Are we out of the woods yet or is the worst still to come? There is only so much conjecture that this question can create........Right? Well, it seems since our proverbial collapse in March this question has loomed in both whispers and screams on wall street. Here we are entering November and it seems we are still digesting data to determine whether this question can finally be put to bed or whether it will continue on into the better part of 2010. The problem? A majority of the positive earnings and data from the banks was either manipulated by the government's cash infusion and tax modifications that changed the way in which they realize income and thus pay taxes. As well as, the non banking US companies that have fueled the rally laid off employees and implemented cost cutting techniques to improve their bottom line. Now this is definitely not a bad thing as most of these companies have increased productivity and profitability by improving their efficiency. However, the problem is that there is only so much fat you can trim. You can't keep downsizing and cost cutting to manipulate earnings and keep your stockholders happy.........eventually even the biggest companies run out of employees to fire. So the million dollar question is...........Now that a majority of the manipulation and smoke and mirrors are used up, are earnings next quarter going to plunge and unveil the true catastrophic environment we are in? Or did we buy ourselves just enough time to actually crawl out of the recession and realize "true" growth, albeit probably very small, without the "growth by subtraction" technique or growth by taxpayer infusion? Until then, welcome to life on the fence.........and here's to hoping we get off on solid footing and don't fall off.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
What do you mean I can't buy?
As home inventory continues to erode..........eager buyers are left home-less. With rates dropping to new historic levels thanks to the mortgage backed security market finally thawing out a little bit, affordability for housing in Southern California is the highest it has been in years. However, don't think that means that you can just run out and get your pick of the litter. Right now, it is common for buyer's to submit multiple offers before they get one accepted. The local media has not given it much attention so many home buyers are getting blindsided with this information by their agents or the constant rejection of their offers. Like 2005 when buyers were getting into bidding wars and throwing all but the kitchen sink at sellers to get them to take their offer........we are once again in a position of extremely high demand at the first time home buyer level. Homes above 500K are still seeing normal marketing times, but the market under 500K and more specifically under 400K are going like they are the prize pig at the fair. Sometimes the bank or seller have multiple offers within 48 hours of listing the property. Often times Agents are setting a date a week or less from the initial listings as a cut-off for offers. With the first time home buyer credit set to expire Dec. 1st this could just be thousands of tax payers fighting to get free money from the government. Regardless of the cause.........the effect is once again a colossal battle of wills as buyer's struggle to reach the American dream despite being qualified, ready, and able to purchase.
With rates inevitably set to rise, temporary loan limits set to expire, and the first time homebuyer credit set to disappear as well.......time will tell how long the demand will last and who will still qualify to buy after the dust has settled.....
With rates inevitably set to rise, temporary loan limits set to expire, and the first time homebuyer credit set to disappear as well.......time will tell how long the demand will last and who will still qualify to buy after the dust has settled.....
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
REO......Rejecting Every Offer
Are you uneducated?
Able to return phone calls but choose not to?
Professionalism.........not for you?
Greedy and underhanded?
Then YOU might just excel in the Southern California Real Estate market. Okay, so I am being pretty cynical. Not everyone fits that mold. I have done countless transactions where the agent on the other side was diligent, professional and knowledgable. However, it sure seems like those were the agents that were forced out of the market when things fell apart. Right now in Orange County and LA county if you are looking to buy something below 400K you are lucky if you even get a phone call acknowledging your offer. Really people...............someone spends a minimum of one hour putting together an offer complete with all the documenation that is "required" for the offer and.........nothing. No "got it, thanks". "Sorry took another offer"...........nothing. Michael Vick had more respect for his dogs than some of these listing agents offer their fellow Realtor and inturn their buyer.
Given this predicament I am now offering anyone that will listen to me some simple advice to weed out these unprofessional agents: Write down the name of the company that shuns you and make it a note to pass it on to anyone and everyone you know. Facebook, Tweet, Myspace, any means available to you. Make a list......most of them are selling REO's. When the REO's run out and no one wants to do business with them, they will wish they took 5 seconds out of their time to e-mail a denial for every buyer and agent that took the time to write an offer. Am I being a little vindictive.........you better believe I am. Imagine going to the car dealership to buy a new car. You offer the "nice" salesman a price and he goes to check with his boss. You wait hours, he never comes back. The place closes for the night and he still never comes back. Turns out he went home hours ago. Now repeat that process at about 10 dealerships and you are starting to understand how much time and energy buyers are wasting.
