Seattle Bubble

News & discussion about real estate & the housing bubble in the Seattle area.

Seattle Bubble - News & discussion about real estate & the housing bubble in the Seattle area.

Entries Tagged as 'Opinion'

Job Loss Crash Comparison Update / Stimulus Rant

By The Tim on November 4th, 2009 at 8:23 AM · 110 Comments

A reader wrote in requesting an update to this February post, in which I criticized Nancy Pelosi’s misleading chart of job losses.

Here’s an update to the post-WWII job loss chart, courtesy of Calculated Risk, in which I’ve added a mark so you can see where the “stimulus” was passed.

Percent Job Losses in Post-WWII Recessions

Wow, good thing we changed direction to the tune of $787 billion*, huh?

*(Actual cost: much, much more)

If there is any doubt about who the stimulus was really directed at saving, just take a look at an update to the stock market crash comparison:

Dow Jones Crashes: 1929, 1973, 1987, 2001, & 2007

Woo, go Wall Street!

Finally, speaking of bailouts for Wall Street and the banks: Congress Poised to Keep Homebuyers’ Tax Credit

The Senate and House are poised to agree on a compromise measure to extend unemployment benefits that also would expand a popular $8,000 tax credit for homebuyers, despite a recent government report on extensive mistakes and suspected fraud in the program.

The Senate might pass its version as early as Wednesday, and aides to Congressional leaders say the House could accept it this week, sending the bill to President Obama to sign into law. After weeks of partisan delay in the Senate, Democrats are eager to show progress before Friday, when the October jobless report is again expected to show high unemployment.

Super! So while people continue to lose their jobs, and absolutely zero of the underlying problems in the economy have been fixed, let’s pour another ten or twenty billion dollars into the housing market to try to keep prices propped up (i.e. – keep homes as unaffordable as possible) a little longer so our buddies in the big banks that got us into this mess can avoid taking losses.

Sounds like a plan to me!

→ 110 CommentsCategories: Opinion · Statistics
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Desperately Searching for a Truly Positive Sign

By The Tim on October 13th, 2009 at 9:00 AM · 88 Comments

[Warning: The following commentary is only marginally related to real estate / housing.]

Despite what some of my readers in the real estate industry may think, I’m a generally upbeat, optimistic kind of guy. I like to believe that things will be better tomorrow than they are today; that American ingenuity and hard work can overcome any obstacle in our path.

That being said, it has been difficult recently to maintain a positive outlook on the future, and not just because of the inevitable mathematical conclusion of ever-increasing debt.

A depressing display of extreme laziness at Nordstrom Rack
How is it even possible for so many people to be this disgustingly, colossally lazy?

Bear with me for a moment while I attempt to explain where I’m coming from here. Consider the photo at right. What you see pictured here is the shoe section of the Nordstrom Rack on Alderwood Parkway at about 8:30 last night. This is not the aftermath of some sort of blowout sale—it’s is just the end of the day on a regular weekday at this mid-range retail outlet (the shoes I looked at were priced $50-$100). Throughout the course of the day dozens and dozens of people pulled a shoe off the shelf, tried it on, and just left it on the ground.

If your average American is so colossally lazy that they won’t even expend the near-zero effort required to put the shoe back on the shelf where they found it, is it any surprise that so many people failed to read their mortgage documents before signing and are now honestly surprised that their teaser rate interest-only mortgage payment has skyrocketed? Is there any hope that these same Americans that are leaving messes like the one pictured at right in their wake every day will be able to pull together and clean up the mess created by twenty years of drunken economic partying?

Will Americans finally buckle down, stop spending more than they earn, give up on get rich quick pyramid schemes, and learn to live within their means on a sustainable path to long-term prosperity? So far I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that this is in our future.

Consider the latest data from an annual home-buyer survey administered by Robert Shiller and Karl Case:

In our survey, we ask, “On average over the next 10 years, how much do you expect the value of your property to change each year?” The average answer among 311 respondents in 2009 was an increase of 11.2 percent. The median response — with half above, half below — was 5 percent, also high.
…
In our survey data from one year earlier, when prices were falling at an annual rate of nearly 20 percent, buyers were still expressing long-term optimism. Then, the average answer to the question about expected yearly increases in home values was 9.5 percent a year, with a median of 5 percent — high figures indeed for that time. The bubble thinking is not new.

Even with the biggest housing bust in pretty much anyone’s memory, people still think that buying a home will be a magical path to 10% yearly returns—no effort required. Unbelievable.

