You will believe what The Ministry of Truth says or you will be taken to Room 101.
Posted on 06/07/2013 6:07:34 AM PDT by blam
Best Explanation For The Fake U.S. Housing Market Recovery
Housing-Market / US Housing Jun 06, 2013 - 04:37 PM GMT
By: Profit Confidential
Michael Lombardi
Michael Lombardi writes: The average American Joe isn’t participating in the U.S. housing market. As a matter of fact, according to the Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey, investors purchased 69% of “damaged” properties in April 2013, while first-time home buyers accounted for only 16% of “damaged” purchases.
It is very well documented in these pages how home prices in the U.S. economy are being driven upward by institutional investors. Affirming my stance on the U.S. housing market, Suzanne Mistretta, an analyst at Fitch Rating Services, was quoted this week as saying, “The [housing price] growth is being propelled by institutional money… The question is how much the change in prices really reflects the market demand, rather than one-off market shifts that may not be around in a couple of years.” (Source: Popper, N., “Behind the Rise in House Prices, Wall Street Buyers,” New York Times Dealbook, June 3, 2013.)
Major financial institutions like The Blackstone Group L.P. (NYSE/BX) have become major buyers in the U.S. housing market. Blackstone has spent more than $4.0 billion for 24,000 homes in the U.S. housing market that it plans to rent out.
Rising prices on homes in various pockets of the U.S. housing market are a direct result of large institutional investors buying in.
Take Atlanta, for example. Blackstone bought 1,400 properties worth more than $100 million in Atlanta last year. (Source: Bloomberg, April 25, 2013.) And what happened to prices for homes in Atlanta? According to CoreLogic, a housing data compiler, home prices in Atlanta increased 12.4% in the 12-month period ended February 2013, )
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(Excerpt) Read more at marketoracle.co.uk ...
How much foreign money is in there too?
After the last collapse, my brother in law (Lives in Phoenix) walked away from many homes there that he was using as investment instruments.
He’s back. He’s flipping an average of one home a day.
And meanwhile, a friend is STILL in her house in Seattle. She has not made a house payment now in over four years. She keeps stringing the bank along and they keep threatening “this time we mean it”. Not so far...
What a world.
I understand they have built entire cities in China that are still unoccupied. People buy and sell the homes there in the large planned neighborhoods like you would buy stocks, yet for years, and ever since they were built, the entire neighborhoods are unoccupied.
What a world.
A lot of cash buyers in my neighborhood.
I trust nothing at face prtaining to the economy anymore reported by the MSM. They only report what they are told to by the spin doctors in the WH. In fact, I bet there’s a whole department of the Obama administration that is devoted to propaganda, lies, and deception. It really would not surprise me one iota.
Warren Buffet advised investors to snap up foreclosures and short sales last year, and they are following his advice. The USA will be a nation of renters as it was during the last Depression, but don’t expect Bloomberg TV or CNBC to report this unpleasant truth.
Then call your Congressman and ask him why you can't get the same deal!
lol...I think
Blackstone Partners have a vested interest in stabilizing the housing market. They own about 30 contractor lumber yards through their subsidiary USLBM. Many of these lumber yards were also purchased when they were in distress, ie bankruptcy.
I currently sell a few of them from IL to CT. They are a large investment company. They look at this as an opportunity to buy cheap. They have already sold a couple of these lumber yards(in Indy) when one of their competitors made them an offer to good to refuse.
However, I disagree with the premise of the article, at least from my first hand experience in selling my house here in NH. Four out of the five offers I had on my house were from first time home buyers. All of them were looking to live in the house.
The houses that have sold to investors in this area are mainly to the house flippers type. For example, there was a house we were looking at to buy about 6 months ago. It was owned by Fannie Mae. It sold for $280K or less(this was the asking price when it when under contract). It just went back on the market for $425K. However, it is in an area where the abutting homes are in the $500K- $1M range. I wanted to buy this house BUT the boss(Mrs. Woodbutcher) did not like it. We bought another house about 2 miles away for $270K. We sold our house the first week of February for $260K in 8 days.
There were a lot of Canadian buyers in the last couple years in both the AZ and FL markets. Many of these folks were people looking to buy their retirement or Snowbird house. I also personally know people from both ND and MT that bought houses in AZ last year just for that reason.
Institutional investors see opportunity in picking up properties from the banksters. They’re about to get their pockets picked. It takes bux up front to cleanup the homes they bought and people and money to maintain them. Their profit margins aren’t going to justify the investment. The banks get to improve their balance sheets and are holding inventory off the market to keep the price up. We’ve still got oversupply gang and even with the fed pumping up the money supply, it isn’t going to change that.
This is simply “The Housing Boom”, Part Deux.
Fake?
It’s one thing to analyze data and reach conclusions about the structure of a market, and it’s another to claim that a market doesn’t exist. Conservatives are so committed to bad news on the economy that they say a lot of very stupid things.
You have a most appropriate screen name.
If you cross index the posting history of the people pointing out that there is no improvement in home buying from actual occupants of houses with the keyword “housingbubble” you will find that we accurately forecast the real estate collapse over six years ago.
We were looking at the numbers then. There are more dwellings than there are families to fill them. A hell of a lot more. This has always been a prognostication predicated on statistics.
This could not have ended any other way and it will be a long time before prices can come up significantly.
At least they will have some value when the currency collapses.
Lady flipped the condo above me.
“Conservatives are so committed to bad news on the economy that they say a lot of very stupid things.”
Your entire post was one stupid liberal comment. The two phrases you strung together are not mutually exclusive as you tried to present them.
You will believe what The Ministry of Truth says or you will be taken to Room 101.
“I bet there’s a whole department of the Obama administration that is devoted to propaganda, lies, and deception. It really would not surprise me one iota.”
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It would certainly surprise me to learn there is NOT one! You may not be able to identify it by name but it certainly exists in function. It might be safe to say that the “mainstream media” serves the function quite well and is in fact the department to which you refer.
Well Blackstone is active in the Tampa-St. Pete area. I heard from my realtor Blackstone’s plan is to rent their properties for 5 years, then dump them back on the market. She was perturbed as it would decrease purchasers up front, then depress values when they divest. But rents have gone up 50% in some areas and there’s all kinds of people angling to profit from it.
In my former town home prices have gone up over 20% and rentals more than 40% since October by my estimate. The market is incredibly tight where the institutions (and foreigners) are active, usually the same area. Outside the ‘investment zones’ prices remain moderate to flat. I found a nice, small area overlooked by the investors and foreigners which is the same work and ocean commute distance as my last place, plus acerage and conservation. I snapped it up and plan on buying land as soon as I can rebuild my savings.
Pasco county is doing well with Raymond James and Fidelity setting up there and more coporations to come. IMO w Pasco’s attraction is due to being the closest available land near both TPA and the coast via uncongested highways. The area I’m in is a ‘sweet spot’ in between there and Tampa.
LOL ...believe it or not I’ve never read it but I bet we have gone far past what Orwell envisioned
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