The San Diego Real Estate Market has seen better days. It’s not that there aren’t buyers seeking that perfect place to call home sweet home it’s the little inventory they have to choose from. Inventory is low especially in some areas of San Diego County in the first time homebuyer price ranges. So low that many VA and FHA buyers are taking their chances on short sales, which may or may not ever close escrow, and waiting it out.
I can’t tell you how many questions I answer on Trulia about buyers and short sales. Buyers are always asking, what takes so long, how come the banks won’t approve my offer, what’s going on, why did they take another offer, why did the bank foreclose on the home when I had an offer on it for 8 months, why is the seller declaring bankruptcy, and on and on. It’s like writing an offer on a home and putting it into a black hole and hoping something good comes out on the other end. It usually doesn’t.
Keep in mind if you’re a buyer who wrote an offer on a short sale you probably are in competition with 5 to 50 other buyers. Only 1 of those offers will get accepted and many times the home will go to foreclosure and no one gets it. It’s frustrating for everyone involved including all agents, the negotiators at the banks, sellers and all the other buyers trying to buy the home. Just think how the seller feels….. they are losing their home, their dreams, their investment, they and their family – kids, dogs, cats now need to find another place to live, most likely a rental or in with family, and their life is being turned upside down. Kind of puts things in a different perspective when you look at it from the side of the one who is losing the home.
San Diego Home Buyers using a VA or FHA Loan to buy a home or condo are often in third and fourth place when writing offers on foreclosed properties. They have that going for them too. The problem is with so many investors in the market buying foreclosures for cash or large sums of money down in conventional loans the VA and FHA loans aren’t usually the best way to go for an asset manager looking at offers on the REO asset they are managing. On cash offers they don’t have to worry about appraisal issues or finding out a buyer really doesn’t qualify for the loan to buy the foreclosure. It’s an unfortunate situation that people who want to buy the home to live in and be part of the community are being put in the back seat to investors looking to make a buck. But it is what it is and for now it’s bad news for some VA and FHA buyers. Hang in there. Times will change.
If you need help buying or selling a home or condo in the San Diego area make sure you contact us we’re your San Diego Realtor.
Foreclosures of San Diego is your source for all foreclosures in San Diego. We have tools to search all homes and condos for sale whether they’re Bank Owned REO Foreclosures, Short Sales or just normal listings. You can Search the San Diego MLS or use our San Diego Foreclosure MLS to find Foreclosures, Pre-Foreclosures or Auction Properties. Did I mention these Search Tools are FREE.
Thousands of people use our search tools every week and find the home or condo they are looking for in San Diego County. We allow visitors to use our tools because we want them to have a portal to search for their home or condo in the comfort of their home or office. If you need help seeing the property or writing an offer on the property or just some real estate advice please contact us.
I Googled San Diego Real Estate this morning and saw the top rated spot was a news article from the Union Tribune, Real Estate Expert: San Diego at Leading Edge of Recovery. The Real Estate Expert they site in the article is Lawrence Yun the Chief Economist for the National Association of Realtors. Yun is known for making many blunders and erroneous predictions in the past. Check out http://www.lawrenceyunwatch.blogspot.com/ for some in depth research on Yun’s other predictions and faux pas. I’m a big fan of laying all the facts out on the table for anyone buying a home in San DiegoCounty. A prediction like this headline needs to have all the facts including the ones behind the scenes.
The article Real Estate Expert: San Diego at Leading Edge of Recovery bases the recovery on rising prices and sales. Yun states that there is only a 2.5 month inventory of homes for sale and new home construction sluggish. He said that the demand is strong. In an excerpt from the article Yun confesses: “He began with a confession about how he missed the real estate bubble of 2004-06. Surely, the system had enough checks and balances to avoid a runaway market, he thought at the time. “I was clearly wrong,” he said.” My concern now is what else is Yun overlooking through assuming that others have checks and balances in place.
In the UT Article, “He also predicted that foreclosures will continue at high levels for the next 12 months because of the weak economy. But unlike last year, he said this year’s foreclosures are being snapped up in many markets, including San Diego.” The market in many areas of San Diego is saturated with many short sales. Many of the short sales have homeowners in them not making mortgage payments and in the foreclosure process while trying to short sell their home. I think the foreclosures at high levels will carry on well past 12 months. Related Blog Post : http://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage-lending/tools-resources/new-foreclosures-by-state-for.html
Many agents and asset managers speak of the tidal wave of foreclosures that are coming. I wonder why the banks are holding back all of the foreclosures that should be on the market. If the foreclosures are being held back and not put on the market for sale then there is a false sense of inventory. They are foreclosed on or will be soon but the homes are intentionally not being made available to home buyers. Why? Maybe this is to stabilize and firm up the market. But is this real or false stabilization?
