It starts out with the obligatory party line: Why live in cramped, smoggy, commute-your-life-away SoCal, when Bend is beautiful, fun... and beautiful! So... not a good start.
Then we actually do get some figures:
Since 1988 — the year the city pulled out of its last major real estate slump — the average price of a Bend home has shot up an average of 11.3 percent per year, according to Central Oregon Multiple Listing Service numbers, dwarfing the 4.8 percent average annual gain in the nation’s average home price during that period and rivaling the 12 percent average annual return of the S&P 500 stock index.
Then some more:The average price of Bend houses gained an average of 10 percent per year from 1988 to 2003, according MLS numbers, while prices nationally climbed only about 4.2 percent per year.
And more:
Now, admittedly there are a few interesting tidbits here. 11.3% yearly for 19 years is a pretty impressive stat. Even 10% without the Bubble Years, is damn good. And finally, we see how & why it's possible: Bend had housing prices HALF the national average just 20 years ago.
And that is what's pretty amazing: Bend has gone from one of the most depressed housing markets in the U.S., to The Most Frothy. How did it happen? Brooks Resources CEO, Mike Hollern says:
“We have become,” Hollern said, “a poster child for the non-placebound economy.”
"The Non-Placebound Economy"? What the hell is a Non-Placebound Economy? Sounds like nomadic wanders, people with nowhere in particular to go, nothing in particular to do. Drifters and gypsy's. We are a town of drifters & gypsy's? Well, that's what the largest developer in town says.
Drifters & gypsy's typically DO NOT have high median home prices, or perhaps in this case, tent prices. And it's funny, when you travel around the nether-regions of rural Central Oregon, you can see what Bend was just a few short years ago: A loose association of persons leading a very tenuous existence, ramshackle unmaintained buildings, abandoned homes & vehicles & businesses, and almost everything you own and everything everyone else owns, is for sale; houses, cars, ATV's, furniture, everything.
The drifter & gypsy lifestyle is Still Alive in many parts of Central Oregon, and although I did not witness it personally, I can very much see Bend in this mode, only on a large scale.
But I would have to disagree with Hollern here: We may have BEEN a "non-placebound economy", but we are definitely not now. Remember all the dread-locked "dudes" of years past hanging out at Mondo & the Taco Stand around 3-4PM, with snowboard in tow, in the back of a thrashed Toyota pickup, with just "YO" on the back? THAT is a non-placebound economy.
What we have now, is Placebound Immigrants coming to a very low productivity, low ROI gypsy economy -- and they are desperately trying to convince all who will listen that they are winning this battle. I, for one, have cheered them on and hoped they could succeed. Unfortunately, they won't. Not to beat the point to death AGAIN, but we have dissipated billions on bizarre, mind-bogglingly stupid, and unneeded real estate developments.
FLIPPER BAIT
Ahhh yes. Flipper Bait is what we've "done". Mile upon mile of completely unneeded homes & commercial development without a gram of demand for it. No, Flipper Bait is built purely as the fungible glop for transactions that enrich middle men & the snake oil sleazeballs who build them.
THIS is Bend's real estate legacy: FLIPPER BAIT. This is what's important. THIS is what we're choking on, with a MIND NUMBING 20.35 MONTHS OF HOME INVENTORY.
I'll talk more about that mind-blowing stat in a sec...
So, I disagree with Hollern on the characterization of Bend right now as a gypsy destination. It WAS 4-5 years ago, but I guaran-damn-tee you that gypsy's CANNOT afford Bend today. We had 24% yearly appreciation from 2003-2006 according to the piece, a figure even the Bulletin (with 20/20 hindsight) admits was impossible to sustain. Here's another Hollern quote:
“We are overbuilt at the moment,” Hollern said. “But as long as our growth rate — in terms of real people, real jobs and real kids — continues, we’ll work through this in a couple of years and things will pick up again.”
Now, tecnically I agree with this. As long as our growth rate DOES continue... we'll be fine. I guess it falls on poor Paul-Doh to say that Bend had a run, growth-wise, which spread out to cast a divine spell economically on everything in the area. Housing, business, employment, everything seemed to do EXTREMELY WELL over the past 20 years.
But like the housing price inflation, this also cannot last. We've had something of a virtuous cycle: Some growth led to better employment, which meant some home price growth, which led to some more growth, etc... And it admittedly went on for quite a long time, going on 20 years.
But it started from the absolute dead bottom. You couldn't get any lower than Bend 20 years ago. It was an economic basket case. It almost COULD NOT get worse. I would put to you that we are at the opposite end of the incredibly extreme spectrum: It CANNOT POSSIBLY GET BETTER. Bend circa 2006 had won the real estate Powerball mega-jackpot. Once in a lifetime, will never happen again, millions to one odds... and it happened, here.
Now Hollern seems to intimate that if we hit the Jackpot again... we'll be OK. Technically true. But realistically? No, we will not hit the jackpot again. In fact we are like many jackpot winners: We think we are "blessed by God", that there is an innate "goodness" in our fair town that makes us preordained to receive outsized bountifulness in all aspects, but especially real estate, and that we are entitled to all the amenities & finer things life has to offer, and that we will probably hit the Jackpot again.
Paul-doh translation: We are dissipating wealth (that just happened to land in our laps) at an alarming rate because we have the myopic selfishness to think that hitting red 10X in a row makes us geniuses, not just lucky stiffs.
So I agree with Hollern: IF we hit the lottery twice, we'll be OK. Paul-doh addendum: We WILL NOT hit the lottery twice, and hence WE WILL NOT BE OK.
Finally, we get this nugg:
Justin Peterson, a 30-year-old Bend mortgage broker, grew up in Redmond. Up until this year, he hadn’t experienced a local real estate downturn in his lifetime. Now, he’s living through one.
Peterson and his wife bought three investment houses during the boom years of 2005 and 2006. He’s trying to sell one now to generate cash, so far without much luck. Two are rented.
Here's the nub: These whackos drank their own Kool-Aid. Multiply this little anecdote times 1,000. Or more. This person has bought into the Real Estate Building Empire, Nothing Down idiocy to the extent that they own something like $1,000,000 in excess real estate. Granted, they have a 66% occupancy rate, but I'll bet my bottom dollar they are cash-flow negative. Why? For the same reason virtually EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO BOUGHT A HOME IN BEND AS AN INVESTMENT IN THE PAST 3 YEARS IS CASH FLOW NEGATIVE: They did ZERO rational cash flow projection, and 100% pie-in-the-sky 30% yearly implied appreciation projection.You rent a house in Cent OR built in the past 4 years? Feel good about your financial choice, because the owner of the home will NEVER be cash flow positive in our lifetime, NEVER. Well, unless you're pretty young. And I'm talking 20, and you plan on renting for 50 years.
Well, I'll stop hammering on this Bulletin piece. But after pointing out what becomes obvious as you read the final sentence: Read the title, "If history proves a guide, housing slump won’t last". Huh? A little critical thinking reveals that this is a completely misleading title. While there IS some historical info regarding Bend's housing market, and some of it is pretty interesting, there is ZERO leading us to believe that, "if history is any guide", that Bend's imploding housing market is about to turn up, much less the U.S.'s or the World's.
And let's face it: This piece is about Bend. And it is meant to paint an incredible historical housing price run in Bend... as repeatable. It is NOT. Not in a million years. NEVER AGAIN. We will be VERY LUCKY to merely enjoy mediocre returns over the next 20 years. So see this for what it is: A PURE PR PIECE targeted EXCLUSIVELY at visitors, meant to paint the Bend housing market as infinitely resilient and bound for new highs using the SINGLE bright spot that this place has: Historical price appreciation.
If you were a long-time aficionado of BEM's wonderful predecessor to this blog, you may recall that Paul-doh talked a bit about how Bend media would stretch farther and farther back into the past, grasping for Best Possible Perspective On A Collapsing Housing Market, because the recent past, is starting to suck eggs, and the future actually looks terrible. THIS IS THAT STRETCH. This is a PR piece to sell houses, cuz houses ain't selling here ANYMORE.
That gives me a segue to what this post was originally going to be about, and that is Doug Farmers July Summary. Now the very first thing that jumped out at me is "116". One hundred sixteen homes sold in July. July 2006, 174 homes sold. June 2006, what could arguably be called the All Time Speculative Top of All Speculative Tops Throughout The U.S., we sold 267 homes at a mind-blowing $491K average.
116 homes with 2,361 homes for sale is 20.35 MONTHS OF INVENTORY, and that, my friends, is DISASTER. I joked in previous comment threads that we could possibly hit 3,000 homes for sale and 2 years of inventory: BOTH are looking increasingly POSSIBLE , and given the HUGE increase in FSBO, MLS-hold-backs by builders, and other Dark Matter, we may already be there in "real" terms. I wrote a few posts back that June was a seminal month, The End, The Abyss From which we would begin an agonizing plummet. July is PLUMMET CONFIRMED. We are plummeting.
I don't want to sound alarmist, but this is unmitigated disaster coming at us. This is complete calamity hitting The Single Largest Industry BY FAR in Central Oregon. We pinned our hopes on FLIPPER BAIT, and now, in the heat of the Summer, The Bait Is Starting To Rot & Stink. Who wants Rotten Fish? What will they pay for Rotten Flipper Bait? The answers are now clear: NO ONE, and NOTHING.
What's innane, is that this thing was coming at us like it had eyes. Paul-doh, BEM, the Movie Star, the Professor and Marianne and everyone else on Gilligans Island was screaming to High Heaven that when you throw FLIPPER BAIT out in the Sun, that it rots, and it sure as hell doesn't sell for what you paid. But we got rotten fruit hurled at us for our trouble. Well, here it is. I hate to say it, cuz I am no "Sage" nor Sooth Sayer... BUT WE TOLD YOU SO. So I'll say it again:
"When you throw FLIPPER BAIT in the Hot Sun of Central Oregon, you get STINK & ROT"
Maybe now that Bulletin piece makes some sense: If poor coffee-addled Paul-doh can just fall outta the mini-van from a trip to John Day, and the first thing he sees is 20.35 MONTHS INVENTORY, then the Powers That Be also know DAMN WELL, that there had by God better be an explanation for the FOUL STENCH that has OVERWHELMED the Bend masses, and that despite Kool-Aid fogged mental capacity, more than a few have started to pin the source of the stink on RE. That means The Moment Of Truth is coming. And They Know It. And they did the One Thing, the Last Gasp, Hail Mary 80 yard hurl that they think will save them: A putrid, stink ridden PR piece loaded with 2 year old, diluted Kool-Aid sent out to delude any completely stupor-fied morons that might be visiting Central Oregon, in the blind hope that they will liquidate all their SoCal RE, and...
