Hello Hampton Roads!
Welcome to the official Tony London Blog Site.
We invite you to comment and share your thoughts and experiences regarding everything real estate!
Click on the Comments link on the right hand side of the page and read recent posts.
I invite you to post your own comments or respond to other bloggers who have posted comments or questions.
I check my blog each day and make every effort to answer recent posts as my schedule allows.
Hi Tony,
I am glad you started a blog about real estate. I am curious how the buyers market will afftect home values in Virginia Beach. I keep hearing that things are bad for home owners looking to sell across the US. Is this true for the Hampton Roads area?
Thanks,
Rick
Comment by Rick Vidallon — March 11, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
So bring it on! I look forward to telling it like it is! My how things have changed in a few short months. Now realtors and mortgage brokers are talking about how the wreckless lending will come to an end. No one is admitting it yet, but here is what will happen. The wreckless lending, the subprime loans to anyone that can fog a mirror are gone. This much people are admitting, and this is good. What people aren’t saying is that the people that were getting these loans contributed to the unrealistic prices we now have, by competing with the other borrowers. When your 100% financed, with NOTHING on the table, you don’t really care how much you pay.
But with this group of borrowers gone, this will hurt sales. This will help add to the already insanely high inventory. The lack of finance will help trap people that thought they could refiance, or sell at some huge profit. More inventory. It will also eliminate buyers that might help others move up. And the lack of activity in the market will help strangle off profits for those in the industry, many who also drank the kool aid and bought who knows how many homes (I’ve seen people trying to sell multiple $600K-900K properties, builders and what not).
Also, with people seeing home prices declining, they won’t feel as rich. So there goes further spending.
With a negative savings rate overall, this had to come. With lax lending standards, this had to come. I’ve been predicting it for 2 years. I’m glad to see it happening. The way I figure it, we should see at _LEAST_ 50% declines in prices. From what I’ve read about past manias, there is generally an overshoot in the correction. Right now HousingTracker.net shows median home wishing price (asking price) at $360K. Median income is around $60K. So You figure what is now on the market @ $360K should be $180K. I think this will happen.
If you’re just out of bankruptcy, YOU MOST LIKELY DON’T DESERVE TO BUY A HOUSE! The mortgage brokers haven’t cared since they weren’t holding the trash. And I believe we will see quite a bit of blood in the non-subprime as well.
As a country, the best thing for us, is a huge, rapid, sharp decline in home prices. It’s pointless to have this much money going towards housing. As a country, we don’t produce much anymore. Other nations will soon out-innovate us. They produce more engineers, more scientists. They now have the manufacturing capability, and they hold the oil which is energy. If we do not correct this soon, bad things will happen as faith in the dollar falls (our money is only as good as the worldwide faith in our currency). We can’t sell poorly constructed homes to each other at ever escalating prices forever. We can’t pick wars with countries that aren’t a threat to us to fuel the military-industrial complex forever. We have stagnant wages, and the majority of good wages are from gov’t jobs, which are basically wealth redistribution from taxes. Bad bad bad!
Rough times ahead. I’m happy to say I’ve been bearish on real estate for 2.5+ years now. There was zero justification for any price increase in the market given salaries. The entire economy has been based on debt. 50%+ of all jobs since 2001 are releated to the Real Estate Mania. These will go away. Last job report was something like 90K jobs. It takes 150K jobs a month to keep up with growth, and a large portion of the 90K jobs were gov’t which is useless. Good times are over, now the sheep will have to pay for their careless spending.
Debt is not wealth. Nothing is more amusing than self righteous “homeowners” going on and on about how they are genius for buying in at the top of the market (aka, the biggest fool). Homeowner is funny when these people are using 80/20 loans or can’t put down 3%. You’re only a homeowner if you hold the deed to the house. All others rent from the bank. House of cards is crumbling.
Comment by Ethan — March 15, 2007 @ 10:42 pm
I visited your website. I really like how you have the properties laid out in your featured homes section. It makes it really easy to find a home or property. Nice job. Are yo planning to put any mapping system in your website, like Google maps. This is a nice feature.
Comment by Rick Martel — March 20, 2007 @ 1:27 pm
Innovative Selling for the 2000’s.
Ethan
I am quite surprised that you would like to see anyone suffer from a financial investment which went bad. Simply put there are ways for homeowners to alleviate the financial burden in most cases. One has only to pick up the phone and call 489-0101or log on to www.TonyLondon.com and request a workout situation. There are troubles throughout the real estate market in many cities but in my opinion we are not going to have a crash in this area. There was frenzied buying over the past six years which was a market adjustment throughout America and it was good for us.
If you are not pleased with the situation, you should look to the source. Address the issue with a solution, not more loquacious gibbering. If you are an investor, check into inventory at rock bottom prices from CM Development in fragile areas. I think the city council members have created this issue, by subsidizing projects in downtown in the tens of millions of dollars, while not anything to assist these fragile communities.
Most of the time we create our own issues, and now it’s time to stand up for what you feel is correct. In the various city council meetings we have spending out of control, with placement of homeless in these supposed fragile communities. It’s no wonder that CM Development and other developers got caught. That’s OK since the strong will pull through and the weak will wither up and go away.
It’s easy to make money in real estate even now, but you need to work with specialists. Please contact Tony London and Associates, Realtors at 757-489-0101 to see how you can get on the gravy train.
Comment by Tony London — March 21, 2007 @ 5:54 pm
<strong>Rorie…</strong>
Hats off to you my good man….
Trackback by Rorie — March 1, 2008 @ 5:09 am