Oh boy, the "not so good future" just got worse..........

http://www.nytimes.com/2008...

Here is the best flow chart to date that shows what is happening in Calif. Scroll down and read it carefully Bakersfield Realty Cheerleaders, this is in Irvine, Bakersfield is even more depressing. No one will be singing" happy days are here again" for a long,long time in Bakersfield, Sorry, it`s not my fault......

http://www.irvinehousingblo...

Years ago we were taught to be discerning agout the brainwashing and propaganda methods the communists were using on people.  Seems like I remember "get on the bandwagon," and "repeat it often enough and they will believe it," were a couple of strategies.  The Growth Machine is in its mantra mode, "There's no slow down ... there's no recession ... lots of money is available to borrow ... a new surge is coming ... and so on."  And, of course they are trying to get us to believe it including this paper when they publish these fantasies.  Well, no matter how many times you say it to try and make it be so, it's just not true, and we all better begin to get our financial houses in order.  Oh, and no amount of government bailout money will cause the American public to "spend" their way out of this overall downturn in the economy.

I'm with you, Funsucker.  Just waiting like a danged old vulture.  Unfortunately, someone's misfortune will be my fortune.  Hope their dark cloud will have some sort of silver lining that doesn't tarnish.

Just Lowball and offer 10-15% below 2002 prices and you will be in the future price range,

I'm still wondering why the paper paints this turnaround as good news DEVELOPERS PREPARING FOR TURNAROUND sounds like we're almost there....according to their experts the soonest the market will 'show signs of recovery'  is '09 and as late as '11 (more probable). The headline should read DEVELOPERS SEE RECOVERY BY 2011 or DEVELOPERS PREPARING FOR SLOW YEARS  or how about DEVELOPERS "OH ^%$# WE'RE SCREWED"  

It's funny to see the paper grasping at anything that possibly shows good news in the housing sector, when in reality there is no good news.....except for those waiting to buy. The longer I wait the more I save!

Nothing to see here, move along, everything is fine....

Here`s a picture of the "not so rosie" future, another batch or ARM`s reseting in 2010-11, ouch!!! Another little tibit, most of the foreclosures we are seeing today came even before the resets, just "liar loans" walking away, Just walk away.......      &n bsp;       &nb sp;

http://nychousingbubble.blo...

http://money.cnn.com/2008/0...

We'll see a little foretaste of that this month.  There's a peak just about to occur.

2011 is the peak of the second wave of sub-prime type loans and it will hit much harder as the volume will be greater, Don`t expect any recovery to start until that surge has cleared out and the pre 2002 prices reset, We are a long way away from paying for the deception of the "bubble", it is not just going to correct itself, You need to search for the truth and you will not find it in your local media, expand your options to include many experts and analyst who are not connected to making a buck off local cheerleading of market conditions and expectations, it`s not a rosy future for awhile...Gonna have to sell the Hummer and get rid of the home theater and suck it up...Browse the following and get a new perspective then make judgements based on facts not dreams

http://www.zillow.com/forum...

http://implode-explode.com/...

*crickets chirp*

Bubbleboy?

Ask this guy what happens if it doesn't. I wish I could elaborate.

Elaborate! I am curious to hear what will happen if construction doesn't occur then...

Thanks for joining the robust discussion, bakersfieldbubble.

I was just feeling that I should point out other portions of the story. But you caught them.

It will certainly be interesting to see how everything plays out.

— Christine Peterson

A few pearls of wisdom here:

“It will turn. We’ve actually seen, since the first of the year, we’ve doubled our foot traffic. It’s being driven by interest rates.”

Doubled from what? Zero?

City Planning Director Jim Movius thinks developers are posturing so when the market turns, “they’re ready to capitalize on it really quick.”

I sure hope the Planning Director knows what he is doing. Prediction  - he will be laying off many people in the near future!

Bruce Norris, a Riverside-based real estate investor who trains other investors, doesn’t think the housing market will perk up until 2011. That’s “when you’re going to have your first positive price year,” he said.

People who think otherwise are taking a rosier view of the market, he said.

Bruce has been right for years and is still correct!