The question is by doing this is it creating another problem of false values like the bubble we just came out of. I don’t know but the information needs to be out there for potential home buyers so they have all the facts when buying. Let’s face it, when NAR says something the news and the public listens. Let’s make sure they have all the facts not just the talking points for getting buyers to buy homes.
Is this last spike in sales and home prices in San Diego due to the mass of foreclosures being held off the market and only a trickling of foreclosures being released for sale? Is there a Great Wave of foreclosures coming? Just do a Google search for REO Tsunami and you will have plenty to read.
I think it is a great time to buy a home in many areas of San Diego County in certain price ranges. I think interest rates are low and the $8,000 tax credit is a helping hand for first time homebuyers. I also think that a home buyer needs to be aware that there are many more foreclosure due to hit the market and the word on the street is that the banks are holding back many foreclosures. If you are considering a home purchase in San Diego do your homework and gather all of the facts.
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I think “Making Home Affordable” the title and the name of the web site have it all wrong, it’s supposed to be “Buy a Home You Can Afford” but most things right now in the world are either upside down or just plain wrong.
I checked out the Obama led web site “Making Home Affordable”. The standard Homeowner’s HOPE Hotline mantra with the HOMES of HOPE 888-995-HOPE number in red to get you to call for urgent help. This government has hijacked the word HOPE from day one and probably won’t stop until they’ve moved on. Which is HOPEfully soon. Not that the next elected group of thugs and profiteers will do much better … I’d settle for doing nothing than the direction we’re heading now.
It was the HOPE of homeownership for many who should never have qualified for the loan that drew them into this burden that now is destroying their lives …. THE MORTGAGE PAYMENT. A HOPE fueled by GREED that lent money to anyone with a faint heartbeat with little regulation and little to no verification of the homeowner’s real ability to pay it back after the ARM would readjust. Lenders were making money hand over fist and could sell the note quickly on Wall Street to a sea of buyers, so why should they care to verify or tighten up on their lending practices. Now the banks and mortgage holders are losing money hand over fist as taxpayer’s bailout them out as well as our government and their buddies…… hand over fist.
The printing presses ($100 machines) are rolling at the Department of Treasury and the money going in every direction imaginable except to where it needs to go. The cost “PAYBACK” is left to our children and their children and so on….. while the baby boomers will have their nest eggs refilled with government pork, $4,500 car buying credit and free healthcare. WHOOOOPI. One of the saddest parts of this whole mess is putting the burden of this generation’s foul-ups on the children and their children. Well I guess they’re doing what they like to do, borrow and spend and expect someone else to pay or somehow get out of it. Their best answer is to pin it on the kids because they don’t have a voice, YET!
HOPE. I used to think HOPE was something like a wish, a dream that you wanted one day to be fulfilled, something in your life or in another’s life that would happen to bring joy into it. Now HOPE is a slogan, a word used by agenda pushers to play on people’s emotions and to get them to go in a specific direction. After all, who doesn’t want HOPE? Right?
Back to the web site …….
On the home page of this web site it asks
Are You Eligible? Please use the self-assessment tools provided on this websiteto see if you are among the 7 to 9 million homeowners who maybe able to benefit from Making Home Affordable.
Right below this is a “Find out if you are eligible” button.
The next web page will ask you to choose if you want to see if you are eligible for “Home Affordable Financing” or “Home Affordable Modification”. Select the one that best fits your desire.
Under “Home Affordable Financing” you have to answer YES to every question to be eligible. That means that you own a 1 -4 unit home, your loan is with Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, your current on your mortgage payments and “the kicker”- you believe that the amount you owe on your first mortgage is about the same or less than the current value of your house. Remember that last question asked about first mortgage only, not first and second. If you answered yes to all of these cross your fingers and toes and HOPE.
Under “Home Affordable Modification” you also have to answer YES to every question to be eligible. That means your home is your primary residence, the amount you owe on your first mortgage is equal to or less than $729,750, you’re having trouble paying your mortgage, you got your current mortgage before January 1, 2009, and your payment on your first mortgage (including principal, interest, taxes, insurance and homeowner’s association dues, if applicable) more than 31% of your current gross income? HOPEfully you can answer YES to all of the questions and then there’s HOPE.
I don’t want to give a sense of false HOPE to troubled homeowners so I want to be clear about this. Please try and use this web site to see if they can help you. From what I have seen in the San Diego area including Chula Vista is that most homeowners that purchased a home in the past 1-4 years can’t truly answer YES to all of the questions in either category. The ones that can are still only eligible for the Making Home Affordable program.