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE BUY SOME CENTRAL OREGON REAL ESTATE!
Will they? Maybe. But not enough to pull us out of the Death Dive onto the Rocks below. Bend is about to get splattered across the rocks. We are most assuredly DOOMED. Not because Crazy Alarmist Paul-doh says so, nor any other imbecilic reason other than WE WASTED OUR CHANCE TO TURN A LOTTERY JACKPOT INTO SOMETHING SUSTAINABLE. Instead of building this one-shot lottery winning into something we could really build on, Boss Hogg INSISTED that we double down on red AGAIN. And if you put enough monkeys together and have them flip coins, eventually one will flip heads 10X in a row. We thought this was the sign that we had a brilliant monkey. No. It's just bound to happen to some monkey, and it happened to us. Now the monkey has thrown a tail when we doubled down our own money, plus a lot of borrowed money, cuz it seemed this monkey really had some juice. But this was just another stupid monkey, and it's thrown a tail and taken our dreams with it, so Paul-doh predicts that we will do the following with this Bad Monkey:
We Will Spank The Monkey
Yes, there will soon start a number of stories about the perils of pinning everything on the hopes of RE. It's coming. Hollern is an example of the monkey almost spanking itself:
Hollern, who has led Brooks Resources, the region’s largest development company, since its founding, said he also sees a bright future for real estate here over the next 20 years, although he also sees pain coming in the short term.
He couldn't quite bring himself to do it, but Hollern and Hollern's paycheck are most definitely in self-spankage mode. Not quite there, but he can feel the spanking a-comin'. Me, BEM and others have been spankin' the monkey for a year and a half, culminating in this very monkey-spanking analogy gone too far. So I'll stop. But be wary... the Bad News is Coming, and it's coming from those who Created It: The Extremely Lucky Coin-Flipping Monkey's. And what's so stupid is they will point out The Most Blatantly Obvious Thing On Earth: Coin Flipping Monkeys Are A Terrible Investment, especially when you lose & you've bet everything you've got & everything you're banks got on the outcome.
A Final Note: Wells Fargo upped their jumbo rates (interest rates on $417K+ homes... yes, $417K is the limit) from 6.8% to 8%. This affects middle America little, if at all. The U.S median is in the lower $200's, so this move doesn't affect the national implosion very much. Bend? Whoa, a totally different story. Our average is North of half a mill, so this affects a huge number of Bend area homes. This is an 18% increase in interest costs, in one swipe. And Wells is a big, and well-run financier of RE (after all Warren Buffett owns a buttload of Wells, 218 million shares at last count). This is a fundamental repricing of risk... and not Trailer-Park Joe, but EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO BUY A HOUSE. Even really well-funded, high down payment types, like Timmy Toes. Buying a house has just gotten MUCH HARDER, and FAR MORE EXPENSIVE in this country, no matter who you are or how much money you have.
And I have a theory, that in normal times, people MOVE AWAY from expensive, low return, hard-to-obtain investments and towards high return investments. I would think that a lot of people who gravitated towards RE as an income vehicle, will realize the heinous downside, and go towards bonds, or possibly income-oriented stocks like utilities... anything but RE backed debt, which is imploding.
So there you have it: Not only is it harder to buy the rotting Flipper Bait, it' a hell of a lot more expensive to do so. But the Bulletin is trying to remind you when this fish didn't stink in a futile attempt to sell rotting Flipper Bait, because Boss Hoggs Fish Market is giving off a stench that is making you recoil in horror. Paul-doh's advice:
DON'T BUY A STINKING ROTTEN BUCKET OF FLIPPER BAIT UNLESS YOU WANT THE STINK OF IT ALL OVER YOU FOR A LONG TIME.
186 comments:
And if you read the Bulletin article, make sure to click the "Printable" version, which contains several interesting graphs.
HILARIOUS Bend Bulletin front page story on housing today. Just a riot. David Foster, where do you get this stuff? FUNNY! Comedy Central for you, buddy.
--TT
Just a save for David Foster...
This piece was written by David FISHER, crack Bulletin reporter. David Foster, Realtor, is not mentioned.
I know, I know... you had a mote in your eye.
And I know there'll be a few comments about $417K jumbos are still pretty safe, and they don't give those to just anyone.
Well, they do & they have, cuz I got one. When I first got here, I got a quick No-Doc loan in no time flat. I did put 20% down, but my income was damn near ALL hot air. Just pretty much made it up.
And they were not the least concerned with verifying it. This was in late 2003, and I know the game got FAR looser in the subsequent 3 years. I heard stories that bordered on fraud: attempts by lenders & mortgage brokers to put chronically unemployed folks into $400K homes, without ANY income whatsoever to show for 3-4 years, and nothing down.
Believe me, this place is awash in $400K homes bought by "consultants" with $120K in stated income. The real source of their income? Refi guy. Refi guy would refi like crazy with no income or DOWN payment, so the refi guy was even better that originator guy. You had to at least convince originator guy that you could get into the asset honey pot and make a few payments.. refi guy needed no such convincer, cuz you already demonstrated the financial "savvy" to having duped originator guy. Refi Guy WAS your income stream.
Thing is: REFI GUY IS GONE. That means your income is gone. That means your house is gone.
Too many Daves.
--T
Oy... one final thing. This market can be characterized as being priced as not being even close to Market Clearing.
A Market Clearing price would bring us down to 6-7 months inventory. We are at 20+ months. This is like a street market where all the Vendors suddenly raise prices, and all the buyers have their income cut in half: There is "some" activity, but it is rare. Non-market clearing prices lead to stagnation, and that is exactly what Bends housing market is: STAGNANT.
No one is making any money, and in fact almost EVERYONE is losing money. I say again: This towns RE participants are losing money in aggregate. 116 sales split 2,200 ways? Comes to WAY under $10K every 20 months. Can't live on that... NO WAY.
One thing will "unloosen" this market: FALLING PRICES. And not a little, a whole lot. Far more than you think. Because the money lenders for the street market have gotten VERY nervous, cuz a lot of shaky credits have stopped paying, and that means EVERYONE, even the well-off, are going to pay more.
This is BEM's Surprises To The Downside, unleashed. Like the precipitous fall in stocks in early September 2001 seemed to have "no cause". "Something" is lurking out there, and all I know is it's worse than anyone thinks.
Look for it: The thing that No One Saw Coming is Coming. It'll be bad.
Since 1988 — the year the city pulled out of its last major real estate slump — the average price of a Bend home has shot up an average of 11.3 percent per year, according to Central Oregon Multiple Listing Service numbers, dwarfing the 4.8 percent average annual gain in the nation’s average home price during that period and rivaling the 12 percent average annual return of the S&P 500 stock index.
And I didn't even catch this: 11.3% DOES NOT "rival" 12%. In fact it's less. DUH.
Also this is exactly what snake oil salesmen do when a market has gone to hell: Selectively choose their sample data. Typically you'll find trough-to-peak percentage gains touted as a reason to buy.
Problem: No one buys at the trough, and subsequently sells at the peak, NO ONE. Peak-to-peak or trough-to-trough is fine, but trough-to-peak is attained by NO ONE. Or damn few. This is by definition. If we all attained trough-to-peak gains every time we'd ALL BE TRILLIONAIRES. All of us. The vast majority buy near the peak and hold into the teeth of the decline, and use the first hint of daylight to unload. A formula for losing money. Human nature, I guess.
Look for more & more of this, "Hey Look, We DID Have a Great RE Market... Back In The Day", as a way to unload this rotting flipper bait that pollutes our streets.
This thing is gonna get sooooo much uglier. I remember being castigated by a few people (life is good) comes to mind on BEM's old blog for saying things are going to get nasty. I always posted anonymously(my gonads are quite small compared to IHTBYB's). Now I am beginning to feel a little vindication. The 30 yr old guy in that article sold me a mortgage some years ago. I got a toxic ARM and sold my house before things started to dump. Thanks in part to BEM's blog and some others. I remember how completely bullish he was on real estate, and how brainwashed I thought he was. Unfortunately, he and probably thousands like him are gonna get absolutely creamed in the next few years. I feel bad for the younger people who got suckered into this mess. I watched a neighbor lose his house in the early 90's , and learned then that real estate doesn't always go up. He had to walk away after owing more on the house than it was worth.
The Bullshittin story does, in passing and somewhat grudgingly, acknowledge that the run-up in the average home price was partly due to the construction of million-dollar and multimillion-dollar homes for the rich and super-rich.
"If history proves a guide, housing slump won’t last". Huh? A little critical thinking reveals that this is a completely misleading title.
Not completely. What goes down will go up. The question is when. As I recall, the last RE "slump" in this town went on for about eight years.
After the current "correction," home prices in Bend will start to rise again. But never at the insane, speculation-driven rates of 2004-2006.
And take a look at the graphs, which are very nice, on the "printable" version of this Bulletin piece: You've got "Average Bend Home Purchase Price", "Average U.S. Home Purchase Price", and "S&P 500: Total Market Value".
Now, it's quite interesting HOW they've cut up the holding period returns, and the fact that they are quoting RETURNS here. BendBB and MANY others have made statements along the lines of, "MY HOME is NOT an investment, IT'S MY HOME", which seems to intimate that holding period returns are irrelevant to their home purchase decision. That's fine.
But look closer at the graph initial "investment" dollar amounts: $54,521 for Bend homes AND the S&P500. U.S. homes start at $83,100. There is a clear comparison of Bend home appreciation to a Pure Investment, not a home, nothing else.
It is clear this is a piece SELLING BEND HOMES AS INVESTMENTS. Not homes where you need to live. Come one, come all SoCal equity locusts, we have INVESTMENTS that have performed well in the 20 year holding period going back to 1986.
And what's hilarious: Bend home price appreciation is about half of what the S&P500 has done since 1983. The title of this piece should be:
Bend Home Appreciation Highest In The Nation, But Still Gets Killed By Stock Market Returns
I disagree that this puff piece was aimed mainly at visitors. I believe it was aimed primarily at realtor/advertisiers. Costa had a column a couple of weeks back saying they were bitching about the paper's "negative" (i.e., semi-accurate) reporting on the "slump."
I do, however, think it is significant that The Bullshittin finally brought itself to use "the B-word" in this story.
The Bullshittin finally brought itself to use "the B-word" in this story.
Where? A quick search for "Bust" comes up empty. What's the "B" word?