Interesting Fact......
All of the scammers in the real estate industry have gone straight from subprime to loan mods. They made the money screwing people into the bad loans and now they are getting paid to try and put them in the loan that most of them qualified for in the first place but required more knowledge to originate and fund.
Able to return phone calls but choose not to?
Professionalism.........not for you?
Greedy and underhanded?
Then YOU might just excel in the Southern California Real Estate market. Okay, so I am being pretty cynical. Not everyone fits that mold. I have done countless transactions where the agent on the other side was diligent, professional and knowledgable. However, it sure seems like those were the agents that were forced out of the market when things fell apart. Right now in Orange County and LA county if you are looking to buy something below 400K you are lucky if you even get a phone call acknowledging your offer. Really people...............someone spends a minimum of one hour putting together an offer complete with all the documenation that is "required" for the offer and.........nothing. No "got it, thanks". "Sorry took another offer"...........nothing. Michael Vick had more respect for his dogs than some of these listing agents offer their fellow Realtor and inturn their buyer.
Given this predicament I am now offering anyone that will listen to me some simple advice to weed out these unprofessional agents: Write down the name of the company that shuns you and make it a note to pass it on to anyone and everyone you know. Facebook, Tweet, Myspace, any means available to you. Make a list......most of them are selling REO's. When the REO's run out and no one wants to do business with them, they will wish they took 5 seconds out of their time to e-mail a denial for every buyer and agent that took the time to write an offer. Am I being a little vindictive.........you better believe I am. Imagine going to the car dealership to buy a new car. You offer the "nice" salesman a price and he goes to check with his boss. You wait hours, he never comes back. The place closes for the night and he still never comes back. Turns out he went home hours ago. Now repeat that process at about 10 dealerships and you are starting to understand how much time and energy buyers are wasting.
Interesting Fact......
All of the scammers in the real estate industry have gone straight from subprime to loan mods. They made the money screwing people into the bad loans and now they are getting paid to try and put them in the loan that most of them qualified for in the first place but required more knowledge to originate and fund.
Friday, July 17, 2009
More stimulus money coming?
Okay so word on the financial circuit today is that politicians are already testing the waters to see what the response would be on a 2ND round of stimuli (really 3rd if you count Bushes 145 or so Billion but who's counting). They are citing the need for this based on the failure of the administration to get the economy to turn the corner.
Before I even go "there". Are they telling us that 787 Billion has been spent? Where did all that money go?
True story: I lost $2000 cash a few years back. it was in a bank envelope and I think I hid it or someone stole it. Regardless, I TORE MY HOUSE UP!.........every book, every page, every cereal box, figurine, I even emptied the entire refrigerator(thought maybe I got hungry while in the middle of my hiding process and set it down.....). Anyway, I felt sick to my stomach for about 2 months. No exaggeration......2 full months! I can't even imagine how I would feel losing 787 Billion. If there was an actual person that was accountable for that money they would have exploded like the guy from the "I won the corvette" commercial a few years back. He/she would be in an indescribable amount of pain from lost and wasted stimuli. Thank the good lord our politicians didn't feel the need to assign someone to have that kind of accountability! Good thinking guys/gals.
In all fairness lets say they can account for all but 1 Billion. Does anyone reading this even know what it is like to have a Billion? (if you answered "yes"to this question I know some fine pieces of real estate, we should talk) A Billion..........If you haven't noticed I capitalize the word Billion in this blog involuntarily.........it is that important, incomprehensible, and ridiculously large of a number. But hey.........it's only money, fire up the printer......what's the worst that could happen.........China only owns us on Paper.....
Before I even go "there". Are they telling us that 787 Billion has been spent? Where did all that money go?
True story: I lost $2000 cash a few years back. it was in a bank envelope and I think I hid it or someone stole it. Regardless, I TORE MY HOUSE UP!.........every book, every page, every cereal box, figurine, I even emptied the entire refrigerator(thought maybe I got hungry while in the middle of my hiding process and set it down.....). Anyway, I felt sick to my stomach for about 2 months. No exaggeration......2 full months! I can't even imagine how I would feel losing 787 Billion. If there was an actual person that was accountable for that money they would have exploded like the guy from the "I won the corvette" commercial a few years back. He/she would be in an indescribable amount of pain from lost and wasted stimuli. Thank the good lord our politicians didn't feel the need to assign someone to have that kind of accountability! Good thinking guys/gals.
