Unless we throw open the borders, we're gonna have millions and millions of vacant homes for years and years and years to come.
Guess that's what happens when you have a wild speculative housing mania, and 25% of all houses are sold as second homes. That nobody needed. That people couldn't afford. And now that they, or the banks, can't get rid of.
Answer in the comments section.
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36 comments:
Millions.
What we HP ers talked about here in the Phoenix metro area 3 years ago was all true and spot on.
I drive all over the area as an HVAC service person and those developments in Maricopa and Buckeye are just homes to Pigeons and Scorpions.
Power Ranch in east Mesa became the poster child for the housing and credit orgy and made the local news due to the overwhwlming number of defaults.
20 somethings in brand new Escalades with 27 inch rims all pimped out and a huge house .
And we were all just a bunch of flying monkeys. I will buy again , but not with the aid of a Realtor. No way. Now we all know who the flying monkeys are.
So burning down a vacant house becomes a civic duty. Especially if it's one that some maggot bank made YOU vacate at the point of an eviction deputy's gun. It helps remove the excess inventory and brings America closer to the day of recovery! But please be politically correct and make sure there are no crackheads unconscious inside before you light it up.
In other news, add another tick to Ireland Panic.
19 million is the answer. Click on the headline article.
19 million.
How the f*ck are they gonna fill those up?
Or do we need to tear some places down?
The banks should be forced to donate one house to every soldier returning from Iraq/Afghanistan.
Ok, Keith, we tottally get how fucked we are. Question is now, how do those of us sitting on piles of gold and cash play this at the bottom (in 5-10 years)?
I've been looking at many of the foreclosure/zillow like web sites and they seem to be bought and paid for by NAR/USGov machine. We'd like to know what tools are out there that really help the BUYER buy cheap, cheap land from cratering banks, crumbling government when the time comes? Maybe this is a niche? BuyersLeverage.Com??
Oh yeah, and you need more worldpanic!
Best to all the panic-bros around the world.
What "headline article"? The one on Immelt?
It's hitting everyone. I recently worked for an attorney who owns a title company, conducts real estate closings, advises and partners with private inner city housing 'remodelers/flippers', and coordinates high-interest loans to shaky investors secured only by supposedly solid 'low-priced' real estate. He was very optimistic about the market and cocky about his various ventures. Now I hear he just lost his own second home, an ocean front condo, to foreclosure.
Some places, like Maricopa, AZ, just need to be plowed back under. It's as simple as that.
Blogger Bukko_in_Australia said...
So burning down a vacant house becomes a civic duty. Especially if it's one that some maggot bank made YOU vacate at the point of an eviction deputy's gun. It helps remove the excess inventory and brings America closer to the day of recovery! But please be politically correct and make sure there are no crackheads unconscious inside before you light it up.
In other news, add another tick to Ireland Panic.
February 6, 2009 11:25 AM
Dear Bukko:
Perhaps in Australia that is how you folks decide to deal with this crisis. We Americans on the other hand believe in; 1. The rule of law and 2. The free market.
The rest of the world needs to grow up and follow the American way and the American model of doing things. If people around the world looked up to America instead of looking down on us, the world would be a better place.
500 million?
No problem. With the North American Union coming those houses will fill up fast. Obama to the rescue!
"So, take a wild guess, how many vacant homes do you think there are in America today?"
-----------------
Not as many as there will be by the end of this year.
Could it be that many banks are able to hold these houses because of the bailout and not flushing inventory at much lower affordable costs? Someone is trying to keep the values up as much as possible, with intervention of natural selection and the course-of evolution.
I was guessing that, as the prices were going insanely up, that it was really a plot of the government to rake-in property tax, not too sure about it, but sustainability was the key and that went P00F! But it could also be they’re planning a really big war, that, I hope not. Boom-Bust-War, Hegelian, isn’t it, that in which the dialectic is used as an analytic tool in order to approach a higher unity?
Not monkeys, mad scientists…..!
NASCAR Fans Unite!
Boogity Boogity Bogity...
It's all rigged. You have no say and No Chance.
Hey, pass me the cheese doodles and a gallon of coke.
