All Forum Posts by: Tracy Harmon

Wow, I didn't know that the president posted here, I'm impressed!!

Toby, your numbers are junk. You fail to take into account operating expenses, which include paying useless people to shuffle paper and pat each other on the back. I do BPOs, and ALL of the loans I've seen are 100% LTV, with the value being a number that a realtor told the appraiser to come up with. The market in SoCal is down 25% in the last 3 months, take it from somebody in the trenches. If you believe the statistics put out by people who have a vested interest in things being rosy, then see my sig below. Bear Stearns just got bought out for $2 a share, welcome to reality.

The most important question is............WHO'S GOING TO BUY THE HOUSES?

Since we don't manufacture anything to speak of other than weapons, WE DON'T HAVE AN ECONOMY.

Tighten your belts folks, and please keep your hands and arms inside the car at all times.

Wow, you guys just don't get it do you? Japan actually MAKES THINGS OTHER PEOPLE WANT. Hence, they have an economy. This country has been running a garage sale on the whole country for 35 years because we've been told we were too good to get our hands dirty and manufacture things. The only way out of the hole we've dug ourselves into is to start working again...........not just trading paper back and forth and patting ourselves on the back about how smart we are to have those dumb foreigners making our stuff.

Pardon the pun, but right on target, atarget. Since we don't make anything any more, it's going to be pretty hard to work our way out of the hole we've been digging for 35 years. The only way an economy can expand is by MAKING THINGS OTHER PEOPLE WANT. Tighten your belts folks, and please keep your hands and arms inside the car at all times.

My bet is for a VERY bad recession, aka depression..........and after a short time that the rest of the world to realize they don't need us except as a market, and our status as a market is declining as other countries expand their economies because they actually MAKE THINGS. The only way an economy can expand is by MAKING THINGS OTHER PEOPLE WANT. The only things we have to sell are food and raw materials, I suppose we could sell off some aircraft carriers. Since we've been busily selling our country to foreigners, we're about out of things to sell..........wake up and smell the coffee, folks.

You all make very good points, however nobody seems to understand or want to talk about the real underlying problem. WE DON'T MAKE ANY OF THE THINGS WE USE. The only thing that has kept this country in blueteeth and SUVs is selling our country to foreigners. We can't keep borrowing our way to prosperity...........funny how that seems so obvious, but our government and MegaCorp keep insisting it'll all work out, trust them. Good luck with that.

It appears to me that we are in for another market crash like in 29. We have the same exact cause here, overextension of credit due to short term greed on the part of lenders. We may be in even worse trouble than in 29, since we don't make hardly any of the products we use on a daily basis. The main thing keeping our "economy" afloat for the last 20 years has been the fact that we're busy selling our country to foreigners. Hopefully, we're still building aircraft carriers so we can scare the rest of the world, cause we darn sure don't have anything to sell em except for food and raw materials............we're in deep doo-doo.

Nobody really seems to get what the root cause of the "housing bubble" was, or how it is affecting home values now and in the near future. When the lenders were loaning money to anybody and their dog, it massively and artificially increased demand, which massively and artificially increased prices. Only a relatively small percentage of the people who shouldn't have been approved for loans have been bitten by reality so far. It's going to be another couple of years before most of these people are out of their homes. This means that the inventory of available homes will still be increasing while the number of people who can actually afford to buy will keep decreasing due to lending procedures getting back to normal and the fact that most people's real income keeps shrinking like it has for the last 20 years. If you put your faith in government statistics, you are in for a rude awakening, they are in the business of covering their butts, and have absolutely no interest in telling us the truth about prices and wages. This whole mess could very easily make the stock market crash of 29 look like a picnic, since both events were caused by the same thing............overextension of credit due to short term greed on the part of lenders. In most markets, prices will continue to fall for another couple of years, and don't expect another "housing bubble" to happen. Since most of the bailouts consist of relableing borrowing, they are destined to fail.

I think that the fact that the megacorps have sent all our manufacturing jobs to other countries and we now don't produce anything we use, means that we are in for some hard times ahead til the global economy levels out. We essentially have nothing to sell the rest of the world except for food and raw materials.

Asking about values in CA isn't a good question. CA is a LARGE state with a lot of very different markets. Where I live in the Palm Springs area, the market is in total free fall. I'd feel comfortable offering a lender 40% here if I had cash money. I've seen a number of properties that were traded from one lender to another 3-4 months ago and are now on the market for 60% of what that lender paid. And that's what they're asking. Many properties here, newer homes built in the last 6 years, are now listed at 45-50% of what they sold for 12-18 months ago. On the other hand, some areas in CA are still appreciating in value.

In my area, values have dropped WAY more than what the NAR admits. I'm a realtor also, but I see a lot of realtors who don't want to admit the truth. I've seen REO properties that have dropped 28% in 3 months. The combination of overly aggressive mortgage brokers, appraisers who are in the realtor's/mortgage broker's pockets, and greedy lenders led to a situation where housing demand was grossly artificially inflated. It'll be quite a while before the powers that be admit how bad the housing market really is.