In all fairness lets say they can account for all but 1 Billion. Does anyone reading this even know what it is like to have a Billion? (if you answered "yes"to this question I know some fine pieces of real estate, we should talk) A Billion..........If you haven't noticed I capitalize the word Billion in this blog involuntarily.........it is that important, incomprehensible, and ridiculously large of a number. But hey.........it's only money, fire up the printer......what's the worst that could happen.........China only owns us on Paper.....
Monday, July 13, 2009
Borrowing from Peter to Pay Paul.......
So I have a little bit of a problem with our 787 Billion dollar stimulus. And no, I am not going to bore you with the usual
1"we are passing on debt to our grandchildren"
2"inflation from printing all this money is going to come back and bite us in the you know where"
3"All we are doing is bailing out the people who got us into this"
Nope, I am not going there, although, I guess in a literal translation I just did. My real problem is as follows:
We got into the current mortgage, housing and economic mess that we are in today because of greed. That is easy.........you could securitize a bag of dog sh*^ and investors would have jumped all over it if they were getting a solid 7% return on their money. Never looking, or in this case smelling, what it was that they just purchased. Okay, that is all Econ101. What gets me is our government decides that it is a good idea to borrow money we do not have to fix the problem. For those of you that don't understand the gravity of that statement let me sum it up as simple as possible:
1. Our government is spending money we do not have(aka borrowed) to curb a crisis that was started by our citizens spending money we did not have and had no way of paying back (aka borrowing or mortgaging)
Does that not strike anyone else as a horrible idea and a catastrophe waiting to happen. If this was 2006 I could see the rationale. Afterall, ignorance is bliss. But we are talking about AFTER the fact. Just to beat a dead horse let me put this in story form:
a child is hit by a car after crossing the street and not looking both ways first. don't worry the child is okay. In fact the parents sat through the bandaging, stitches, an other procedures all the while shaking their finger that you need to look both ways before crossing the street. Then the parents go to bring the child home, walk out of the hospital and cross the busy street without looking both ways. Can anyone guess what happens next?
Isn't natural selection supposed to kill off animals like us?
1"we are passing on debt to our grandchildren"
2"inflation from printing all this money is going to come back and bite us in the you know where"
3"All we are doing is bailing out the people who got us into this"
Nope, I am not going there, although, I guess in a literal translation I just did. My real problem is as follows:
We got into the current mortgage, housing and economic mess that we are in today because of greed. That is easy.........you could securitize a bag of dog sh*^ and investors would have jumped all over it if they were getting a solid 7% return on their money. Never looking, or in this case smelling, what it was that they just purchased. Okay, that is all Econ101. What gets me is our government decides that it is a good idea to borrow money we do not have to fix the problem. For those of you that don't understand the gravity of that statement let me sum it up as simple as possible:
1. Our government is spending money we do not have(aka borrowed) to curb a crisis that was started by our citizens spending money we did not have and had no way of paying back (aka borrowing or mortgaging)
Does that not strike anyone else as a horrible idea and a catastrophe waiting to happen. If this was 2006 I could see the rationale. Afterall, ignorance is bliss. But we are talking about AFTER the fact. Just to beat a dead horse let me put this in story form:
a child is hit by a car after crossing the street and not looking both ways first. don't worry the child is okay. In fact the parents sat through the bandaging, stitches, an other procedures all the while shaking their finger that you need to look both ways before crossing the street. Then the parents go to bring the child home, walk out of the hospital and cross the busy street without looking both ways. Can anyone guess what happens next?
Isn't natural selection supposed to kill off animals like us?
