levin70

Who Really Understands Housing?

Jeff

Those who are motivated sellers are well aware of current trends. They are much better with their opinions about home values than they are on macro-economic issues.

I beg to disagree significantly with this statement. Many sellers who are not in the market at the lowest price points are clearly delusional about where the market is. Go to zillow and do a search for the number of listings with DOM above 180. It's a telling statistic. Even more so is to have an REA do it where they back into the true original DOM, where small changes in the listing are not recorded as refreshes or where the REA removes the listing for 1 week to get a new DOM.

I would also disagree with the statement that shadow inventory works both ways. If there really was more demand why aren't sales higher than they were in 2005? Prices are 20-40% lower - any shadow buyers would have jumped already and did and are hurting because they jumped already. With homeownership still above 68% there isn't alot of pent up demand. The only real demand is at the $125k and below mark and people looking to trade down but can't because they can't move their McMansion for anywhere near what they are on the hook for on the first, second and sometimes third mortgages

Regards

Mortgage Resets: One Shoe Dropping

One of the things that really irk me about the recast debate is that people continue to use really old data. Most of the information out there is from 2006 or at best, first quarter 2007 about what option arm/alt recasts are coming down the pipe-line. Does anyone have more recent info?

Saying that there is a wave of recasts coming, but only having data from 3 years ago leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Regards

Why I'm Shorting Commercial Real Estate

Good article. I however would be leery shorting given how you so aptly describe that it now appears that pile on has already occurred on the short side of the trade.

Regards