price Decline Due to Inflation $ 15,050Savings on Acquisition (Closing and Rate Buy Down): $ 7,705Savings on Renting Versus ...
More About: Holistic , List , Bears , Near , Early

OC Bears Typical Savings Approaching $50,000
2007-02-26 06:16:03
As was reported in the OC Register today, the "all homes" median price dropped to $600.000 for the month of January. Quite a Valentine's Day gift for us bears.Congratulations once again to OC?s prudent bears! The savings by deferring a purchase and biding your time, keep on rolling in! Let?s have a look at these savings (all homes) your patience has earned you so far:Saving s Compared to Last Week: $4,000Savings Compared to Last Year: $27,000Savings Compared to Last Month: $42,000Savings Compared to All Time High: $46,000With prices down as broadly as I found in my last study I?m not at all surprised to see prices continue to drift down and, as I have said in the past, I think they will continue to do so for quite some time.Another very, noteworthy fact from this last report is that our ?all homes? price is at exactly $600,000. I think this is a profoundly important number in terms of sellers? psychology. If we break through this number, even by $500, I think it very well may cause ...
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