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    • Thu Feb 21st 02:49 AM | Rating: 0 0
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      Biggest Increases and Decreases in U.S. Housing Prices
      In many markets where there are price increases? There are huge swaths of real estate depression. In San Jose, for example, the east, central and south districts of the city and greater Silicon Valley have seen some home prices fall by 20 percent or more. The median price is being pushed up by a greater percentage of home sales in the high end sectors, because of the credit crunch that's keeping first-timers and even move-uppers out of the market.

      I've recently found this to also be true in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. I would assume the same applies to San Francisco and just about any city in California that has high end and starter homes.
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    • Tue Jan 29th 14:07 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Media Coverage of the Mortgage Crisis
      If only the media would just shut up and stop contributing to public opinion.

      That's the companion cry-me-a-river implication that always comes with media bashing.

      If the media didn't report market conditions at the level at which they are actually occurring, consumer confidence would somehow gravitate to some higher plane of getting and spending discretionary cash.

      Never mind that before there was a media and things went awry, the townsfolk hoisted axes, lit torches and marched down to the town square searching for truth in a pile of someone's cinders.

      Even if we did live in that insane bizarro world where the media ignored the mortgage squeeze, wouldn't consumers discover they'd been had when the same mortgage application approved two years ago now comes back rejected?

      Wouldn't they sort of figure it all out without being spoon fed by the media mind benders?

      Less knowledge doesn't make consumers more confident.

      It pisses them off.

      What has consumers' knickers in a knot isn't the act of reading or watching the news. Such a simplistic rendition of today's complex economic conditions is a twisted denial of reality.

      Consumers know what's happening to them. They are more and more often blocked from homeownership. They are losing hope and homes at a rate 100 percent greater than a year ago. The media isn't taking their homes.

      Consumers know they trusted a housing market that sold them a bill of goods packaged with corruption and collusion likened to organized crime.

      New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo isn't suing First American Corp. subsidiary eAppraiseIT because of something printed in paper. The suit alleges the company "caved to pressure from Washington Mutual" to inflate property values of homes.

      California recently passed a law making appraisal pressure illegal, not because a talking head on the nightly news lobbied Golden State legislators. Many appraisers bowed under increased pressure throughout the last housing boom and consumers were left holding the bag with over-priced homes that are now plunging in value.

      Book cooking allegations are rising over the housing boom-spawned mortgage-backed securities sector, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Secret Service and U.S. Postal inspectors have a growing case load of mortgage fraud which soared to record heights during the housing boom and federal regulators acted (far too slowly) several times in recent years to shore up regulations to give consumers greater protections when they go shopping for home loans.

      Most consumers left twisting in the wind wind up financially ruined. Fifty-seven percent of foreclosure-prevention counselors surveyed by the California Reinvestment Coalition found the most common outcome for the homeowners they work with is foreclosure. A short sale outcome was reported by 33 percent of the counselors.

      The media's job isn't to tell readers the sun is shining when their home is submerged in three feet of water. If the news is bad, it gets reported. In the next cycle, when the news is better, happy days will be here again -- in ink, online and on the air.

      Rather than a society of censorship, we live in a free market where, for better or for worse, merchants get to try their untested, unregulated shenanigans on an unsuspecting public which too frequently doesn't know better to read the small print.

      That's where the media comes in.

      It's called the right to know.

      It's either that or torches blazing across the town square.

      The point is don't generalize. There's good, there's bad and there's ugly media.

      Professional real estate journalists, for the most part, get it right.

      Choose news that really hits home.

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