Brooks Resources — formed in 1968 as the real estate arm of the old Brooks-Scanlon lumber company — started Shevlin Center, which today is a thriving hub of office buildings and industrial plants on the west side of the Deschutes River along Colorado Avenue, in the early 1980s. But nothing happened for years, even though Brooks and the city poured thousands of dollars into the Colorado Avenue bridge and other improvements.
Unfortunately, an associated article, Biggest office building in Bend is up for sale is subscription required so I can't confirm it precisely, but it details the sale of Bend's largest office complex, which if my recollection is right (that's iffy), is the same property.
I'm curious if Brooks is still the current owner, or if in fact this is the exact same "thriving hub of office buildings and industrial plants" (nice objective reporting). Whoever it is, they are liquidating.
And when they Big Boys say "All Is Well", while they are selling... they are really hoping for you to be The Next Sucker.
And like Duncan at Pegasus, look for what Brooks is DOING (not saying) if you want a decent insight into what the future of Bend RE looks like. And they are bailing, like crazy.
“We are overbuilt at the moment,” Hollern ( Brooks Resources hatchet-man ) said. “But as long as our growth rate — in terms of real people, real jobs and real kids — continues, we’ll work through this in a couple of years and things will pick up again.
Let's grow ourselves out of RE recession. Let's build more houses, lets have more events, and ...
What in the hell is real people? Real kids? What the fuck is this bitch talkin? and to WHOM?
Yes, we're over-built, try a twenty year inventory. Yes, growth will grow us out of this...
Yes, this is what I have been saying for a year, 3-5 years, we're now in year one, and the for the first time ever the BULL gives us a history lesson.
The timber crash started in 1983, and even here they're saying 1988 for recovery, that's five years, note the title says it will be a quick correction, but for resets and foreclosures, hungry realtors, mtg, commercial, ... the whole bend biz of events, its going to be a long cold five years.
If history proves a guide, housing slump won’t last
By David Fisher / The Bulletin
Published: August 05. 2007 5:00AM
A few years ago, Krishan Tinney was stuck in traffic — again — on her grinding commute from Los Angeles to Ventura County. So she called a friend in Bend to kill some time.
“What are you doing?” Tinney asked.
“Oh, I just got off work,” her friend said. “Thought I’d walk down to the river and float for a while.”
It was 4 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.
A few months later, Tinney and her husband, an engineer, ditched Southern California, moved to Bend and bought a house — something that was way beyond their means in SoCal’s heady housing market. Since then, he has recruited friends to join him at Columbia Aircraft Manufacturing Corp. Her parents have moved here, too.
The Tinneys sold their first house a few months ago and moved into a bigger, brand-new one in south Bend’s Renaissance Ridge subdivision.
“We could never have done this in Ventura County,” Tinney said, plucking a few weeds from her tiny new lawn last week as she got ready to take her young daughter swimming. “We feel very fortunate. We love it here.”
Drawn by the lure of relatively affordable housing through the years, the low-key, small-city atmosphere and the stunning natural beauty of Central Oregon, Tinney and thousands of newcomers like her have rained a remarkable streak of good fortune on Bend’s housing market.
Since 1988 — the year the city pulled out of its last major real estate slump — the average price of a Bend home has shot up an average of 11.3 percent per year, according to Central Oregon Multiple Listing Service numbers, dwarfing the 4.8 percent average annual gain in the nation’s average home price during that period and rivaling the
12 percent average annual return of the S&P 500 stock index.
Even ignoring the unsustainable growth rates of the boom years of 2004-06, the city’s real estate gains have been impressive.
The average price of Bend houses gained an average of
10 percent per year from 1988 to 2003, according MLS numbers, while prices nationally climbed only about 4.2 percent per year.
Of course, the numbers are rough. Some of Bend’s average price gains have come more from increases in the construction of super-expensive homes than from the price appreciation of individual houses. Still, it’s clear that the local housing economy hasn’t experienced anything like a drawdown in nearly a generation.
Until, possibly, this year.
The inventory of unsold homes in the Bend market has swelled to record numbers this year, while sales levels for the first six month of the year have fallen back to levels not seen since 2003.
The traditional underlying drivers of the local housing market are likely still there, University of Oregon economist Tim Duy said Thursday. Newcomers are still attracted to Central Oregon’s natural beauty and, even at today’s prices, average housing prices here remain lower than they are in neighboring California and in other high-priced regions along the nation’s gold coasts.
But working off all of those unsold houses might bring some pain, Duy said. The only question is how much and for how long.
“I’ve got to think that the world is not falling apart here,” Duy said. “But prices are going to have to come down to get rid of whatever excess inventory has built up.”
Rough past
Bend’s prices have appreciated so much during the past 20 years, Duy noted, partly because they started so low.
The real estate economy here was in rough shape as the 1970s faded into the ’80s, Brooks Resources Corp. CEO Mike Hollern recalled recently.
A housing boom in the late 1970s attracted a stream of new contractors to town and filled neighborhoods with new housing, Hollern said, but the optimism didn’t last long. Interest rates spiked in the early 1980s as the Federal Reserve Board launched an aggressive battle against inflation, sending average mortgage rates soaring from the 9.25 percent average of 1978 to a peak of nearly 15 percent in 1982.
That, combined with an employment crunch in the wood products industry, hit Bend’s economy hard, Hollern said. Downtown shops closed and boarded their windows. Contractors pulled up stakes and left town.
Don Kelleher, now a longtime real estate agent, was in a retail business at the time, trying to make ends meet while paying 19 percent interest on inventory loans. His wife, a real estate agent at the time, closed deals that required the sellers to bring money to the table because the sales prices of their homes could no longer pay off their mortgages.
From the exuberance of the 1970s, confidence plunged to an all-time low.
“There was a time when we would hear about a housing start — just one house, not a subdivision — and everybody would drive by to see who the hell was building a house,” Hollern said. “Whoever it is must be crazy.”
It took the local housing market years to recover.
From 1983 — the earliest year for which the Central Oregon Multiple Listing Service has reliable numbers — through 1985, the average price of a Bend home fell more than 8 percent, from $54,521 to $50,144. Prices staged a brief rally in 1986 as mortgage interest rates dropped back below the 10 percent mark again. But 1987 brought another 2.8 percent slide, and the average price of a Bend house — which amounted to only about $54,000 that year — was less than half the national average.
Weakness in the housing market was mirrored by sluggishness in other market sectors, Hollern said.
Brooks Resources — formed in 1968 as the real estate arm of the old Brooks-Scanlon lumber company — started Shevlin Center, which today is a thriving hub of office buildings and industrial plants on the west side of the Deschutes River along Colorado Avenue, in the early 1980s. But nothing happened for years, even though Brooks and the city poured thousands of dollars into the Colorado Avenue bridge and other improvements.
Awbrey Butte also stood virtually empty through the first half of the ’80s, Hollern said, even though Brooks bought it in 1970 and master planned it a few years later.
Still, the city was beginning to sprout some of the seeds of its future growth. Developments like the High Desert Museum, along with a trickle of new concert series, new restaurants and new shops increased the city’s attractiveness while the Sunriver Resort, founded by investor John Gray in the mid-1960s, and Black Butte Ranch, founded by Brooks Resources in 1970, exposed the area to a steady stream of tourists from the cities of California and the Pacific Northwest.
Developments like the new St. Charles Medical Center, meanwhile, increased the city’s service level and formed the nexus for a growing employment base, Hollern noted. But the key to the city’s growth through the 1990s and beyond proved to be its attractiveness to retirees and young, skilled urban workers who brought pre-existing wealth or, in some cases, their own jobs with them when they moved to the High Desert.
“We have become,” Hollern said, “a poster child for the non-placebound economy.”
From close to the bottom of Oregon’s 36 counties in terms of household income in the early years of the 1990s, Deschutes County has climbed to among the highest in the state, Hollern noted. Still, storm clouds have gathered again around its housing market.
Speculative bubble
From 2004 through 2006, the smooth, upward-trending curve that maps Bend’s historical housing prices takes a sudden jump upward.
Fueled by cheap mortgage rates and intense investor interest, the average price of Bend’s housing shot up 24 percent per year in that span, giving the city a prominent spot on national rankings of overpriced housing markets.
Whether that’s fair or not is debatable. Most relative price rankings — including a quarterly report generated by Global Insight and National City Mortgage that pegged Bend at or near the top of its list for more than a year — attempt to measure the degree of an area’s “overpriced” condition by comparing home prices to prevailing local wages, leaving investment income, self-employed income and other common sources of Bend household wealth out of the equation.
Still, there’s no doubt that home prices have broken beyond the city’s established trend line, said Duy, who tracks a collection of local economic data to produce a quarterly Central Oregon economic index for The Bulletin. The question now is, where does it go from here?
Some factors, like the city’s continuing attractiveness to wealthy newcomers, are likely to continue to drive growth for years to come, Duy said. But other shorter-term factors, like the oversupply of houses for sale, a growing credit crunch in the mortgage lending industry and the deflation of investor interest in the housing market here and nationwide, all foreshadow some tough months, or years, to come for local residential real estate.
Sellers in any real estate market are psychologically resistant to lowering home prices, Duy said, but the market’s current angst could work itself out through one of a couple of scenarios: prices could come down, which could drain the area’s excess inventory quickly if they come down far enough, or prices will remain stuck somewhere around their current levels or even rise while the region relies on population growth to work off the excess — a process that could take much longer.
Bend money manager Bill Valentine, who warned his radio talk show listeners about inflation in the local housing market as early as 2005, likened the choice to the difference between ripping a Band-Aid off quickly to take the pain all at once, or peeling it off hair by painful hair.
“It has to return to the trend line, and it’s going to happen in one of two ways: fast and ugly or slow and painful,” Valentine said Thursday. “We are gonna end up in the same place, regardless, with a healthy real estate market. We’re probably gonna end up with a thinned-out real estate force, but we still have a great place to live, and people will still be able to make a decent living building houses here and selling real estate.”
A couple of wildcards — recession or rapidly rising interest rates — could make recovery longer and tougher, Valentine said, although an out-and-out recession seems unlikely at this point, and 10-year Treasury bond rates, which tend to foreshadow mortgage rates, have actually dipped in recent weeks.
Hollern, who has led Brooks Resources, the region’s largest development company, since its founding, said he also sees a bright future for real estate here over the next 20 years, although he also sees pain coming in the short term.
“We are overbuilt at the moment,” Hollern said. “But as long as our growth rate — in terms of real people, real jobs and real kids — continues, we’ll work through this in a couple of years and things will pick up again.”
That couple of years, though, could feel like a long stretch for some.