Developer Mike Petrini said ground may be broken in June on the master-planned community Old River Ranch in the southwest. Construction may start in February 2009, he said.

These are lots 7043 and 7045, near the future Independence High School, targeted to entry-level buyers. The homes range from 1,000 square feet to 1,600 square feet, and may be priced between $180,000 and $230,000.

He believes the local housing market will show signs of recovery in 2009.

Ask this guy what happens if it doesn't. I wish I could elaborate.

Christine-

I am not bashing her.  These are the kind of stories I live for (yes, I am a loser).

I am glad when you guys run these stories with "insiders" comments. That is where the best material comes from. These guys go on the record and then they are discredited all over the net.

The vast majority of reporter Jenny Shearer's story is not about when the market will turn. There's actually very little prediction on when that might be in the story.

Rather, the story is about how developers and investors have submitted maps and other planning documents to prepare for the future.

Of course, many readers do like to predict. I realize that!

— Christine Peterson

So, when did used car and real estate salesmen ever change their spots? Not in my lifetime.

Last year, the same people said we'd see recovery sometime in early to mid 2008.  Based on what I ask?  The decreasing amount of qualified homebuyers combined with an increase to idle inventory?  Sitting on a lot of inventory with no movement to sell is BAD no matter what business you are in.  Sure go build another 2000 homes, you think home prices are bad now...  I like the alternate theory. 

"Others say another theory for ongoing activity is these projects may be from the tail end of the building boom, given the length of the approval process."

Whoa... now that is a fringe theory if I ever saw one.

Vacant Homes in U.S. Climb to Most Since 1970s With Ghost Towns
 

Feb. 29 (Bloomberg) -- When Quinn Cuthbertson looks around his new neighborhood in El Dorado Hills, California, he sees rows of empty homes and barren hillsides. A promised new school and a clubhouse haven't materialized.

Cuthbertson paid $460,000 for a four-bedroom house in this northern California town named for the mythical golden city. He now suspects his neighbor spent $45,000 less. Nearby, 87 of 98 Toll Brothers Inc. home sites are undeveloped.

Almost 200,000 newly constructed single-family homes are sitting empty in the U.S., the most since Commerce Department statistics began in 1973. Partially completed developments reduce revenue for cities and towns and hurt businesses, said Nicolas Retsinas, the director of Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. Rising foreclosures and falling property values may cut tax revenue by more than $6.6 billion for 10 states, including New York, California and Florida, the U.S. Conference of Mayors said in a November report.

``Half-filled developments are an advertisement for a failing housing market,'' said Retsinas, a former assistant secretary for housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. ``It also has a spillover effect on the surrounding community.''

Falling Prices

About 370,000 new homes are for sale because people who initially contracted to buy them backed out, according to estimates in a Feb. 15 report from analysts at New York-based CreditSights Inc. An additional 216,000 homes are under construction, according to Commerce Department data.

In January 1973, the number of finished new homes for sale was 97,000, when the U.S. population was about 212 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In December 2007, 197,000 completed homes were on the market and in January 2008 there were 195,000. The current population is 303.5 million.

Home prices may fall at least 8 percent nationwide and by as much as 26 percent from the third quarter of 2007 before hitting bottom, according to a Feb. 13 report from New York- based Deutsche Bank AG analyst Karen Weaver, the firm's global head of securitization research.

El Dorado Hills and the nearby towns of Bass Lake and Cameron Park started growing in the mid-1990s as Californians sought out new suburbs within commuting distance of Sacramento, the state capital. El Dorado Hills is about 30 miles east of Sacramento and used to be known as just a bus stop between the San Francisco Bay Area and Lake Tahoe resorts.

El Dorado's Growth

``Thirty years ago, El Dorado Hills was a Raley's and a 76 gas station, and some homes off in the hills,'' said Mike Applegarth, a senior administrative analyst in the El Dorado County chief administrative office. Raley's is a grocery store chain based in West Sacramento, California.

Today the town has a Target Corp. store, a Mercedes-Benz dealership and a Regal Cinemas with 14 screens, Applegarth said.

Most of the community's growth came in the late 1990s when the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors gave approval for construction of 11,598 homes as part of five development agreements, said Laura Gill, the county's chief administrative officer.