Most of the homes in many neighborhoods in San Diego County are short sales. This means that there was no loan refinancing or loan modification for the homeowner that allowed them to successfully stay in their home. If there was they would not be short selling the home, and many are short selling their homes and condos. Some truly just didn’t try, shame on them. Most are just way upside down in property value and can’t make the monthly payments since the ARM readjustment or loss of job.
Its simple math, let me show you;
Paid $800,000 for home … worth $500,000 – why do I want this home?
or
Monthly income $5,000…. house payment jumped to $4,900 – need to eat!
These short sale listings will either be sold short or be taken back by the bank through a foreclosure and end up on the market as a Bank Owned REO. I have spoken with many homeowners who just want to get out their homes or condos and just move on. They want to close that door in their lives and open the next one. The choice of keeping a home that has decreased in value 40% in 3 years and a monthly mortgage payment that is just not possible to pay is destroying families.
I have met many that have said “enough, I’ll take the credit hit and short sell my home or let the bank foreclose on it” and they have. I will always ask them if they contacted an attorney and a CPA to go over all of the ramifications of both. This is essential if the path of short sale or foreclosure is in any ones future.
I HOPE this review of the Making Home Affordable web site helps you.
CAR Revises San Diego Real Estate Sales Numbers Due to MLS Data Glitch
This blog post is in reference to an article in the Wall Street Journal by James R. Hagerty. The WSJ reported that:
“The California Association of Realtors expects to make sharp downward revisions in its recent monthly reports of soaring home sales in the San Diego area, Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist of the trade group, said in an interview. The problem resulted from a glitch in data from a multiple-listing service in San Diego, Mr. Kleinhenz said. He said a change in computer systems used there resulted in incorrect data being sent to the Realtor association over the past year or so. Thomas Lawler, an independent economist in Leesburg, Va., who tracks home sales nationwide, raised questions about the San Diego data in a report last week. Mr. Lawler noted that the numbers reported by the Realtors vastly exceeded those from MDA DataQuick, a research firm in La Jolla, Calif., and other sources. The California Realtors have reported that San Diego sales in April were up about 63% from a year earlier. Mr. Kleinhenz said that is expected to be revised downward to a gain of about 20%. For May, the group reported an 89% increase in sales in San Diego; that will be slashed to about 6.5%, the economist said. As a result, he said, the state-wide sales gain for May — reported last week as 35% — also will be revised down, though it probably will remain above 30%, Mr. Kleinhenz said.”
I use the San Diego MLS as a Realtor in San Diego. There have been some changes to it over the past year and just recently. Fields have been added and things have been changed around. It took Listingbook quite a while to finally come into San Diego as a tool for agents and their buyers and sellers to view real estate for sale in the MLS. It has been frustrating for me as well because the IDX solution for my San Diego real estate web site has been changed several times because of the adjustments in the San Diego MLS. This has also made many of my search links invalid and error codes pop up when clients do searches with prior created links. It has forced me to remove the links. I also understand that the MLS not only in San Diego but other areas of the country change from time to time and will always have to be modified with new fields and updates. It is a part of technology and changing times.
The old adage “GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out” – doesn’t apply either because it wasn’t “Garbage In” it was just “Garbage Out”. Because of the Changes in the MLS I can see how the sales calculations can be different from what they were in the past because of the added fields that are now in play. I’m glad the mistake was caught and I’m sure more caution will be used in the future when doing these calculations. It can also affect the Median Home Price data as well. If fields change and new categories are created someone with an understanding of all this needs to be overseeing the operation to make sure the reporting is correct. DataQuick got it right ….. Why not hire them.
The annual Realtors Conference and Expo will be held in my town, San Diego California. San Diego couldn’t have been a better choice for the 2009 Realtor Conference. Who wouldn’t want to come to San Diego anyway? Now Realtors in other parts of the country will truly understand why San Diego is America’s Finest City. And why real estate in San Diego is priceless. The event is being held at the San Diego Convention Center in Downtown San Diego from November 13 – 16. Some of the guest speakers are Condoleezza Rice, Sugar Ray Leonard and Reba McEntire. Our great city will be gracious to all Realtors throughout the country coming to San Diego to experience this great event and the finest city in America.
Info from Realtor.org about the San Diego Real Estate Event.
THE 2009 REALTORS® CONFERENCE & EXPO
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First REALTORS® Conference & Expo in San Diego!
Enjoy a wide-range of Conference special events, including the REALTORS® Celebrity Concert starring Reba McEntire.
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Make sure you don’t miss out. See you in San Diego!
If you need help buying a home or condo in the San Diego area make sure you contact us we’re your San Diego Realtor.