Justin Peterson, a 30-year-old Bend mortgage broker, grew up in Redmond. Up until this year, he hadn’t experienced a local real estate downturn in his lifetime. Now, he’s living through one.
Peterson and his wife bought three investment houses during the boom years of 2005 and 2006. He’s trying to sell one now to generate cash, so far without much luck. Two are rented.
The experience so far hasn’t soured him on real estate investing, Peterson said, but lessons have been learned. Going forward, he said he’ll be more conservative, maybe buying a property every few years rather than buying them in a lump, reducing the chances of buying at the peak of a cycle. He’ll stay more liquid, too — cash is king in a downturn, and it can take a lot of cash to hang onto houses to wait one out.
But for now, like a lot of other recent investors, he’s a seller.
“We definitely haven’t lost faith in real estate, for sure,” Peterson said Thursday. “We’ll just get past this correction and make our adjustments and move on.”
Hi, what are you doing today? I'm just up here in my Old Mill condo rubbing the wilson, you know flipping the fred. And You? I'm floating the river, its full of 12 year old kids in bathing suits... Yeh, you should see the view from my condo, I just love this city. Yeh, they give free binoculars with every condo purchase summer in Bend is Paradise, .... The city banned dogs too from the condo-canyon, yeh its good to be in Bend in the summer, and its even better to own a condo-canyon condo. How can I get one? Ya need to know a condo-ho...
A few years ago, Krishan Tinney was stuck in traffic — again — on her grinding commute from Los Angeles to Ventura County. So she called a friend in Bend to kill some time.
“What are you doing?” Tinney asked.
“Oh, I just got off work,” her friend said. “Thought I’d walk down to the river and float for a while.”
It was 4 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.
Very few of the beautiful people will survive the five cold years.
Get rich quick folk cannot tolerate five years of $6k/yr income.
Given that ALL of Bend was financed on HELOC,
Next 2-3 years will be very ugly.
That said I'm amazed at the number of people on my street that bought their home at $12k in the 70's, and haven't played the game, the attitude is seen the 80's, ... It's the newbies in the last ten years that will be hurt the most,...
Like they say Bend is a city of "Marks".
I hadn't caught that Hollern had said, "real" people, "real" kids, "real" jobs.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I wonder if he isn't just signaling that he isn't fooled by the B.S. anymore than we are.
His wife, a real estate agent at the time, closed deals that required the sellers to bring money to the table because the sales prices of their homes could no longer pay off their mortgages.
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Yup, today in Bend, if you want to sell a home, you either have to have enough equity to list -50% of 2005, or your buyer MUST have a ton of cash.
Welcome to Bend.
Developments like Sunriver Resort, founded by investor John Gray in the mid-1960s, and Black Butte Ranch, founded by Brooks Resources in 1970, exposed the area to a steady stream of tourists from the cities of California and the Pacific Northwest.
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Yes, old bilbo has been writing about this for forty long years, how SB100 was written and funded by John Gray, and Brooks-Scanlon, both involved in creating the UGB law of today, John Gray best known as the Harvard MBA that created the modern chain saw. Richest man in Oregon in the 1960's.
Valentine said Thursday. “We are gonna end up in the same place, regardless, with a healthy real estate market. We’re probably gonna end up with a thinned-out real estate force, but we still have a great place to live, and people will still be able to make a decent living building houses here and selling real estate.”
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First all 2,000 realtors need to leave, but those remaining will still make a fortune like they always have. Smart folk have already left, and smart builders have already sold what they were working on for penny's on the dollar.
Those sitting around to wait this one out, will starve. Where in the hell did you folks find this 'valentine'? Is he on the BULL or SORE payroll?
Justin Peterson, a 30-year-old Bend mortgage broker, grew up in Redmond. Up until this year, he hadn’t experienced a local real estate downturn in his lifetime. Now, he’s living through one.
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Enough to bring tears to your eyes, this guy has probably been in RE four years top, and all that time as an assistant, and what the HELL does he do? He buys three houses, you know he wasn't selling RE, he was planning to make his 30% a year forever on the property.... A lifetime of perhaps 2-4 years in RE in central oregon and never seen a correction. This shit could make a crocodile cry over its last meal.
Well I'll be damned... poor Paul-doh go on a 5 day trip and no one tell him about imploding Alt-A mortgage originator, American Home Mortgage.
I mean, DAMN! From $12 to $.69 in just a week. From USAToday, American Home Mortgage lays off 7,000
The collapse is widely expected to lead to a bankruptcy filing over the next few days. It is one of the most dramatic signs that the contraction in subprime lending industry, which make loans to people with weak credit records, has spread.
The meltdown was even faster than that of New Century Financial, a subprime lender that took nearly two months from the time it advised all was not well to its bankruptcy filing.
While liquidity concerns began to mount in June and July, American Home did not hint it was strapped for cash until a week ago, when it said — late on a Friday night, when most investors and employees were long gone for the weekend — it would delay some dividends.
"Even Friday they were saying everything is fine, we have enough to stem the tide," Vasilakis said. But he added that rumors of a shutdown became rife the following Tuesday, and that for the last few days, little work got done.
American Home this week said that its own lenders cut it off, it faced escalating margin calls, and might liquidate assets. It also stopped taking loan applications.
Ahhh yes. This is what happens when the lightning fast stock market meets to cold-molasses meltdown of an imploding housing market. I knew that quick beating in Feb-Mar when New Century blew up was NOT the Fat Lady Singing. Nor is this.
Look for home builders to go under, and all manner of satellite industries.
But most important: DO NOT trust someone who nervously assures you they are Just Fine. This thing is WAY WORSE than ANYONE is letting on. Remember: 116 sales last month. That is not sustainable for an industry that directly or indirectly fuels over half the Cent OR economy.
This badboy is DOOMED, and don't you believe ANYONE who says different... they almost certainly have a house they want you to buy.
Wait for Fall. BLOOD IN THE STREETS. And that is optimistic. Ain't no one going to say "Wait for next Spring" this Fall/Winter. Fool me once... It's about to splatter folks. Worst economic disaster EVER in this area is commencing RIGHT NOW.
Remember these days. You WERE HERE when it started... ya ain't thinkin' it now.... but you will.
Peterson said, but lessons have been learned. Going forward, he said he’ll be more conservative...
But for now, like a lot of other recent investors, he’s a seller.
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Ok, so we got a SHIT LOAD of sellers, and no buyers.
This is going to be beautiful.
Our sister city atlanta is already seeing homes that were $350k NOT sell at auction for $100k, and central oregon has 10-30 year inventory, and nearly everyone here like petersen bought 2,3, or more homes.
When ALL of our investors start dumping this shit... We know they all paid nuttin down, interest only, ... They all live off HELOC's, ... Just keep doing the same thing over and over, any day now someone is going to come and buy.
“We definitely haven’t lost faith in real estate, for sure,” Peterson said Thursday. “We’ll just get past this correction and make our adjustments and move on.”
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Let's see he has three home, two are rented one sitting empty, and you figure he lives in a mcMansion that costs $1k/mo to heat, he has had NO RE commissions for over a year.
Yeh, its takes faith lots of baby-jeezus, and good old time religion. Of course he hasn't lost faith, its like DUBYA's war, if he quits he loses it all, so keep fighting and praying, ...
Smart business people used to say "Let profits run, and cut loss", Now's it Bleed & Pray. Welcome to the new-box thinking.
I hadn't caught that Hollern had said, "real" people, "real" kids, "real" jobs.
Good catch Duncan. Man, you really have to read between the lines! He's basically saying the Flipper-fueled demand is hollow, and will actually make his job harder for a few years.
I think he's implicitly admitting that what we've had the past few years is "not real". Good catch.
Hardly, Bend has been over-sold to Golfer's go to the EDCO website, 24 over-developed golf-courses for a small population. Non-Placebound is is far from Bend, Bend is a Golfing Retirement Community, and the geezers are PLACE-BOUND, especially given that the shit don't sell, they could RE-PLACE themselves if they wanted to.
“We have become,” Hollern said, “a poster child for the non-placebound economy.”
Concepts of community, construction of community, online community, cyberspace, history of online communities and their conceptualization, computer mediated communication, online social networks, virtual and real communities, space and time, place-bound and non place-bound.
Hey, hey, Paul-doh learn something new every 10 minutes:
Woodside Ranch fire? What's this?
Hmmm...
1) Woodside Ranch
2) Becky Breeze
3) www.deschutes.org
4) Can't sell home
5) Fire
6) McArson
Hey... I ain't sayin' nut'n.
I'm just sayin'...
“We definitely haven’t lost faith in real estate, for sure...”
Hmmm... suspiciously close to American Home Mortgage... days before it declares Chap 11.
WE HAVEN'T LOST FAITH.... we are simply going broke at warp speed, and are desperately trying to sell. Yeah... the FAITH is still there... just not the willingness to hold these losers.
Still got the faith, though....
Tomorrow night monday is the continuation of the 5pm county talk on UGB, you had better be there, and HBM had better be there.
It's at the County Building,
HBM writes non-sense about measure 49 wrt to 37, the 49 is sponsored by 'friends of oregon' a coalition of newyork bankers.
JD Gray and SCANLON ( BROOKS ) got sb100 passed, they created the law that made UGB, tomorrow they're trying to get richer.
HBM has a little piece in this weeks SORE that says NOTHING the fact what 49 does is it says that folks can 'transfer' there pre-1972 to other people, what 37 did was say if you owned before 1972 ( scanlon, brooks, gray ), then you can now build in 2007 and get rich, but guess what they can't sub-divide, so they need a new law called 49,
What 49 will do is 'fix' 37 so that the good old boys can transfer the large logging holding to developers, end of story, why didn't HBM say this?
Because he is on the payroll of the good old boys.
Hmmm... suspiciously close to American Home Mortgage... days before it declares Chap 11.
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For three long months AmericanHome MTG, said EVERYTHING-IS-OK, its all fine, please don't withdrawl your money. Then this week, they said "we're going out of business". Note they were only #13 or #17, they're NOT #1 like country-wide.
But STILL for three long months AmercianHome said "we're different' we're ok, ... The fact is NOBODY is ok, and like the man said, in the banking business, if you have to tell people things are OK, then its time for depositors to withdraw. The banking biz, is a confidence scam, and when the banker has to TALK SHIT to grandma, well that is NOT a good sign,
When the ONLY REALTOR the BULL can find is a 30 year old virgin, with 2-3 RE years under his shorts, you know that things are REAL STRANGE in Bend.
