All Forum Posts by: Jason F

I know from experience that loan packages that were available under certain criteria 1 year ago are long gone now.

Not 100% sure but I did hear somewhere that the limit is no longer 10, but lower.

The more I think about it, the more I believe they do that for a reason. It works out better for my county if they only come down on the assessed values of those that have the time/resources to complain about it. Most people look at the tax bill and pay the overage that their mortgage company tells them is due.

Here's a question:

When home prices were going through the roof, property taxes (which use home sales as drivers) were increasing as well, in some areas, by a lot.

There were a lot of new homes which means new tax dollars and a lot of historically high sales comps for many municipalities.

Okay, now that prices have fallen by as much as they have, do you feel that the local property taxing authorities have adjusted their assessed values as quickly downward as they did when prices going up. Here in Gainesville, FL, prices haven't dropped as severely as other areas, but even here I don't see as much of a reflection on my properties.

What about other areas? If the 'value of your home' which is derived from comparable sales prices, drops by 30%, shouldn't your tax bill? Has it?

On a side note, shouldn't we see some crazy community improvements as a result of the unexpected tax revenues throughout the early 2000s? As people made money because of high property values, so did the counties throughout America. Where's my monorail?

Well, I think it is much simpler when looking at the rent/buy analysis.

low demand (no one qualifying) and high supply (foreclosures, over building) = lower prices.

As prices go lower, so will the price people are paying for rentals. When the price of a rental property drops that means the PITI will go down. More and more landlords, having lower carrying costs, will be able to compete on price to get THEIR place rented in a market with a lot of rentals vacant (again, over supply).

This is a vicious cycle. Knowing that they have a lot of competition and cheap rents in the rental market (on top of high insurance costs and taxes) investors know they will need to pay less for a property to make it work. This, again, will drive down demand for the house at a certain price. This will bring you back to the beginning of the post.

What needs to happen? Supply needs to decrease and demand needs to either stay the same or increase. Until that critical point, I don't see prices stabilizing.

just my 2 cents

Every time I hear gold mentioned, it strikes me as so strange how our markets work. Literally, anything that is standard enough, people will trade it back and forth.

Other than our money being backed by it (hahaha) it really has no use, but we still buy it back and forth.

Dan,

It sounds like you have the motivation to get things going which is key. Unfortunately I think this is a hard market to get started in (not impossible, but hard). You have a lot of deals and not a lot of buyers. I'm sure most of the buyers out there know where to find deals, but have the same problem as you, no money.

That being said, if you can find home run deals than you can always find a way to make money from them. I would find a deal and then shop it around. Even if the buyers don't bit, you will have their names for the next one.

Just an idea. Good luck man.

In my opinion, every day you will see less and less buyers. Credit is going to be VERY hard to get for the next 3-7 years, if not more.

What has to happen is these end-buyers are going to need time to save up a down-payment like they normally should have had to do and that will take some time as they try to pay down their credit cards and start losing their jobs.

It's going to be a rough journey for a while.

A lot has to do with which part of Florida.

South Florida is rough right now.

The more north you go, the better the market.

Good luck

I was referring to selling stocks short, as in to avoid selling the market into the ground by everyone banking on stocks going down.

i think they have been restricted by the SEC since last week, but I could be completely wrong. As you can probably tell I'm not the most educated when it comes to the stock market.

I'm sure the market as a whole can keep going. Some of these financial stocks, however, personally I don't think can go much further.

Selling short is permitted now, but that doesn't mean they are going to lift that ANY time soon. They will when it is clear the market is past the worst.

I'm not saying it's not risky, but just as with houses, you buy cheap.