Problem: Nobody Wants to Pay for Quality Work.

The Buyers (particularly the under-35 crowd) could care less about Quality. They just want the latest Do-Dah crap in the kitchen and chickenshit cove mouldings in the living room.

Deciding that working 85-90 hours per week for less than a first-year Dentist makes, I said, “Screw It!” after 18 of my years and three generations before me and went to work for the government.

And Quality work means: I have NEVER built a home using Drywall…always lath and plaster.

Do you know the difference?

A 109 year old house? bet you can’t even drive a nail into the wood now.

I will never understand why people bought houses

But do you understand why Realtors sold people houses?

Do you understand why appraisers apprised houses?

Why bankers offered mortgages?

Greedy, dishonest, deceiving, no?

CONNIVING?

The ABX is traded only at the institutional level and is not traded on an exchange so it is tough to track. I will get regular color from my friends at 12th Street Capital and share it.

The Case-Shiller is published monthly and is broken into different geographic zones. You can google that and track it by zone.

http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/author/ld/

You may find these 129 posts informative. Enjoy!!

The U.S. housing crisis is deepening as President Barack Obama attempts a $275 billion rescue to help borrowers with sinking home values or unaffordable loans. Declining prices sapped $2.4 trillion in value from the nation’s residential market last year, according to First American CoreLogic. A measure of prices in 20 U.S. cities has fallen every month since January 2007, the S&P/Case Shiller index shows.
~snip~
Some of the top U.S. lenders own as many as 700,000 foreclosed homes they have yet to offer for sale, said Rick Sharga, executive vice president for marketing for RealtyTrac

Is any wonder that the future is bleak with 5.3 million people out with 654,000 people applting for un-enjoyment last week.

AIG is not talking. Is it worth the 180 billion? Bernanke and Geithner will not name the “counter parties” as to where it went. But my guess are hedge funds. The WSJ is saying that foriegn banks are the ones that are getting the largese, but if the European market is worse than ours and that is where the $$$ is going…isn’t that a financial rabbit hole?

HA! BO just said he is “a glutten for punishment” on the local news. He ain’t seen nothing yet.

As the housing values plummet, less will be helped.

Except for those who bought way above their means. They are the ones who will get to keep what rightfully should never have been theirs in the first place while the rest of us who did live within our means are essentially told, “they bought it and you’ll pay for it”. But what the hell, those McMansions they bought will be rubble in about 30 years because they are cheap crap–right about the time they (with help from the rest of us) finish payments. My place, on the other hand, is 109 years old, built like a Sherman tank, and will outlast me and my children. Yep, I will get the last laugh on this one.

I do not look at indexes. I look at the average family budgets. Real estate in any primary residense markets is directly dependant on the family income. PERIOD.

Whatever the average family income is in a particular market, you take around 25-28% of that and that gives you the mortgage paiment they spend. Given the average 30-year fixed rate at the moment, you have the price of the average house in the market.

Any deviation from those numbers is speculation, risky and unsustainable.

Considering the amount of debt the average American family is now having and accumulating (thanks to the various spending bills Obama’s administration is voting), considering the shrinking of their income and considering the anticipated inflation soon to kick in, there is no way IMO the value of the Real Estate can improve for a long long time.

As matter of fact, I rather think if you accept the Stock Market as an advance indicator of future values, that the real estate market has still some way to drop to catch up with 1997 values shown on Wall Street on Monday.

The jobs report was dismal. Retail sales fell, but not as much as expected. ( I suppose that is a good thing in a twisted sort of way). More foreclosures on the horizon. Some banks returned the bailout money. So does that mean that the banks never needed it or maybe they didn’t like some accountability for receiving it? Germany is forecasting a 7 percent contraction. All in all, it is still pretty bad news.

Really until they get the housing plan implemented we aren’t going to know if it will have any impact. It isn’t going to help those who have lost incredible value in their house. As the housing values plummet, less will be helped.