One characteristic of the housing industry that differs from other sectors is that investment is, generally, tied to particular places. Construction creates many jobs that can not be outsourced. With the end of mortgage subsidies, capital would be invested in other sectors. Due to the increasing globalization of information technologies and manufacturing, it would not be unreasonable to expect large scale investment to pour into these non place-bound industries, continuing to improve corporate bottom lines, but doing little for the thousands employed in the housing industry.
I disagree that this puff piece was aimed mainly at visitors. I believe it was aimed primarily at realtor/advertisiers.
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Hi darling its me, where are YOU? I'm floating down the river, I just happen to have my cell phone on, and you can get WIFI everywhere on the river, the water is so dry your laptop doesn't even get wet....
Ya, right this piece was written for tourists, even the kids don't float the river with their cell phone, they're too busy drinking beer.
This is all mythology, as we have already killed the dead horse, come to bend and work 12 hour day, for seven days a week, nobody but 12 year-olds floats down the river.
Certainly not an alpha-male commuter from cali, will not be found that far from his/her excursion
look for what Brooks is DOING (not saying) if you want a decent insight into what the future of Bend RE looks like. And they are bailing, like crazy.
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Been that way for a year, builders were selling unfinished projects for fifty cents on the dollar, and now its 20 cents.
Bend is over, REIT in Bend is over, Walls-Fargo in Bend is over, CMO-MTG-BOND in bend is over.
There is NO more NewYork Wall-Street money coming to the MOST over-priced town. Everybody follows everybody else, and it will be YEARS before the national biz media is saying that spending money in Bend is smart. Now it dumb, get out now 10 cents on the dollar if you can. Note that most of these Funds dying aren't even getting a penny on the dollar.
Duncan McGeary said...
I hadn't caught that Hollern had said, "real" people, "real" kids, "real" jobs.
Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I wonder if he isn't just signaling that he isn't fooled by the B.S. anymore than we are.
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Duncan, You really shouldn't give these folks credit for what they say.
Besides what the fuck does a real kid have to do with anything? Perhaps what he's saying is NOT the kids you see in Bend from cali, 24 years old driving a new car, not a job in their life, still sucking their parents tit, and playing golf at widgi all summer, and skiing all winter, perhaps those are the non-real kids ???
I personally think that as my wife said just last night downtown with all those old cars and old people, "What the hell do young people do in this town"??
yes, this town is a retirement village, the events seem to be geared for the 80+ crowd,
perhaps that is what is meant by real people and real kids,
What we see to date in Bend is HELOC people and HELOC kids, good news is they're going the way of the do-do,
Well I'll be damned... poor Paul-doh go on a 5 day trip and no one tell him about imploding Alt-A mortgage originator, American Home Mortgage.
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No it was posted on your site friday or thursday,...
I hadn't caught that Hollern had said, "real" people, "real" kids, "real" jobs.
Good catch Duncan. Man, you really have to read between the lines! He's basically saying the Flipper-fueled demand is hollow, and will actually make his job harder for a few years.
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I think that 'real people' pay real bills and have real jobs, and real kids cost real money, so they're saddled to their mortgage.
The trouble in Bend, is that nothing is real, nobody had a job, and everyone live the life on HELOC,
I think that Brooks would like to see the return of 'real people', because they're what make the game work long-term, the false "The DEEP" looking good bend ( non-place-bound ), flexible people that ALL came here for a fast buck, are not what the BIG fast buckers want.
I think that Brooks is saying is that you cannot fuck people when they're fucking you. Brooks Resources has managed to attract mirror images of themselves to Bend.
Thus the implosion is going to be far worse than imagined, because there are no real kids or real jobs to hold the people to their REAL mortgages,
Which means that Real Estate is no longer real, and will NO longer be selling.
It's funny that I should still feel, well into my middle age, as though Mr.Hollern and Brooks Resources are the Adults in the room.
When I was growing up, they were not only big dogs, they were just about the only big dogs. I'm sure they'd laugh to think of themselves that way, they've probably exponentially increased the value of their holdings.
Still, I always pay attention to a company who has a habit of making good decisions. They have a long history in Central Oregon. Parse what they say... I'm probably reading way too much into it, but when he says that Bend has become a 'poster child for the non-placement bound economy.." he doesn't say its a GOOD thing. ;) He also mentions that Bend has a bright real estate future over the next "20 years." Twenty Years? Great.
I don't remember if Mr. Hollern or Brooks Resources have been so front and center in the news articles until lately. What projects have they been doing? What are they buying, selling? Anyone know?
I have a funny image of them stepping into a room full of rowdy real estate agents and saying, "Now Norma and Becky, you've had your fun. Now its time to get real...."
>>I think that Brooks is saying is that you cannot fuck people when they're fucking you.
My great aunt was a hermaphrodite. Seriously.
--TT
Look. At. This!
http://www.notsoclever.com/2007/08/panic.htm
They're moving from SoCal to Bend. Or trying to, at least.
Peterson is really trying to sell the cash house, see
http://bend.craigslist.org/rfs/389621487.html
Do it your self open house each weekend. Hand drawn FSBO sign that claims 0% financing (they plan to carry it if your dumb enough to make their payment for you?)
The also canned Southby to try this FSBO sham.
Two bits: #1 I got my Oregon Business magazine today. Central Oregon MLS Sales: May 2006 $322.4MM; April 2007 $165.2MM; May 2007 $186.4MM - a 42% decrease. The Willamette Valley decreased 5% year over year.
#2 in my friends' Bend neighborhood lots of homes were bought as investments, and their CC&Rs forbid renting. Seven empty ones on their street, with investors clamoring to be allowed to rent. So sorry - that was part of the price originally. I wonder how long before they default, the banks take 'em back, and they reappear as REO? Should be interesting, but the only sympathy I have is for my friends, who bought their house to live in (and work, and can make their payments no problem).
The investor folks and their bagholders are so screwed.
>>in my friends' Bend neighborhood lots of homes were bought as investments, and their CC&Rs forbid renting...
Let me get this straight. In a city packed to the gills with houses built for investors, there were actually dolts who bought in a neighborhood that doesn't allow renting?
Oh, that's a delight!. There was really no Plan B there, was there? It's as if a profit had been guaranteed.
Is there any dumb thing that _didn't_ happen in Bend in 2005?
--TT
The investor folks and their bagholders are so screwed
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For three long months the investor SAGE class out of Florida have been saying if you own "investor RE" sell at any price. There should be NO pity for anyone holding.
It's no different than holding pets.com in 2002, if you didn't sell in 2000, your fucked.
Let me get this straight. In a city packed to the gills with houses built for investors, there were actually dolts who bought in a neighborhood that doesn't allow renting?
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TT where in the hell have you been? I know your persona is to be a renter, but the gig all along is NOT worry about renting a $500k home for $1k/mo or $12k/yr, when you were making $150k(30%YR), NOBODY IN bend rents, these investments propertys were NEVER about renting, they were always about letting a house sit empty for ever and earning 30% a year.
This is how 90% of the homes in NWXC were sold.
Peterson is really trying to sell the cash house, see
http://bend.craigslist.org/rfs/389621487.html
Do it your self open house each weekend. Hand drawn FSBO sign that claims 0% financing (they plan to carry it if your dumb enough to make their payment for you?)
The also canned Southby to try this FSBO sham.
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At the end of any bubble this how its always played, folks like 'X'...
sells the $500k home on contract 0%down, 6% interest, $2500/mo interest, they keep the cash to float, it takes 1-2 years for a foreclosure, and you get the cash, the BUYER gets shit, and the seller gets a cash-flow. This is how many deals will be made. I will not get into the specifics of how to make these deals safe. But I'll say this, that anybody who gets into these deals is FUCKED, because they guys always pocket the cash, and again it takes the court and system 1-2 years to get you out, and if you just rented you would only get $1k/mo, this way as a sale you get $2500/mo, OK!
I'm probably reading way too much into it, but when he says that Bend has become a 'poster child for the non-placement bound economy.." he doesn't say its a GOOD thing. ;) He also mentions that Bend has a bright real estate future over the next "20 years." Twenty Years? Great.
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Yes, we'll all be dead then, so from his point of view, 20 years will be very good times, that said, so will he, perhaps that is what he means, is that just wait 20 until he's gone, then he'll not be held responsible for over-selling the desert shit-hole in his lifetime.
Ludwig von Mises summed it up like this:
"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The question is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." (Thanks to the Daily Reckoning)
For six months I have been saying this is BIG, but I guess you ain't seen nothing yet.
The good news is that nobody anywhere is going to be giving Bend a nickel anytime soon.
Please go to the County Meeting tomorrow night and support and end to the building insanity in Bend, let's NOT dig the hole any deeper. We can voluntarily shut this thing down or we can completely implode with no hope of recovery. Time is of the essence.
This week a third Bear Stearns fund shuttered its doors and stopped investors from withdrawing their money. Bear's CFO, Sam Molinaro, described the chaos in the credit market as the worst he'd seen in 22 years. At the same time, American Home Mortgage Investment Corp---the 10th-largest mortgage lender in the U.S. ---said that “it can't pay its creditors, potentially becoming the first big lender outside the subprime mortgage business to go bust”. (MarketWatch)
This is big news, mainly because AHM is the first major lender OUTSIDE THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE BUSINESS to go belly-up. The contagion has now spread through the entire mortgage industry—Alt-A, piggyback, Interest Only, ARMs, Prime, 2-28, Jumbo,—the whole range of loans is now vulnerable. That means we should expect far more than the estimated 2 million foreclosures by year-end. This is bound to wreak havoc in the secondary market where $1.7 trillion in toxic CDOs have already become the scourge of Wall Street.
Some of the country's biggest banks are going to take a beating when AHM goes under. Bank of America is on the hook for $1.3 billion, Bear Stearns $2 billion and Barclay's $1 billion. All told, AHM's mortgage underwriting amounted to a whopping $9.7 billion. (Apparently, AHM could not even come up with a measly $300 million to cover existing deals on mortgages! Where'd all the money go?) This shows the downstream effects of these massive mortgage-lending meltdowns. Everybody gets hurt.
AHM's stock plunged 90% IN ONE DAY. Jittery investors are now bailing out at the first sign of a downturn. Wall Street has become a bundle of nerves and the problems in housing have only just begun. Inventory is still building, prices are falling and defaults are steadily rising; all the necessary components for a full-blown catastrophe.
AHM warned investors on Tuesday that it had stopped buying loans from a variety of originators. 2 other mortgage lenders announced they were going out of business just hours later. The lending climate has gotten worse by the day. Up to now, the banks have had no trouble bundling mortgages off to Wall Street through collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Now everything has changed. The banks are buried under MORE THAN $300 BILLION worth of loans that no one wants. The mortgage CDO is going the way of the Dodo. Unfortunately, it has attached itself to many of the investment banks on its way to extinction.
