This is priceless, from NPR:
“Finally, we find a beautiful, totally toxic asset at what Solberg thinks is a good price: $36,000. Back in the bubble, somebody paid $2.7 million for this thing. We buy a piece from Solberg for $1,000. It’s going to be our encyclopedia of the financial crisis.
What Our Toxic Asset Looks Like
Our toxic asset has 2,000 mortgages, many of them in hard-hit states like California, Arizona and Florida. A lot of the people in our bond are really struggling. Almost half are behind on their mortgage payments, and 15 percent of the homes are already in foreclosure.”
The subtext here is that we are still screwed in many ways and will be very lucky if anybody but the government will ever buy or guarantee home loans by the time the mortgage finance system is done detoxing.
· We Bought a Toxic Asset; You Can Watch it Die [NPR]
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Equal Housing Lender |
Monthly Realtor Stat Dump Feb 2010: Year Over Year Increases Lead
by Alex Stenback on March 10, 2010
It’s that time of the month (where the local Realtor orgs disgorge all the sales and market stats from the previous month.)
[Explanatory note: Both Minneapolis and Saint Paul report stats for the entire Metro Area, so their information is basically the same, but it is interesting to note the different spin each org puts on the data.]
From Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors:
“For the second consecutive month, home prices in the Twin Cities 13-county metropolitan area showed a year-over-year increase. We haven’t seen back-to-back year-over-year increases since 2006.
“Closed Sales
Pending Sales
Good news for certain. Even beyond the above, all of the major “metrics” suggest a recovering market – in particular, the market for homes priced under 200K is still about as hot as it can get and actually favors sellers.
That said, the devil is still in the details here: There’s an oversupply in many higher price bands (oversupply tends to put downward pressure on prices) and property types (condo’s and townhomes are still out of whack) and new listing inventory is rising, rather than falling. From Saint Paul Again:
“Year over year there was an increase of 7.8 percent in new listings with 6,648 listings added in February ‘09 compared to the 7,165 added in February of this year.”
Again, overall this is a positive report, but to really understand the market in your neck of the woods, you’ve got to peel the onion back and look at your price band, location, and property type, or just call your rockstar realtor to do the same (if you don’t have one, I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.)
Check in again next month for more thrilling tales in real estate stats, where Supply and Demand will continue their epic battle for dominance.
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