The 12 March front page headline in WaPo says it all:
“Foreclosure wave threatens stability of housing market.”
Do not wait for a journalist to package the contemporary condition of the housing market for you. Go to Realtor.com and check out what has happened this week in your Village, your Neighborhood, your Cluster or even your Dooryard. In just the last few days the picture has changed dramatically.
The snow has melted? Daylight Savings Time starts tomorrow? A week until Spring arrives? Who knows the catalyst?
Whatever it is, houses that have been off the market – or have not been listed in years – are flooding back and many are $100K below what they and similar dwellings were listed for just a few months ago.
There appears to be a rush to move foreclosures, do short sales and get out of underwater dwellings, especially the WSH, WL dwellings.
If one looks at the national scene, Virginia and especially the National Capital SubRegion (Washington MSA is a passable surrogate) SHOULD be better positioned than most vis a vis employment / unemployment, foreclosures and dwelling prices.
Those who applied an analysis of Radial Bands (a tool of Regional Metrics) to get a handle on the housing market / foreclosure patterns will not be surprise at the spacial distribution but most will be shocked at the scope of the value loss.
On 11 March CNN had a story that was similar the WaPo story a day later. CNN painted a more rosie picture in the headline and the first few paragraphs but came clean later in the story. The reader comments were very pointed. For example: “How can you distort the truth just to save your real estate ad revenue…” Sounds like they had read THE ESTATES MATRIX… (Today’s WaPo Real Estate section was four pages and the feature story was how to do a short sale.)
The other shoe – commercial real estate – is about to drop. Insiders have been saying for a year that April of 2010 will be the month.
And now the REALLY scarey news:
On Friday WaPo headlined: “No rush to restructure Fannie, Freddie; Who wants to topple the housing giants? Politics, shaky economy make it an unsavory task for Obama, analysts say.”
Well yes, but until there is a Fundamental Transformation – including rational location criteria for residential lending – the problem will only grow worse.
As much as Groveton, rightly, beats on the Clown Show in Richmond, let us not forget the Super Clown Show in the Federal District.
As EMR has argued in these posts for six years:
WSH, WL.
(For those just coming in, WSH, WL means Wrong Size House, Wrong Location. See TRILO-G – PART SIX – Chapter 22 – Without Shelter: The Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis. Also keyword search ‘affordable and accessible’ in Chapters 46, 47 & 48. )
EMR