IHTBYB has mentioned the 'B' word, its not bust, and its NOT bubble,
Its BLOOD-BATH
Wall Street will look like the Baghdad morgue.
The insurance companies and pension funds are loaded with trillions of dollars in “toxic waste” CDOs. That shoe hasn't even dropped yet. By the end of 2008, the economy will be on life-support and Wall Street will look like the Baghdad morgue. American biggest financials will be splayed out on a marble slab peering blankly into the ether.
We've never seen an economic tsunami like this before. The dollar is falling, employment and manufacturing are weakening, new car sales are off for the seventh straight month, consumer spending is down to a paltry 1.3%, and oil is hitting new highs every day as it marches inexorably towards a $100 per barrel.
Just a month ago, we were told by wall-street that the charade is over, now were told that the entire USA economy is a 'sham'. What is left?
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The increased volatility means that more and more investors will probably ditch the stock market altogether and head for the safety of US Treasuries.
But, that just presents a different set of problems. After all, what good are US Treasuries if the dollar continues to plummet? No one will put up with 5% or 6% return on their investment if the dollar keeps sliding 10% to 15% per year. It would be wiser to one's move money into foreign investments where the currency is stable.
And, that is (presumably) why Treasury Secretary Paulson is in China today---to sweet talk our Communist bankers into buying more USTs to prop up the flaccid greenback. (Note: The Chinese are currently holding $103 billion in toxic US-CDOs---and are not at all happy about their decline in value.) If the Chinese don't purchase more US debt, then panicky US investors will start moving their dollars into gold, foreign currencies and German state bonds as a hedge against inflation. This will further accelerate the flight of foreign capital from American markets and trigger a massive blow-off in the stock and bond markets. In fact, this process is already underway. (although it has been largely concealed in the business media) In truth, the big money has been fleeing the US for the last 3 years. What passes as “trading” on Wall Street today is just the endless expansion of credit via newer and more opaque debt-instruments. It's all a sham.
America 's hard assets are being sold off to at an unprecedented pace.
A 178 to 1 margin, in the great depression the house of cards fell on a 10 to 1, anybody want to know how far real value will fall until todays money is at the level of 'real money' here is the number 1/178 of today price
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The downgrading of CDOs has just begun and Wall Street is already in a frenzy over what the effects will be. Once the ratings fall, the banks will be required to increase their reserves to cover the additional risk. For example, “As a recent issue of Grant's explains, global commercial banks are only required to set aside 56 cents ($0.56) for every $100 worth of triple-A rated securities they hold. That's roughly 178 to 1 ratio. Drop that down to double-B minus, and the requirement skyrockets to $52 per $100 worth of securities held---a margin increase of more than 9,000%”.
“56 cents ($0.56) for every $100 worth of triple-A rated securities”?!? Are you kidding me?
As Mugambo Guru says, "That is 1/18th of the 10% stock margin equity required in 1929"!! (Mugambo Guru; kitco.com)
And don't forget that ARM resets don't peak until halfway through 2008! Yes, more defaults and faster, all while inventory is already at record peaks and while no one can figure out who will fund mortgages.
--TT
Freddie Mac don't want yer steenkin' loan...
http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/04/news/companies/freddiemac.reut/index.htm?source=yahoo_quote
It was 2 yrs. ago a very smart man told me the day will come when Central Oregons realstate would crash, this could not go on forever, way too much over building for no economy base. I mentioned what will happen to all those new houses they have built then. He said well its simple, The investers will pack it up and go back to California where they came from, after all even California has mobile home parks, leave the tax payers of Bend holding the bag . I am not saying all of the investers came from California but you can bet in the end the working class gets screwed again. Bend has been building up too this for decades. The big shots there have been in control for yrs. Money was all that was important, place for only the rich to play, well I guess now what goes around comes around for that city. I sure hate to see what few working class is left have to clean it up after the big party.
. I sure hate to see what few working class is left have to clean it up after the big party.
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DVA the PR firm that runs BEND for the bank UBS ( kuratek - juniper ridge ) has a siamese twin in Oregon called 'bandon'.
In bandon the tax payer paid for a brand-new private airstrip on the nicest scottish golf-course, and guess what? Tetherow has the same golf-course designer, and the same PR firm, and much of the same bankers.
The point is these international banks and PR firms run Bend/Bandon ( via marketing ), and they have consistently passed real costs to the tax-payer. The 'rich' are ONLY drawn to these areas with the promise of NO COST to themselves.
Even today ALL the solutions to all problems is to 'grow' which is a nice way of saying "increase the tax base", so more than a few little guys get the BIG bill.
There is talk amongst the golfer's that Tetehrow will have an air-strip on their 700 acres that will connect to Bandon, and the rumor is its the same deal, that the city of Bend will pay for the air-strip on private land, behind a gated community.
I sure hate to see what few working class is left have to clean it up after the big party.
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Bend is ONLY rich people, and thus can afford to pay $5k/yr per $100k on home for taxes, and can afford to pay a $500/mo water bill for Juniper-Ridge...
Rich & Beautiful will not blink an eye towards helping Bend in a time of need.
Freddie Mac don't want yer steenkin' loan...
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Want to REFI or buy a home? Then pay cash.
Who would loan real cash to a home-loan orginator, knowing that the RE is worth penny's on the dollar?
Folks MUST pay interest rates for what RE is worth, now ALL RE notes are 'bb' at best and will NO longer be treated as 'AAA', which means that junk-bond rates must be paid, if you can find someone willing to lose other people's money.
"Where? A quick search for "Bust" comes up empty. What's the "B" word?"
"Bubble." I don't remember The Bullshittin ever using it before.
The 'B' word is Blood-Bath.
Go to the EDCO website, so called Economic Development, funded by tax payer to create jobs.
#1 thing the promote is the 24 golf courses in the Bend area, the majority of which are 18 hole.
Bend is the place where everyone works as caddy's at the golf course.
Let's hope that rich folk don't quit golfing, because this town has built itself a hole.
So now what? I cannot even fathom where this takes us...but I do have a few thoughts:
#1:
Let anyone who should go bankrupt...go bankrupt. I believe in free market capitalism...both on the good side and on the bad side. I do not believe in holding up houses of cards and I do believe that people who took ridiculous risks, should pay the penalty...big or small. You want to take on 90% margin, I say have a nice life.
#2:
For the past 2-3 weeks, several Fedheads have been out claiming that the problem is "contained." Contained? Contained by what? As I have said in the past, these Fedheads are either dumb or lying. In either case, it scares the wits out of me. If the Fed is reading this, I would not even wait for your Fed meeting on Tuesday. I would lower rates on Monday. Lowering rates would not save the day and will not correct the problem. That will take time. In fact, I believe this problem is not fixable in the short run. .But movement by the Fed would send a real message to the markets that you are not a bunch of stumbling, mumbling, bumbling ,fumbling, comatose, blithering idiots and that you get it. You finally get it that there are real consequences of markets that are run amok because the inmates were running the asylum. You get it that both you as well as the other overseers and regulators stood by watching an orgy of credit and debt and leverage infiltrate a system by the greediest of greedy people. You finally get it that you should be in front of the problems and not enabling the problems that are out there and that just because the stock market is going up, everything may not be ok....because as I have told you, for some idiotic unknown reason, it is only a problem when stock markets say so. Why were only just a few people calling for a problem? Simple...markets were still going up. Problems take time to work through the system.
#3
Make every hedge fund mark to the market everything immediately. When I started in the investment business, I sold penny stocks. What we are seeing now pales in comparison to the manipulation in the penny stock market. The penny stock business was a very small market. The fraudulent loan business and the fraudulent pricing of these loans is massive. I do not think it would be a good thing to wake up every day to another fund marking their products correctly...and going out of business. Take the medicine now so we can get a semblance of order. I ask again...WHERE WERE THE REGULATORS? How were these fraudulent markets able to live for so long? Oh yeah! Simple...markets were still going up. Problems take time to work through the system.
#4
Shut Hank Paulson up. Hank Paulson and the company he used to run, were part of this problem. Hank Paulson, in my mind, is and has been part of the problem, not the solution. You just cannot come out every other day and say everything is fine...when it is not fine. You cannot come out every other day and state housing is stabilizing and bottoming...when it is not. Credibility is key when you are the Treasury Secretary and frankly, I would rather listen to Michael Vick tell me how to treat dogs then listen to Hank Paulson tell me the state of the markets. How is a so-called genius not able to see any of this coming? Why were only just a few people calling for a problem? Simple...markets were stil going up. Problems take time to work through the system.
"If the Fed is reading this,..."
I can neither confirm nor deny that we are.
I don't think the Fed will lower rates. Here's the problem. Over the last six months of 2006, inflation dropped. Over the first six months of 2007, they went up.
That means that YOY comparisons are going to look really bad for inflation, even if prices don't go up _at all_ from here (and would you bet on that?).
If the Fed lowers now, everyone will go "oh fucking crap" as inflation is reported every months through the rest of the year.
I still think a lift is more likely than a drop. If there's a drop, it's because of a financial meltdown 10 times as bad as what's already hitting the fan.
So expect everyone to quote Dr. Smith for another year and a half. "Oh the pain. The pain."
--TT
>>Make every hedge fund mark to the market everything immediately.
Well, that's a panic then, isn't it? There is _no_ market for lots of that crap (especially if you're busy bullying the hedge funds). By forcing a mark, you erase all hope that people have that some things can come back from the precipice.
In fact, just announcing that you will force marking to market will have everyone threatening their hedgie that they want out NOW, window be damned, whether or not that hedgie is even exposed to any crap. Even if that hedgie is in a 130/30 long short style of only equities with no exposure to the credit market at all (beyond any exposure implied in the long side of his equities).
--TT
Very few of the beautiful people will survive the five cold years.
Very few of the beautiful people survive, period. It's always been that way.
Get rich quick folk cannot tolerate five years of $6k/yr income.
Not that many "get rich quick" folk get rich quick.
That said I'm amazed at the number of people on my street that bought their home at $12k in the 70's, and haven't played the game
Not playing the game, waiting out the bad times, this is the key. If you want to be one of the "beautiful people" you must be practical. If you want to get rich, drop the quick and plan long term.
The St Petersburg Times. “Claudia Vinson Johnson’s savings were decimated as risky mortgage-backed securities in her account were devalued and her investments were sold to meet margin calls. The broker who put her into the high-risk investments: Steven Shrago, her neighbor across the street.”