Lennar Corp., Centex Corp., Cambridge Homes and Parkland Homes plan to build 1,500 houses on 990 acres in El Dorado Hills in the Blackstone El Dorado development south of Highway 50, according to the project's Web site. So far, Centex has built 30 of the 105 houses it plans to construct there, said salesman Bob DeWitt.

Building permits in El Dorado County are estimated to drop to $3.5 million in the fiscal year ending June 30, from a peak of $5.7 million in fiscal 2004, Gill said.

Cutting Prices

In Yorkville, Illinois, a town 55 miles southwest of Chicago, residential building permits fell 47 percent in 2007 from the year earlier.

In El Dorado Hills, Cuthbertson, a California Highway Patrol officer who has two sons ages 4 and 6, plans to stay in the area, and says he can afford to wait for prices to recover.

``We'll wait to see what the neighborhood will be like,'' Cuthbertson said. ``We know prices might be going down, but in five years we'll be OK.''

Homebuilders can't wait. They're cutting prices even further than last year and some are courting real estate brokers and using auctions to get rid of homes. They usually rely on their own staff to sell properties.

Builders Retrench

``It's a desire for the companies to do whatever is necessary to retrench and put themselves in a position to succeed when the residential markets turn more favorable,'' said Keven Lindemann, director of the real estate group at SNL Financial in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The five largest U.S. builders had almost 8,900 completed homes for sale at the end of their most recent quarters, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

D.R. Horton Inc., the second-biggest U.S. builder, held an ``UnAuction'' on Feb. 16 and Feb. 23 with prices cut as much as 50 percent at 23 developments in Southern California.

Pacific West Cos., a Reno, Nevada-based builder, said this month that it's offering a ``risk free'' price guarantee to buyers in its California communities, including El Dorado Hills. If a similar property in the same development sells for less than a homeowner paid, the company will refund the difference.

`Element of Fear'

``We're taking the element of fear away,'' said Taylor Cohee, Pacific West's vice president of sales.

Builders such as Los Angeles-based KB Home and D.R. Horton of Fort Worth, Texas, are seeking out real estate agents to bring buyers to developments, said Joellen Chappell, sales manager at Century 21 M&M and Associates in Stockton, California. Century 21 realtors are now getting commissions of as much as 4 percent for a sale.

``They're bribing us with bonuses,'' Chappell said.

Stockton's metropolitan area had the second highest foreclosure rate in the U.S. last year and again in January. Almost 5 percent of households in that community were in some stage of foreclosure in 2007, according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of foreclosure data.

At least 14 new-home auctions are scheduled through April in California, Florida, Illinois, Arizona and Nevada, said Brigitte Boudress, a Beverly Hills, California-based spokeswoman for Kennedy Wilson Inc.

Moving Inventory

``The builders are looking for ways to accelerate sales and get inventory moving,'' said Marty Clouser, senior vice president at Kennedy Wilson. The company auctioned 450 properties last year for $170 million at prices 85 percent to 90 percent less than the homes' listings, Clouser said.

The decline in housing values is reducing the amount of revenue that counties make from property taxes, said Jacqueline Byers, director of research and outreach with the National Association of Counties in Washington. In states like California that require builders to use sales proceeds to pay for streets, fire stations and schools, that means slower development.

Brent Sease, who bought a five-bedroom home built by Miami- based Lennar in El Dorado Hills, said a park and school that were supposed to be constructed are at least two years from being completed. Across the street, red tags that say ``Available'' are pasted on two houses.

``That's the thing I'm concerned about,'' said Sease, a software manager with three daughters. ``It's going to be a while before they put all that in, because they're not selling homes.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/ap...

This was my response:

http://bakersfieldbubble.bl...

WHO WAS RIGHT??

This is what this newspaper printed on Jan 8, 2007:

Local real estate insiders scoff at predicted 'nose dive'
By Ryan Schuster, Californian staff writer

Bakersfield's housing market is still healthy and is simply going through a market correction that was inevitable after its meteoric rise, according to several local real estate professionals.