SUPERSIZE ME!
If you put 4 people in each one of those houses, you could relocate the entire population of England, and still have room for New York and Mexico City.
"25% of all houses are sold as second homes"
Sure! and millions more are sold as primary "homes," but they are just like the one we see in the picture, or even worse! Why do we insist on calling them homes! How about "shanties," or piles of crap sold by realtors to monkeys looking for a habitat.
Matt C said...
............I've been looking at many of the foreclosure/zillow like web sites and they seem to be bought and paid for by NAR/USGov machine. We'd like to know what tools are out there that really help the BUYER buy cheap, cheap land from cratering banks, crumbling government when the time comes? Maybe this is a niche? BuyersLeverage.Com??
============================
I would love to see a LEGITIMATE website that did just that. It would be a paysite, of course, but would be worth it. How this theoretical paysite would pull it all together, I'm not sure.
All the raw data is out there, but each chunk of info is controlled/handled/owned by this agency, or that dept., or that website, and everybody's got their hand out.
And good price alone should not be the only factor. Local conditions: cost of living, deterioration or not, school/commercial access, taxes, job availability, etc., should all be included.
Sounds formidable, but a paysite offering to guide you to the BIGGEST purchase most of us ever make, having established a good name for itself, could charge, and get, a pretty penny for its services.
Just a thought.
1. Create credit bubble.
2. Use proceeds to build massive numbers of homes.
3. Rescind credit to collapse economy.
4. Create union.
5. Fill homes with dirty mexicans and central americans.
6. Render former US to 3rd world status.
According to that article, and US census figures, the average American family still needs a $20000 raise to afford the average house. Either that, or the national average home price has to drop by $60000.
I wonder what we will see first.
This empy housing glut may work out perfectly after all.
Take all felons or politicians with sentences over 5 years (too stupid not to get caught) and place them strapped into a chair which is bolted to the floor joists and then nail all doors and windows shut and set house on fire with jet fuel after using for Swat Team practice.
Two Birds with one stone...
You're Welcome
1. Create credit bubble.
2. Use proceeds to build massive numbers of homes.
3. Rescind credit to collapse economy.
4. Create union.
5. Fill homes with dirty mexicans and central americans.
6. Render former US to 3rd world status.
February 6, 2009 4:15 PM
Also add:
7. Install OBBBAMMMY as god king.
8. Build collesseum so that citizen slaves can be fed to lions or used as gladiators for a tidy globalist profit. (thats if they cause trouble for the new god king or NEW wORLD ORDER.)
There are alot of people who need shelter of some kind, so now there is no excuse to fix-up some of these empty crack-jack boxes and turn them into shelters for those who need it.
$900bil - if spent wisely - can actually do some good for those who really need it, but keeping the public-service pigs away from the trough is going to be might tough.
When fuel oil becomes to expensive to purchase regularly, firewood becomes scarce and expensive. There won't be so many. Which will coincidently clean up some of the crack / flop / eyesores that plague neighborhoods.
"No officer we don't have any idea how that house got (tore down / blown up / burned down) it's a damn shame. Hopefully no one (except those drug dealing Mutha' effers that lived there) got hurt."
200 million guns and a pissed-off-unemployed-foreclosed and broke population... priceless
There are plenty of people already in this country who would gladly fill those houses.
The problem is delusional sellers asking ridiculously high prices to sell, and delusional landlords asking ridiculously high prices to rent.
Until this situation changes, or until potential buyers and renters get higher paying jobs, those houses will remain empty.
The following are solutions:
1. Lower housing costs
2. Higher wages
The fgollowing are not solutions:
1. Easy credit
2. Open borders
There were 19 million vacant homes at the end of 2008.
I anticipate 3.5 million foreclosures in 2009 along with 500K residual empty homes.
This gives us a total of 23 million vacant homes.
My guess is that We will sell 3-3.5million homes in 2009.
A total of 19.5-20 Million homes will sit vacant at the end of 2009!!!