“‘One day you wake up thinking you have a little bit of financial security and by mid afternoon, you have none,’ she said.”
“Johnson is one of dozens of clients of Brookstreet Securities Corp. who suffered huge losses in June on risky debt securities that were sold to them as safe investments. Brookstreet, which was based in Irvine, Calif., collapsed.”
“To say the least, it’s put a chill in a once neighborly relationship. Shrago, who didn’t respond to attempts to contact him, keeps his blinds closed.”
Very few of the beautiful people will survive the five cold years.
Very few of the beautiful people survive, period. It's always been that way.
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In Bend the Beautiful people are the people running city hall. The MTG brokers, the realtors, the stock brokers, the pump&dump crowd that run's Bend.
They'll survive because the city runs on secret deals, and the costs will just get passed to the taxpayers, and nobody will know until they get the bill.
"When you can't sell your assets that are going bad, you sell assets that are good,"
Thus good stuff is now selling cheap, because the bad stuff is unsellable.
Braving the Subprime Storm
Tough to Avoid Trouble,
As More Parts of Market
Start to Move Together
By JUSTIN LAHART, ALISTAIR MACDONALD and JOANNA SLATER
August 6, 2007; Page C1
Diversification -- not putting all one's eggs in the same basket -- has long been a mainstay of investing safely. But it works only so long as all the baskets don't tumble at once.
In recent weeks, assets around the world have fallen in lockstep. Stocks, corporate bonds, emerging-market debt and a host of derivatives backed by mortgages and other types of borrowing have been hit hard. Even commodities such as gold and other metals, which investors turn to precisely because their prices typically don't move in sync with other assets, dropped along with everything else in late July.
The result is that investors who spread their money across different assets are finding they were less protected than they thought.
"It is becoming more difficult to find assets that aren't highly correlated. Over short periods of time, property, commodities, equity and bonds are all moving together in similar directions," said Andrew Milligan, head of global strategy at Standard Life Investments in Edinburgh which has about £140 billion, or $285 billion, under management.
Concerns about risky bonds sent U.S. stocks tumbling Friday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.1% to 13181.91. Although still up 5.8% this year, the Dow is now nearly 6% below its record close of 14000.41 on July 19, little more than two weeks ago.
The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is down 7.7% from its record, also hit July 19, raising the specter of a 10% decline that is considered a correction to shake off speculative excess in a bull market. The S&P is up just 1% this year.
Much of the boom that buoyed financial markets over the past few years was aided by a belief among portfolio managers that by spreading their cash across a myriad of investments they could take on substantially more risk. Wall Street firms helped meet that demand by creating investment vehicles that lump uncorrelated assets together.
Borrowing With Confidence
Because they believed they were safer with assets that don't move in sync, hedge funds and other investors felt more comfortable investing with borrowed money, amplifying the cash pouring into new investment vehicles. As money poured in, pushing prices higher, stocks around the world, corporate bonds, emerging-markets debt, mortgage-backed securities and commodities began to trade more similarly. And when they fell, and funds that had used borrowed money to invest needed to sell assets to cover debts, the correlation grew even stronger.
When the Dow tumbled 311 points on July 27, gold fell $10.80 per troy ounce to $662.50. Traditionally, investors have fled to gold in times of uncertainty as a scarce and tangible asset that keeps its value. Now, trading activity is so high that gold is being used as a source of cash to cover losses in other markets.
"When you can't sell your assets that are going bad, you sell assets that are good," says Kim Catechis, who manages $3.8 billion in emerging-market stocks at Scottish Widows Investment Partnership. "We've seen some evidence of that."
The drive toward uncorrelated assets picked up after the tech-stock meltdown that began in 2000. Investors who had loaded up on tech stocks suffered for it, but those that had spread their risk across different asset classes escaped relatively unscathed.
Studies show that commodities historically performed differently than stocks and bonds. This is partly because inflation usually hits returns on bonds and stocks, but commodities are a component of inflation, pushing it up when prices rise for oil and basic materials.
In 2005, Gary Gorton at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and K. Geert Rouwenhorst at Yale looked at the correlation of commodities futures and the S&P 500 between 1959 and 2004. They found that during the very worst performing months for stocks, 5% of their sample, shares fell an average of 8.98% while commodity futures gained 1.03%. They also found a negative correlation between commodities and bonds.
Aoifinn Devitt at Clontarf Capital in London, who advises family firms and institutions on alternative investments, says most of the commodities funds she sees marketed hail the benefits of not being correlated to other markets. Many investors put money into commodities precisely because they offer diversification. At the end of last year, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the nation's largest pension fund with $245 billion in assets, set aside $500 million for investment in commodities.
But over the past year commodities have increasingly moved in step with other markets. The price of copper and aluminum, two of the most widely traded metals, suffered near 5% declines in the week ended July 27, almost mirroring the 5.6% fall on the Dow Jones Stoxx 600, which tracks Europe's 600 largest listed companies, and the S&P 500's 4.9% decline.
Because many developing countries continue to show robust growth, many investors believe that emerging-market stocks and bonds should be able to weather the latest storm. But as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 4.2% the last week in July, the MSCI Emerging Markets Index lost 3.8% in dollar terms and Merrill Lynch's index of emerging-market sovereign and corporate debt fell 1.5%.
"On a fundamental basis, emerging markets are fine," says Uri Landesman, a senior portfolio manager at ING Investment Management in New York. But in the immediate future, he says, the question is what investors will do. "Are people spooked? Are people pulling in their risk reins?"
The increasing correlation of global markets is enough that regulators are beginning to take note. Britain's Financial Services Authority, which regulates the London markets, listed it as a potential risk for 2007 in its report Financial Risk Outlook.
Correlation "calls into question some of the benefits of geographic diversification, either in an investment portfolio or within a group," the FSA said. With markets so interlinked, financial crises are less likely to be contained in the area they originate in, spreading over geographic areas and markets, the report said.
Collateralized-debt obligations holding bonds backed by subprime mortgages illustrate how investments don't always perform as expected. CDOs, as they are known, are pooled debt instruments cut into slices, known as tranches. Higher-rated CDO tranches were considered relatively safe because they were structured so they wouldn't get hit until a large proportion of the debt held by the CDO suffers losses. But losses among subprime-backed bonds held by CDOs were far more correlated than expected, causing steep losses.
Dragging Down Quality, Too
In addition to subprime mortgages, loans to the riskiest borrowers, some troubled CDOs also held bonds backed by better-quality household mortgages, commercial mortgages and credit-card debt -- which had the effect of making those instruments more highly correlated with subprime mortgages.
"When you fund things with CDOs, they become correlated, because they're all funded from a single place," says Christopher Mayer, director of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at Columbia Business School.
Losses in CDOs also prompted investors to question the valuations of other instruments that hold corporate debt -- among the reasons that the corporate debt market, too, has run into trouble. Leveraged loans -- bank loans to companies that have historically shown little correlation to other financial markets -- had their worst month on record in July, falling 3.35%, says S&P.
Very few of the beautiful people survive, period. It's always been that way.
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Then why do the beautiful people run Bend? Why is downtown Bend all now foo-foo and time-share sales? Why is the DEEP always packed with beautiful people?
Why does the city council only listen to the beautiful condo ho's?
Looks do matter, Darwinian economic logic doesn't work in Bend, as everyone wants to be rich, and act rich, and be seen as rich. Everyone in Bend is still playing the game.
The city is still trying to GROW ASAP, in order to maximize revenue, and bring in new people to consume the inventory. Bend only exists to sell real estate. These are the beautiful people, and my guess is they'll still be running this town five years from now.
Tonight monday is the continuation of the 5pm county talk on UGB, you had better be there, and HBM had better be there.
It's at the County Building,
HBM writes non-sense about measure 49 wrt to 37, the 49 is sponsored by 'friends of oregon' a coalition of newyork bankers.
JD Gray and SCANLON ( BROOKS ) got sb100 passed, they created the law that made UGB, tomorrow they're trying to get richer.
HBM has a little piece in this weeks SORE that says NOTHING the fact what 49 does is it says that folks can 'transfer' there pre-1972 to other people, what 37 did was say if you owned before 1972 ( scanlon, brooks, gray ), then you can now build in 2007 and get rich, but guess what they can't sub-divide, so they need a new law called 49,
What 49 will do is 'fix' 37 so that the good old boys can transfer the large logging holding to developers, end of story, why didn't HBM say this?
Because he is on the payroll of the good old boys.
[x] Big shiny SUV
[x} Golf course home with built in social club
[x] antidepressants
[x] gated community
[x] 30+ year old children still live at home
Where do these people above hail from? Remember these are 'real' kids and 'real' people, with 'real' jobs.
Somebody please do something, and save the realtor's. These are the beautiful people. These signs are a part of Bend. They're are only legacy.
Bend ready to crack down on wayward signs'For sale' signs creeping into medians and onto street corners are becoming a nuisance
The Associated Press
August 06, 2007
BEND — Too many "For sale" real estate signs being planted on the city's right of way has Bend ready to crack down on sign rule enforcement.
The signs have sprouted everywhere this summer, due partly to a slow real estate market and a bulging inventory of unsold homes.
Too many of those signs are finding their way onto medians, boulevards, street corners, roundabouts and even the streets as real estate agents jockey for attention, particularly on the weekends when open houses are scheduled, said Mel Oberst, director of the city Department of Community Development.
For seven years, the city's code enforcers "have been basically the garbage collectors for the city of Bend in terms of collecting signs," Oberst said, picking up signs when someone complains, then calling the sign owner to come down to City Hall to get their sign and a lecture.
So the city is ready to crack down and enforce its seven-year-old sign ordinance, unless it can get real estate agents, homeowners and businesses to police themselves first, City Manager Andy Anderson said.
"Our aim is always to gain compliance, and not to cause anybody any harm or consternation, or to cost them lots of money," Anderson said. "Unless there's no other way to get their attention."
Oberst said if the city's code enforcers have to pluck a real estate sign or a yard-sale sign or any other privately owned sign out of a gutter, or off of a handicapped access ramp, or away from a busy corner, they'll hand the owner a summons to appear in Municipal Court on a code violation that could carry a $500 fine and $113 in court costs per violation.
The issue has been brewing for some time, said Bill Robie, government affairs director for the Central Oregon Association of Realtors.
Sellers or their brokers can post only one real estate sign per tax lot on the lot that's actually being sold, according to a pamphlet printed on city stationery that circulated widely earlier this month. Real estate signs cannot be any larger than 4 square feet and 4 feet high, if they're for residential sales.
