Thursday, November 15, 2007

48 Point Type

It must be important when the LATimes uses the big fonts. In this case top fold lead of the Business Section under Real Estate:

Prices of homes at 2005 levels


Well, late to the party is better than never having shown up I guess.


If you bought last October how has that worked out? You paid $480,000 and you've lost $36,000 in a year. You've actually lost a whole lot more because your house isn't the median anymore. The median today is 120 sq ft (~1 bedroom) larger than yours. Okay, the 7% in purchase costs are gone. The $5000 in taxes are out of pocket. All told PITI plus depreciation plus lost opportunity costs and your little adventure in real estate investing has cost you $200 per day. Premium hotel rates but with no room service or maids. Good going there smart investor. You are more than $50,000 behind the dummy who rented.

Juicy data by clicking the headline. Enjoy.

14 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sweet Cashback said...

Maybe you could first pawn the kanoe for $50K before going into foreclosure?

You wont get more then $5 for the car....

Anonymous said...

No problemo, get a HELOC to cover the difference.

Sweet Cashback said...

I like the trim color of the house a lot btw. Wonder if the neighbors have filed a lawsuit for visual assault.....

Ogg the Caveman said...

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned here or not, but it seems it's hard to foreclose if you can't prove that you own the mortgage. I'd expect more of that.

Unknown said...

Ogg,
great article. Me thinks that the lenders will be taking this to the next level for sure! Can you imagine the utter chaos if the switch was flipped on the lenders? Talk about financial meltdown.

Ogg the Caveman said...

I thought the bit about the same loan appearing in multiple pools was particularly troubling.

Peripheral Visionary said...

Ogg, the article you posted has opened a very large can of worms at CalculatedRisk, here. Long story short, Tanta at CalculatedRisk has taken issue with the article, not the least of her concerns being that much of the content may have been listed from CalculatedRisk and from (the new) IAmFacingForeclosure.com, which broke the original story. That, and Tanta just doesn't like Gretchen Morgenson.

Peripheral Visionary said...

*listed should be lifted. It looks like Gretchen got a couple of original quotes that she threw in, but a lot of the ideas are from CR and IAFF, which broke the story just yesterday. The best version and analysis is on CR, of course. The NYT is slightly off, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that IAFF has a hysterical misinterpretation that completely misses the most important points.

On topic: old wood-sided cars are very stylish in a retro way; if it's an original wood-sided car from the 50's or 60's it's actually worth something as a collector's item.

BJ said...

If you are referring to the car in the image, it is not a woodie. It is an old Volvo, from the mid 60's. It is probably a Volvo Amazon (120/130) model. Model line ended early 70's.

Volvo models

ha38349 said...

He's had the Anaheim Hills home he bought in 2003 on the market for nearly a year and has lowered the price by $100,000 -- a 12% discount from his original asking price of $849,000.

"The good thing is that I paid less than that, but I have definitely lost equity," Freck said. He bought the house for less than $500,000 four years ago.


WTF is it with these people? His cost basis is less than 500K he is now asking 749K for almost a 50% gain and he is complaining ?

"lost equity" ?

Santa Flipper Clause said...

Ho Ho Ho - It's Santa Flipper Clause

Good article Ogg. I'll leave something special in your stocking this year; perhaps an oversized club.

Santa F. Clause

w said...

You can't put a price on pride of ownership.

Oh...you can? Who new.

Lost Cause said...

Last.