By The Tim on November 20th, 2009 at 6:44 AM · 4 Comments
An interesting post on Calculated Risk this morning points out a few notable near-term home price predictions:
Housing consultant Ivy Zelman via the New York Times:
…home prices are going back down.
Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi via Bloomberg:
I think we’re going to see another leg down.
And Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius:
Our current working assumption is a 5%-10% drop in home prices through the middle of 2010.
Note that these forecasts are all nationwide. In most parts of the country home prices began falling a good year before Seattle, and had fallen further than Seattle before the inefficient, expensive, and economically stupid tax credit put the brakes on the full return to affordable housing.
If nationwide average home prices do indeed drop another 5-10% in the coming year, I suspect that Seattle area home prices will probably be down 10-15%.
Oh and by the way, in case you didn’t see the news; as expected, a couple weeks ago Congress passed an extension and expansion of the idiotic tax credit. The move was tacked onto a completely unrelated extension of unemployment benefits to assure that no congressman could vote against it (crap like that should be illegal), and is estimated to cost another $10 billion that we don’t have (so you can expect it to cost at least $20 billion). Oh, and just for kicks they threw $33 billion in tax refunds to homebuilders into the bill, too. Because the national debt just wasn’t big enough already. Super!
Categories: News
Tags: predictions, tax credit
By The Tim on November 11th, 2009 at 6:00 AM · 19 Comments
With the news in September that Seattle is #1 for delinquent construction loans, it probably comes as not much of a surprise that Washington State also happens to rank #1 in the nation for troubled banks, according to Calculated Risk’s unofficial problem bank list.
| State |
Percent |
| Washington |
26.3% |
| Utah |
25.0% |
| Arizona |
21.3% |
| Nevada |
20.0% |
| Oregon |
19.5% |
| Georgia |
19.2% |
| California |
17.8% |
| Florida |
16.3% |
| Michigan |
13.2% |
| Maryland |
10.8% |
| Colorado |
10.6% |
This week we looked over the numbers to determine which states have the most stress in their banking sector. For the ranking, we added together the number of institutions that are on the Unofficial Problem Bank List and failures since 2008 and divided by the number of institutions headquartered in the state and failures since 2008. Interestingly, Georgia is not the top ranked state. Here is the top 10 list; actually top 11 as Maryland and Colorado are in a virtual tie. Please note that we only ranked states with at least 15 institutions headquartered within their borders, as we did not want the ranking influenced by a small banking market.
Washington State leads the way with more than 26 percent of its banking industry either under formal enforcement action or having failed. No wonder the esteemed governor wrote a letter to the state’s congressional delegation complaining about bank regulators (see Wall Street Journal article).
Here’s a map of Washington’s 23 troubled banks, according to Calculated Risk’s unofficial list, as well as Washington’s three recently-failed banks (via the FDIC), and WaMu, which the FDIC lists as a Nevada bank.
View Washington’s Troubled Banks in a larger map
Hat tip: Puget Sound Business Journal
Categories: News
Tags: banks, Business Journal, Calculated_Risk, commercial, lending, troubled-banks
By The Tim on November 6th, 2009 at 8:00 AM · 56 Comments
Time for the monthly reporting roundup, where I read all the local paper rehashes of the NWMLS press release so you don’t have to.
Here’s a link to this month’s NWMLS press release: Tax credit spurs big surge in Western Washington home sales
Before we get into the roundup, I’d like to take a moment to quote an excerpt from the monthly NWMLS data post from May, which was titled Huge Gap Opening Between Pending and Closed Sales (a subject that I first brought to your attention in August of last year).
The disconnect between pending sales and closed sales grows ever larger. … Something is becoming extremely fishy about the pending sales data.
…it is good to keep in mind when you start reading news reports in the coming weeks about the market supposedly picking back up. It’s an illusion.
Here’s a graphical representation of the 2009 sales illusion:
Pending sales peaked at 2,447 in June, while so far closed sales have not made it higher than 1,758—a nearly 30% discrepancy. So far this year there have been at total of 20,025 pending SFH sales in King County, but only 12,986 actual closed sales. In other words, more than a third (35%) of pending sales have yet to materialize into closed sales. That difference is typically well under 10%.
Find me a newspaper that reported this growing issue last August.
Click below for this month’s roundup of gawking at the tax credit.
[Read more →]
Categories: News
Tags: Benbow, Boone, bottom-calling, Crellin, Everett_Herald, JohnLScott, Kearsley, Olympian, Pryne, reporting_roundup, Seattle_PI, Seattle_Times, Spratt, Tacoma_Tribune, tax credit