I truly hope that we can somehow escape this economic death spiral of ever-increasing debt, destroy the prevailing sense of entitlement, and return to a time when financial responsibility is admired and hard work is rewarded. I just have a hard time finding any evidence that we’re headed in that direction.

→ 88 CommentsCategories: Opinion
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$8k Tax Credit: Inefficient, Expensive, Economically Stupid

By The Tim on October 8th, 2009 at 10:30 AM · 59 Comments

The intensity of the push from a couple of major national lobbying groups (NAR and NAHB) to extend and/or expand the $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit seems to have increased since we last discussed the topic on these pages. With the supposed end of the program coming up in about seven weeks, now seems like a good time to broach the subject again.

Here’s the latest news on the status of a possible extension: Democrats May Extend Tax Credit for Homes

Democratic Congressional leaders are working with the White House to extend an expiring $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers, and aides said Wednesday that they were considering making it available to current homeowners who purchase a new residence.
…
The Democratic leaders met with the president to discuss a broad range of options to combat persistent high unemployment, officials say.
…
Keeping the home-buyers credit and broadening it has been a priority for real estate agents and the home builders lobbies, and for [Senator Harry] Reid, who faces a tough re-election race next year in a state [Nevada] that has been among the hardest hit by the housing crisis since mid-2007.

Okay first off, let’s drop the nonsense notion that somehow propping up home prices will “combat persistent high unemployment.” That’s a complete non sequitur. Now, before we really talk about extending the credit for another year, let’s have a look at its effectiveness and cost this year.

In February, when the “$787 billion” stimulus plan was passed into law, the CBO estimated that the $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit would cost around $6.6 billion (source, source). That would have been 825,000 first-time buyers claiming the $8,000 credit. As of September, the NAR is estimating that “1.8 to 2.0 million” first-time buyers will claim the credit, with a mere 350,000 of those being sales that “would not have taken place without the credit.” That would be a total cost of about $15.2 billion. Here’s a visual of those numbers:

Estimated Cost of the 2009 $8,000 Homebuyer Tax Credit

To me, that looks like a program that has been pretty poor at actually “stimulating” people to do something, and pretty good at giving a nice fat $8,000 handout to people who were planning to buy a house anyway, at a cost well over double the original estimate.

However, apparently to organizations like NAR and NAHB, that looks like a rousing success story that should be both extended and expanded. According to Calculated Risk the NAHB is pushing to up the credit to $15,000, expand it to all homebuyers, and extend it another year. Because, you know, We The People can afford it, right? It’s not like the federal government is facing a massive budget deficit and a mind-blowingly enormous debt.

If we’re going to use the kind of anti-logic that NAR and NAHB are apparently high on, I like the plan that (ironically) was suggested by a Georgia Realtor: Let’s increase the tax credit to $100,000! Heck, why not make it permanent, and up it to $500,000, or even a cool $1 million? Apparently cost and effectiveness are not factors in this decision, we should just do whatever it takes to get those pesky homebuyers “off the fence,” right?

The constant argument that is raised in favor of extending the tax credit is that because home sales are a major driving force in our economy, stimulating the real estate market is a critical ingredient to economic recovery. Is it just me, or does that way looking at the problem seem obviously inherently flawed?

Allow me to explain by way of analogy. Let’s say I decide to quit my job as an engineer and instead get into a full-time Ponzi scheme that has me selling “business secrets” to an ever-growing pyramid of underlings, who themselves re-sell the “business secrets” to their own underlings, passing on a commission to me. Eventually the scheme collapses (as all Ponzi schemes inevitably do), and my income drops to zero. Now, I could go back and get a new engineering job again, but instead I decide to focus all my effort on figuring out ways to get people buying “business secrets” again so I can get my income back to where it was at the peak.

Sounds insane, right? Yet that is exactly what the government is attempting to do with the various “stimulus” plans directed at the real estate market.

Meanwhile, as Calculated Risk points out, “stimulating” people to move out of rentals and buy their own homes has some rather unpleasant unintended consequences:

And that means even more pressure on rents (rents are already falling). This is good news for renters, but this will also lead to more apartment defaults, higher default rates for apartment CMBS, and more losses for small and regional banks.

What I don’t understand is why aren’t major REITs that own rental units across the country (e.g. Equity Residential) lobbying congress just as hard as NAR and NAHB against extending the tax credit? You would think they would have a pretty strong interest in not defaulting on their loans due to too-low occupancy rates.

So basically what we’re looking at in the $8,000 tax credit is an inefficient, massively expensive, and quite probably economically damaging program. I can’t imagine why Congress hasn’t expanded it already.