We still have a long way to go before we hit bottom. Here in Nevada people just keep building condos,houses,apartments, and strip malls. Nothing is filled, crappy houses everywhere and prices still astronomical. As long as people keep thinking in just an"slight economic downturn " mentality, the harder the sudden stop at the end of the fall.
I love this market, made $20k turning BAC in 2 days and just closed on my 3rd foreclosure in a month, $2600 mortgage payment with $2500 rental in place.
hmm, the Phoenix rises from soot and ashes, maybe I should start buying there too.
I recently read that the number of vacant homes is far above what's reported. The reason for this is because banks simply have not put tons of their foreclosed homes on the market, so they aren't counted as "vacant". The only way they could be counted is if they actually go on the market for sale by the bank. The number of additional foreclosed homes the banks have that are not on the market number in the millions, according to the source I read. I'm just reporting what I read; I don't know this for a fact.
But if that's true, just wait until the alt-a's and option arms start defaulting later this year...kick up that number by another few million over the next three years when those loans stop resetting in the spring of 2012.
14,325,942.
Give or take a couple.
Lol!
Not a bad guess actually.
We already know that about 30 percent of the houses that were bought during the bubble were bought by flippers - not owner occupiers. These are not houses that had families in them - there was never anybody in them. So unless there was a massive increase in people renting, these are empty. I guess you could look it up somewhere. Houses sold say in 2005, 2006... 30%=? Just as a starting point.
I amazes me how many of the foreclosures and short sales are owned by real estate agents too. No wonder they are so concerned with keeping values up. Powerful lobby in Washington.
How are you going, Anon. @ 2:08 p.m.? Thanks for taking the time to comment on my comment, which was meant to sardonic, not serious. I'm not an Australian (although I'm aiming for citizenship), just a Yank who moved here as a voluntary political exile.
There's no thought of burning vacant houses in Oz. In my part of town, it's still hard to find a rental, the supply is so tight. Even with their notorious drunkenness, Aussies are more law-abiding when it comes to big things like arson than Americans.
They still tend to look up to America here, as you would an older, stronger brother. But Australia's faith in the (other) States was shaken during the Cheney/Bush reign of error. (The unceasing stream of gun massacres also horrifies them.) And as you would if your older brother turned out to be a child-abusing drug addict, Aussies are ever more looking at the U.S. as a grotesque, malignant entity, not something to be emulated. Such a shame...
I heard 2 million. That's 2,000,000. Isn't that the population of Boston? I hope the number goes to 10 million. The more the better.
Tear places down?
Not in NJ!
I'm 32, and about 10% of the friends I grew up with are still living with their parents.
All have jobs which should enable them to buy: Sous chef, personal trainer, lumberjack, electrical technician, small business owner with $1million/year gross sales.
They want to move out, but not at the cost of commiting financial suicide.
Prices in the New York metro area are still sky high, and the landlords who bought in 2006 seem to prefer leaving houses empty, rather than renting them at a loss. Until these clowns go bankrupt, things will not improve.
Take a look at Mike Shedlock's Global Economic Trend Analysis blog. The futures market expects prices in the NYC metro area to fall 27% over the course of the next 2 years. That is the largest expected drop out of the 10 metro areas which have futures trading.
There is a time lag between the crash elsewhere and the crash in NYC/LI/NJ. Take drastic action now to stop the price declines, and you will screw the future buyers in this region.
I love that photo. It's amazing what happens when you take a house and board up the windows. Suddenly you realize that this thing that you might commit all your life savings and 30% of your income for 30 years becomes what it really is: a wooden box with holes in it.
Keith said:"19 million.
How the f*ck are they gonna fill those up?"
Easy. The coming depression will
probably generate 20 million homeless Americans. Let 'em stay in bank-owmed properties in exchange for basic upkeep = that will free up room in the homeless
shelters and get some of those living under highway underpasses
to come in from the cold. And the banks win also, because their properties are kept lived in and
won't deteriorate or become the crime magnets empty houses are, nd may even contribute to keeping
neighborhood property values up.
Millions of homeless, millions of empty homes that are, in way, no longer really privately owned - any bank that took bailout money should be required to make their REOs available to house the homeless until they can sell the properties.
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