With San Diego real estate moving in an upwardly direction over the past couple of months recent interest rates could slow home buying activity. Home buyers in San Diego have been, in some areas of the county, fighting over homes that come up for sale. Many San Diego home buyers have offers in on short sales and jump all over the bank owned REO foreclosures the day they hit the market. Unfortunately the bank owned REO’s already have offers on them the day they come up for sale and sometime even before they show up in the MLS.
This has many home buyers frustrated and wondering what they have to do to get a house or condo in today’s San Diego Real Estate Market. Another issue that has been waiting to rear its ugly head is interest rates. When interest rates rise home buyers see their purchasing power reduced. Keep in mind when interest rates go up the monthly payment for a homebuyer also goes up and sometimes more than what they are comfortable with. Many times the lender will have to reduce the purchase price of what the homebuyer can qualify for.
This scenario can also have a real negative effect on the real estate market in general. If a home buyer wanting to buy a home has had a certain purchase price and monthly payment in mind for a certain size and quality of home and then they’re told that they can’t buy the same home at the same monthly payment, many of them will decide not to buy. Some will wait for the homes that they were recently able to buy at a certain price range to come down into the loan amount of what the comfortable monthly payment is that they had already had their hearts set on. Some of them won’t be able to afford the same home they thought they could buy and won’t settle for less of a home now. These factors could show a decline in demand and then a decline in home prices. We’ll have to wait and see. Oh, and don’t forget about the foreclosures to keep the median home price in San Diego from gaining too much ground. There are a few years of that left.
If you need help buying a home or condo in the San Diego area make sure you contact us we’re your San Diego Realtor.
Ashlon Langley Writer and Director of The Car a 1970’s film starring James Brolin was interviewed on Shameful Cinema. I write many Blog posts about San Diego and San Diego Real Estate and after reading the Ashlon interview about this 1970 movie I thought I would deviate and write about something out of the ordinary. I like the 1970’s low budget movies without all of the special effects and outspoken actors of today’s Hollywood. Ashlon responding to a question from the interviewer Andy about the car design he said;
Ashlon: The under-cranking was reminiscent of the Adams Family and The Munsters television series, making that quality silly to me. However, the design is choice! I love that one of the confusing points for the cops in the movie is that they can’t tell what make or model the beast is. And… it has no tags! If only they could get a license plate, the bungling cops could stop all the mayhem, yeah right!
I wrote about this movie and this interview because things are also reminiscent of the 1970’s even though it’s 2009. We are now like in the early 70’s in a recession and inflation is due to rise. America has taken a hit in the pride department due to the media’s constant attack on the good things America stands for and good things the United States does for so many around the world. The 70’s brought about the 80’s and the economy started gaining ground again and Americans had a lot of good things to feel good about. Watch The Car if you can and read the Ashlon interview. It’s truly entertaining.
If you need help buying a home, condo, Bank Owned REO, Foreclosure or Short Sale in the San Diego area including Chula Vista make sure you contact us we’re your San Diego Realtor.
May 2009 - The Mortgage Reform and Anti Predatory Lending Act HR1728 passed on Thursday May 7, 2009. The House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 300 to 114 and is said to protect homeowners from questionable and predatory lending practices that were partially responsible for the record home foreclosures and financial crisis.
This Mortgage Reform and Anti Predatory Lending Act sets up rules to ensure that lenders make loans that mortgage borrowers can afford to pay back. The act also bans prepayment penalties on ARMs Adjustable Rate Mortgages that are the real culprit loans in the foreclosure mess. This bill will also hold accountable the secondary mortgage market for following the same rules. One lawmaker said, “The message is simple. Lenders can’t give loans to people who can’t afford them. And borrowers have to tell the truth about their finances when they apply for a loan.” Not to be disagreeing with the administration of hope but isn’t this just common sense?
Nancy Pelosi the Democratic House Speaker said, “The simple fact is that our laws and enforcement efforts did not keep pace with the complexities of a global economy and a financial industry where the greed of some trumped common sense. Insisting on responsible borrowing and lending and ensuring that borrowers enter into mortgages they can repay or refinance will help families protect their most valuable asset — their home — and guard against another financial and housing market meltdown.” I would have to ask Nancy why she didn’t do something about it, she was a lawmaker at the time and there were many economists warning the government about this.
Many San Diego home owners and potential home buyers know the facts about the San Diego housing market and its foreclosure mess. This act, although very important for protecting potential home buyers when getting a mortgage comes in way too late. The damage is already done. I think if anyone dropped the ball it was the U.S. Government and there lack of proper legislation to protect home buyers and the greed that’s within the system itself. Isn’t that what we elect them for? It’s very interesting to see where all of the elected officials got their campaign contributions, the banks and companies now getting all of our future tax dollars in the form of a so called bailout? What a joke.
If you need help buying a home or condo in the San Diego area make sure you contact us we’re your San Diego Realtor.
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