→ 59 CommentsCategories: Opinion
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Can the NWMLS Control Online Conversations About Listings?

By The Tim on October 2nd, 2009 at 6:00 AM · 62 Comments

I linked this up last week on the Twitter account, but the story has been getting enough chit chat online in the last few days that I figure it deserves its own post here.

In news first broken by local REALTOR® Marlow Harris, the NWMLS will apparently be adding two new ways to fine their members via a pair of new fields on the listing input sheets. In essence, new checkboxes have been added to the listing sheet: “buzz off Zillow” and “beat it bloggers.”

What this means is that sellers are now given the option of whether or not Zillow estimates will be allowed to appear on their listings that are posted on NWMLS member sites, and also the option of whether or not NWMLS members are permitted to blog about their listing. For the full official description of the two new listing parameters hit Marlow’s September 25th post for an excerpt from the NWMLS bulletin.

Median Sale Price / sq. ft.

Obviously the point of the first one is obvious. Giving the potential seller an option to prevent Zillow and other “automatic valuation model” price estimates from appearing next to their listing is no doubt something that some sellers and agents have wished for for some time. Despite the fact that Zillow is a completely automated system based on sometimes incorrect inputs, and the company openly admits that their estimates should not be treated as a gold standard, some sellers and seller’s agents have convinced themselves that if a Zillow estimate displayed on the same page as their listing is lower than their asking price, it’s Zillow’s fault if nobody wants to buy their house.

The second option is actually opening up their rules just slightly, as they previously had a blanket prohibition on NWMLS member agents blogging about any listings that were not your own. That’s what the $50,000 fine slapped on Redfin in 2007 was all about. With this new checkbox, sellers will now be able to “opt-in” to blogging.

Not surprisingly, the anti-Zillow move has stirred up some in the industry, especially among those that have had it in for Zillow since day one. Since Zillow is not a member of the NWMLS themselves, insiders there insist that the new rule will have little effect on their business. I have pointed this out when people have asked in the past, but this is a prime example of why I have no interest in Seattle Bubble becoming a member of the NWMLS, even though it would gain me direct access to their database for some prime number-crunching.

In an amusing twist on the whole thing, Marlow followed up her post on these new rules with another angle on the subject yesterday: Can new technology make some MLS rules unenforceable?

It could be that technology will trump all of these new NWMLS rules, and blogging/comments/AVM restrictions will become ineffective and impossible to enforce with the new Google Toolbar application called Sidewiki.

…anyone who installs the Sidewiki will be able to add comments to your real estate webpage, including individual property pages that you may have created to help market your properties.

There is no “opt-out” tab, no way to eliminate the sidebar comments, no way to edit out objectionable material, porn, spam links, comments on the personal character of the sellers or the agent or the home or the neighborhood.

It seems to me that the NWMLS rules are set up to attempt to restrict and stifle as much conversation about listings as possible in a misguided attempt to give the seller absolute control over how their home is “marketed.” Unfortunately for the NWMLS, fancy technology or not, people are free to talk about home listings in real life in whatever way they choose.

If I wanted to start a weekly tour of the most overpriced homes in Seattle, where we drive around town and gather outside homes for sale through the NWMLS and mock the granite countertops and other such faux-luxury “upgrades,” the NWMLS can’t stop me. And once you move the conversation online, it becomes even less possible to control it.

If I wanted to start a website that provided a searchable map of every house for sale on the market, linked to open forum threads on every house where people could say whatever they want about the agent or the home or the neighborhood—again, the NWMLS couldn’t do a thing about it.

The NWMLS can certainly exert control over their members by levying ridiculously large fines for seemingly innocuous conversations, but in my opinion, the more they attempt to stifle and restrict the free flow of information and ideas relating to their precious listings, the more they will encourage another, more open competitor to step up and make their entire system obsolete.

→ 62 CommentsCategories: Opinion
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$8,000 Tax Credit: To Extend or Not to Extend?

By The Tim on September 16th, 2009 at 1:00 PM · 47 Comments

As the expiration date on the first-time homebuyer $8,000 tax credit nears, talk is stirring about renewing and expanding the scheme. Here’s a brief rundown of some of the varying related pieces I’ve been following from around the web.

First up, we’ve got the National Ass. of Realtors pushing hard on their members to “Write Congress Now”:

The National Association of REALTORS® is calling upon its 1.2 million members to urge Congress to extend the successful homebuyer tax credit into next year.