Monday, June 8, 2009
Everyday Annoyance
----Hybrid Cars allowed in the carpool lane----
My Take: I am all for saving the environment and doing my part in "going green" and if this law was only for Hydrogen Cars omitting just water......I get it. But is anyone else accutely aware of the fact that electricity does not spontaneously come from magic. Hate to break it to all you Prius owners but burning coal for electricity is just an alternative way to destroy the environment and deserves no special treatment. Also, check out the life of an electric car battery and, oh yeah, the super efficient way that we dispose of them. Recycle? Nope, not able to just yet, just throw them in a big pile at the local landfill. And for this specimen of clean carbonless footprinting, I offer you the commuter lane so you can go home and plug in your car for tomorrow's fill of "magic" power. Good work politicians, way to think that one through. Oh wait, one more thing, you deserve a big old tax credit too. Federal Deficit....smeficit
My Take: I am all for saving the environment and doing my part in "going green" and if this law was only for Hydrogen Cars omitting just water......I get it. But is anyone else accutely aware of the fact that electricity does not spontaneously come from magic. Hate to break it to all you Prius owners but burning coal for electricity is just an alternative way to destroy the environment and deserves no special treatment. Also, check out the life of an electric car battery and, oh yeah, the super efficient way that we dispose of them. Recycle? Nope, not able to just yet, just throw them in a big pile at the local landfill. And for this specimen of clean carbonless footprinting, I offer you the commuter lane so you can go home and plug in your car for tomorrow's fill of "magic" power. Good work politicians, way to think that one through. Oh wait, one more thing, you deserve a big old tax credit too. Federal Deficit....smeficit
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Top 10 advertising annoyances
1. Cash for Gold
My take: Really? Send me your gold and I will send you an unagreed upon amount of money that I feel is fair. Who does that?
2. AshleyMadison.com
My Take: Did a pair of divorce lawyers start this company to drum up business? If you need a website to help you commit adultery, maybe you should think twice about it.......
3. 1-800 Dentist
My Take: Is it really that hard to find a dentist? Yellowpages.com, 411.com, the phonebook, a friend, a relative, I can’t imagine it was necessary to have a dentist headhunting company.
4. Subway "five dollar footlongs"
My Take: If you are going to pump a catchy little tune to bounce around in my subconscious for an indefinite amount of time………one request, use professional singers, or just someone that has sang once before in their life.
5. Old Navy mannequin commercials
My Take: I’ll keep this to one word……..”Creepy”
6. E-trade Baby commercials
My Take: Congratulations E-trade you outdid Old Navy. Your commercials are far creepier.
7. Verizon Guy Commercials
My Take: "I can hear you now” I have heard you for the last four years. I now have a question for you. Can you stop talking?
8. Cheerios cholesterol commercials
My Take: There are far too many ignorant people to make these kinds of commercials. I cringe thinking about how many people are sitting down with a bowl right now for health reasons.
9. Viagra and Cialis War
My Take: I am pretty confident that you can stop. There is not one warm blooded male in the universe that would be unaware of the existence of magic blue pills.....let alone recite the warnings and songs associated with them.
10. Geico Caveman
My Take: After four years and a failed sitcom spinoff.........can't we put this one to rest.
My take: Really? Send me your gold and I will send you an unagreed upon amount of money that I feel is fair. Who does that?
2. AshleyMadison.com
My Take: Did a pair of divorce lawyers start this company to drum up business? If you need a website to help you commit adultery, maybe you should think twice about it.......
3. 1-800 Dentist
My Take: Is it really that hard to find a dentist? Yellowpages.com, 411.com, the phonebook, a friend, a relative, I can’t imagine it was necessary to have a dentist headhunting company.
4. Subway "five dollar footlongs"
My Take: If you are going to pump a catchy little tune to bounce around in my subconscious for an indefinite amount of time………one request, use professional singers, or just someone that has sang once before in their life.
5. Old Navy mannequin commercials
My Take: I’ll keep this to one word……..”Creepy”
6. E-trade Baby commercials
My Take: Congratulations E-trade you outdid Old Navy. Your commercials are far creepier.
7. Verizon Guy Commercials
My Take: "I can hear you now” I have heard you for the last four years. I now have a question for you. Can you stop talking?
8. Cheerios cholesterol commercials
My Take: There are far too many ignorant people to make these kinds of commercials. I cringe thinking about how many people are sitting down with a bowl right now for health reasons.
9. Viagra and Cialis War
My Take: I am pretty confident that you can stop. There is not one warm blooded male in the universe that would be unaware of the existence of magic blue pills.....let alone recite the warnings and songs associated with them.
10. Geico Caveman
My Take: After four years and a failed sitcom spinoff.........can't we put this one to rest.
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