"I don't think it's all doom and gloom," said Jon Busby, a real estate agent with Bakersfield Premier Realty. "We had the investors that came and the builders that came and drove the prices up. It's just correcting itself now." Source: The Bakersfield Californian

In December there were 3,181 homes listed on the market, down 13 percent from the month before, according to a preliminary report on December sales compiled by local appraiser Gary Crabtree. The full report is due out next week.

The preliminary report also shows the median list price of existing homes declined from $289,000 in November to $288,000 in December.

"Listings are going down," Crabtree said. "Sellers have come to the realization that the party is over and they can no longer get the prices they were expecting before. We've reached a plateau and that plateau is holding. It is not taking this gigantic nose dive everyone was predicting."

After being one of the nation's hottest real estate markets in recent years, some have described local market conditions as a bubble and predicted Bakersfield's real estate market will be one of the nation's worst in 2007.

But local real estate experts disagree.

"They are crazy. We don't have one of the worst housing markets in the country," said Ray Karpe, the president of Karpe Real Estate Center and the incoming president of the Bakersfield Association of Realtors. "The market is not bad at all. The market has just slowed. It has gone from a ridiculously good market to a good market. We couldn't maintain that forever."

The real estate slowdown has led homebuilders to scale back their building pace locally.

In November, 120 building permits were pulled for single family residences in the city of Bakersfield, down from 225 a year earlier and 650 in August 2005.

Crabtree projects that home prices will decline by about 5 percent in 2007, but he says more dire national projections are off base.

"They don't see the whole picture," Crabtree said. "They're not here. They don't have their feet on the ground. They don't know what's going on."

Leslie Appleton-Young, the chief economist with the California Association of Realtors, anticipates a 7 percent drop in the statewide median sales price in 2007. She said areas like Bakersfield that had a wave of new construction during the housing boom, adding more supply, will experience greater price decreases.

But she said while the housing market is softening, she doesn't believe it is a bubble.

She said she doesn't foresee a real estate crash like the one in the mid-1990s unless the economy slips into recession, causing mass job losses.

"It's all relative. The housing market in general has been accused of being a bubble," Appleton-Young said. "There has been talk of a bubble for four years. In the last year and a half we have seen a significant decline in sales. But the actual decline in prices has been slower. What is protecting the market is we have an improving economy."

But increased foreclosures and a rise in interest rates could spell trouble for the housing market, Appleton-Young said.

Crabtree said last year he routinely saw between 20 and 30 notices of default filed a month. The numbers jumped to 41 in November 2005 and 179 in November 2006.

Local appraiser Jeremy Jans anticipates the local market will actually pick up a little this spring, despite a possible increase in home listings some are predicting.

"Although we will not get back to where it was, it will be a strong market this year," Jans said. "We are a unique market. We always react a lot slower than everyone else. We are a lot more affordable than other places."

Bakersfield's relatively affordable housing market compared to the rest of the state has prevented a more dramatic market correction, according to Delores Conway, the director of the Casden Forecast at USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate.

"It's slowing like all places are slowing because the speculators are pretty much gone," Conway said. "Bakersfield has been fairly strong, partly because of lower prices and the shift in population into central California.

"In Southern California we are pretty much land constrained. Bakersfield can still build. As long as the builders don't get crazy, there still is demand. It's just that the housing market is returning to more of a normal level."

LMFAO!!!!!

Ask all of these guys what they were saying in 2003-2006, then get back to me. Nevermind, I will tell you, "this boom will continue for 7-10 more years", "we have been discovered, we are on the national map now", "they are not making anymore land and this is the new gold rush". etc..

Then when things starting slowing down. What did they say? Let me tell you. "No one is walking away from land kid, you have no idea what you are talking about", "by the second half next year we will be booming again", etc...

There is already way too much inventory out there to absorb. The demand during the boom will not be coming back. 40% of the transactions were by speculators and floppers (failed flippers). They are not coming back. We have 3+ years of inventory to work off. 

Let them build, most of these guys will go bankrupt anyway, good riddance! These guys are all hoping things will turn, actually they are dreaming.

Credit is getting tighter, foreclosures are increasing and inventory is growing. Tell me how this plays out in 12 months?