Since its inception earlier this year, the $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit has brought 1.2 million new buyers into the market—350,000 of whom would not have purchased a home without the credit, according to NAR. The credit is due to expire November 30.

As Calculated Risk has been pointing out, if the NAR’s numbers are accurate, that translates into a cost to (future) taxpayers of over $43,000 per additional sale (that would not have happened anyway). What a deal, right? Plus, how many of these “additional sales” are sales that would have taken place anyway in 2010 or 2011 (i.e. – borrowed demand)? I’d bet quite a few.

Here’s some more from Calculated Risk:

…if we actually look at the numbers, this is a poor choice for a second stimulus package.

…the program cost is about $43,000 per additional buyer. Very expensive.

Now the National Association of Home Builders estimates that expanding and extending the credit through 2010 would generate 500,000 additional sales at a cost of about $30 billion. So this is approximately $60,000 per additional house sold. And I think the cost will be much higher.

REMEMBER: Many homes will be sold to buyers who would have bought anyway without the credit. These buyers will still receive the credit. This year almost 2 million home buyers will claim the tax credit, but only 350,000 were additional buyers. That means this was a poorly targeted tax credit since so many people receive it who would have bought anyway.

Meanwhile, even as the NAR is urging their members to encourage Congress to extend the credit, rank-and-file members seem to have reservations. Check out this post from a Realtor on ActiveRain (basically MySpace for real estate agents):

While I am glad that the tax credit has probably helped stimulate the real estate market and the economy some, I also wonder about the longer-term effects of this so-called “stimulus” money on this nation’s deficit and national debt.

I would rather see the money in the hands of the people as opposed to Wall Street fat cats or failing banks though. However I also hear stories on the news and elsewhere of people using the $8,000 to pay for frivolous items. Kind of a windfall shopping spree. I also don’t like mortgaging the future of this country by giving free money to people while increasing massive debt that may end up crushing our nation one day (if it hasn’t already). Kind of “socialized” real estate buying if you can call it that. Take from my pocket and put it in yours.

The comments to that post (pretty much entirely left by real estate agents) are also an interesting read.

At this point, I’m not even convinced that extending the existing credit will even have much of an effect. Everyone knows that the current credit expires at the end of November. People who were “on the fence” about buying for whom the tax credit was enough to spur them to action are already dashing to get their purchase in before the deadline. How many people are really out there thinking, “you know, I wasn’t planning on buying a house at all, and the 2009 tax credit was not enough of an incentive, but if they would just extended it into 2010, I would definitely jump in there and buy!” Probably not very many.

So what do you think? Should the tax credit be extended? Is it likely to be extended? Why or why not?

→ 47 CommentsCategories: Opinion
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Fiduciary Standards in Lending and on Wall Street: Can it Work?

By S-Crow on September 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 AM · 42 Comments

Question for discussion: In Washington State, can Loan Officers operate within the framework of a Fiduciary duty to their clients when the lending industry is structured with incentives that may be in conflict with the new standard?

Jane Kim of the Wall Street Journal wrote an excellent article in this past weekend’s issue regarding Wall Street brokers (selling investments) being placed under Fiduciary standards in dealing with customers.

Currently, Wall Street brokers are held to what is termed “suitability standard,” which is a more lenient standard than that of a fiduciary.  In contrast, Registered Investment Advisers have operated for a long time under the more stringent “fiduciary” standard—a legal standard that compelled them to act in the best interests of customers.  The proposed higher standard forces disclosure of potential conflicts of interest (i.e., if they make more money off of an investment offered vs. others) and promotes recommendations of investments that may be less costly to the consumer and more tax-efficient.

While Wall Street struggles with reform as part of its regulatory overhaul, the mortgage industry has also implemented reform by introducing a similar “fiduciary standard” for mortgage brokers and loan officers.  Prior to this reform in the mortgage industry, those who originated loans had no obligation to work in the best interest of their customers.

“In most states, mortgage loan originators still have no fiduciary obligation to work on behalf of their client’s best interests. The state of California mandated fiduciary duties for only mortgage brokers even during the height of the real estate bubble and Washington State added fiduciary duties for mortgage brokers and loan originators in 2008 but this still leaves consumer loan company loan officers (LO’s) and bank loan officers with more of a salesperson’s status.  I’m sure there are some LOs who work at a bank, credit union, or consumer loan company (they like to say “mortgage banker” or “correspondent lender”
because it sounds better) who do regularly look after their clients’ best interests but this is just mere subjectivism.”

– Jillayne Schlicke,  Founder of the National Assn. of Mortgage Fiduciaries

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