Commercial buildings can use much bigger signs. But whether they're residential or commercial sales signs, they cannot be posted in the city's right of way, which usually runs from the back of the sidewalk to the back of the sidewalk across the street, Anderson said.
If there are no sidewalks, the right of way can usually be located because it's where mailboxes, utility poles, fire hydrants and street signs are located.
In practical terms, there likely won't be much active enforcement until September, when some new enforcement officers will be trained and available for weekend work, Oberst said.
"We're being nice," Oberst said, "but nobody is listening to us."
Folks I know you don't have the stomach, but please TRY and get involved in YOUR Government.
Aug. 6: Hearing on Bend Urban Growth Boundary
Aug 6, 2007 11:41 AM
The City of Bend Planning Commission and the Deschutes County Planning Commission will continue their joint public hearing held on July 26 on the proposed Urban Reserve designation and Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) expansion on Monday, August 6.
The hearing will take place at 5:30 P.M. at the Deschutes County Services Center in the Barnes and Sawyer meeting rooms, located at 1300 NW Wall Street. Priority will be given to those who signed up to speak at the July 26th hearing, but did not have the opportunity to testify. The public is encouraged to attend and provide their input.
If you want to be one of the "beautiful people" you must be practical.
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I don't think you understand, the 'beautiful people' are the ones in Old Mill selling real estate and mortgages, they're all carpet baggers, that just came up from cali since 2002-2004. They're the ones running city hall today. They're beautiful, because they always look good, and you want to buy condos from them so you can be one of them.
Regarding folks that paid $12k for a home in the late 1970's in Bend, an still live in the same house, and didn't flip, they're generally the kind of person who fishes, and bikes. All BEAUTIFUL newbies are golfers.
If you think realtors are the beautiful people that's like having beer goggles on.
Nothing beautiful about those bubble headed bleach blondes and plastic smiles. They can tell you about bargain real estate with a gleam in their eyes. It's interesting when flippers fry, we love dirty laundry.
couldn't resist a little Henley.
Bend is a 'mark' town, the whole mission of the town is to look good and sell condo's.
Given that our customer is californians, we must appear like successful calis.
Everything about Bend is selling real estate and growing. Even the sunday BULL article quoted "Brooks Resource" as saying that we can just grow our way out of the bubble, if we can keep people moving here.
Old Mil, Condo-Canyon, floating down the river, the boardwalk, les Schwab amphitheater its all about looking good and selling condo's.
SUV's, big fake boobs, big hair, nice smiles, is Bend. 1/2 Billion dollars of tourist revenue July-August. Look good and keep Bend growing.
Yes, there will soon start a number of stories about the perils of pinning everything on the hopes of RE.
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It is our only hope. If we have lots of events and smile for the tourists and all do our part to sell condos, then we can all become infinitely rich forever.
There is no peril in pinning our hopes on Real Estate it is our only hope.
We must grow, we must build, and we must look good.
The fall in oil prices, and gold is NOT surprising. People need money, and the there are MORE sellers than buyers. People can no longer get cash by borrowing, and thus must either burn cash, or sell things that will sell for cash.
Thus now we'll have falling commodities and falling real estate.
Oil prices continue declines
Permalink: Oil prices continue declines by Stewart Douglas
Oil prices could ruin economic growth
The price of crude oil has fallen considerably over the course of today, continuing the declining price trend of last week.
Oil prices, which have fairly recently broken all time record highs, have been dramatically impacted upon by poor US economic performance, causing prices to decrease in the face of recent trends.
Worrying results from Wall Street, and prolonged underlying economy problems in the US have resulted in lower investor confidence, which has led to sell-offs in investment oil stock bringing the price per barrel down by in excess of $2.00.
Economic indicators from the US revealed continuing uncertainty as to the immediate direction of the economy, which was reflected in falling share prices across the world’s major stock markets.
The stagnant housing market has continued to bog down economic growth, whilst the sub-prime lending crisis remains at the forefront of the world’s media, and the US mortgage market.
US interest rates remain lower than most other major world economies, which have seen a trend towards interest rate rises as global stability and growth begins to take its toll on inflation.
Analysts attribute the lower interest rates to sluggish growth, and the continuing buyers market for US housing, with very little possibility of an upturn on the horizon.
After a week of mixed messages from think-tanks and analysts, markets have favoured a weaker interpretation of recent results.
Market confidence directly contradicts the Federal Reserve and President Bush, off the back of his positive comments as to the ‘resilience’ of the US economy, showing that perhaps the underlying concern as to the governance of the economy is having an adverse impact on growth and any potential recovery.
The price drops may have an impact on the decision of OPEC later this year, as they meet to discuss the regulation of pricing through world oil supply.
Given that our customer is californians, we must appear like successful calis.
That is exactly what should NOT be done if we want a way out of this mess.
Real Estate is not selling in California either. No amount of plastic realtor smiles or promises or millions of signs will change the fact that buying real estate right now is a colossal rip off.
Symbols of excess are now being seen for what they are: excessive and unattractive.
Lack of infrastructure is now taking it's real toll: collapse.
Nothing can stop the decline in the short term, it's karma coming due. Like the Iraq war there is no easy exit or quick fix for these mistakes we have long made a habit of.
Nothing can stop the decline in the short term, it's karma coming due. Like the Iraq war there is no easy exit or quick fix for these mistakes we have long made a habit of.
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Holy shit, have you been smokin some south cascadian pipe weed?
That is exactly what should NOT be done if we want a way out of this mess.
*
Just yesterday Mr. Brooks said that we can grow our wait out, if we just keep getting to move here,... Note over 50% of cali homes aren't selling, but that means that 40% are selling, and all those calis can come to bend and golf in paradise.
"The Tinneys sold their first house a few months ago and moved into a bigger, brand-new one in south Bend’s Renaissance Ridge subdivision."
WOW, talk about MARKET TIMING. To bad for them. LOL!! Randy snagged a couple suckers...
Today, Brooks Resources and Mike Hollern are the premier developers in Central Oregon
It is impossible to spend much time in Central Oregon without hearing the name Brooks Resources.
Generally, once you hear that name, you’ll soon hear the name of its chairman, Mike Hollern.
I first met Mike when we started the historical society at Black Butte Ranch. We began the organization in 1997 by offering programs with speakers of historical interest. A few people told me that I should ask Mr. Hollern, the chairman of a very busy and successful company, to come and speak to our group. Brooks Resources had not been involved with the Ranch for many years and I thought it would be next to impossible for someone as busy as him to be willing to come out and speak to a group of Ranch homeowners.
Somehow I dug up the courage to call him. The first astounding thing about that call was finding that Mike actually answered his own phone. Very quickly into the conversation it became evident that I was speaking with a truly exceptional person. He was thoughtful and gracious and to my amazement, willing to speak with the group.
The day he spoke we had fifty people in attendance. Given the fact that only about 250 people lived at the Ranch at that time, and many of them were still south escaping the cold, the attendance was significant. Some people already knew Mike because they had owned property at the Ranch for a long time. Many were like me; their only knowledge of him came from reading Peggy Lucas’ book There is a Place. We were all quickly captivated. Hearing him share stories of risk taking, struggle and good luck gave new value to what was around us.
Born in 1938 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mike’s mother was a Brooks of the Brooks-Scanlon lumber company. As a young man, Mike didn’t immediately join the Brooks-Scanlon organization after graduating college. He wanted to prove to himself that he could achieve something on his own, so he took a job as a television announcer in Billings Montana.
After a year, Mike concluded he was “no Chet Huntley or David Brinkley,” so he moved his young wife to California. He spent two years earning an MBA at Stanford University. He stayed at the university for two years after graduation, becoming Assistant to the Vice President of Finance, while raising a family – he has four children. He said he learned everything there from financial planning to fund-raising.
In 1965 an opportunity to join his family’s company arose, this time in Central Oregon. Mike joined Brooks Scanlon in July of that year as Administration Manager. Though headquartered in Minnesota, by the late 1960s Brooks-Scanlon owned nearly 300,000 acres of Central Oregon timber land. The timber industry was beginning to face hard times. All of the timber mills in Sisters had closed by 1963, devastating the town. “Old-timers” remember the 1960s as a time of mass unemployment and a great depression in Sisters Country.
As Mike told us in his talk in 1997, “Brooks realized they were not just in the timber business, but in the land business.” They had been looking at their Central Oregon timber land as an opportunity to become land developers. Brooks Resources Corporation, a subsidiary of Brooks-Scanlon, was established in 1969. Mike became President of Brooks-Scanlon and Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive officer of Brooks Resources in 1970.
The first development for Mike and his new company was Black Butte Ranch. Mike used his relationship with Stanford University to help him find the people he wanted to build the new resort.
Though Black Butte Ranch was the first, it was only the beginning. People looking in today may say it was all easy. What they may not remember is the terrible recession in land prices in the 1980s. There were times then, though Brooks Resources was land rich, it was cash poor. Only strong leadership and a commitment to the area let Brooks Resources continue through those tough years.
Today, Brooks Resources and Mike Hollern are the premier developers in Central Oregon. Having created showcase developments like North Rim on Awbrey Butte in Bend, they are moving out to Prineville and Madras creating astounding opportunities for new arrivals to Central Oregon to buy beautiful but affordable homes and land.
A man of vision, yet grounded in the simple values of family, community and concern for others. Mike Hollern is a special part of Central Oregon history.
“We are overbuilt at the moment,” Hollern said. “But as long as our growth rate — in terms of real people, real jobs and real kids — continues, we’ll work through this in a couple of years and things will pick up again.”
1.) Today we're overbuilt
2.) Growth in terms of real-people,kids,and jobs
Yes, we're overbuilt, real-people cannot afford Bend. There is NOTHING for kids to here, Bend is a retirement village. There are NO jobs in Bend.
In effect Hollern is saying that were overbuilt, and its going to stay that way.
“We have become,” Hollern said, “a poster child for the non-placebound economy.”
It all sounds sort of odd you read Holern's BIO above, and note he's been through all the hard times, and he saw his own company land rich and cash poor in the early 1980's.
He doesn't sound to happy with the non-god fearing people that are moving and golfing in Central Oregon. Then again, he was promoting Black Butte Ranch to the same kind of people 30 years ago,... So this isn't new?
We're a poster child for drifters, we don't have real people, real kids, or real jobs... Yes, this from a Stanford MBA. Simply amazing. He admits that the WHOLE central oregon house of cards is a fraud.
Note also that he is the major developer also for Madras and Prineville, two places with a 30 year inventory of unsold homes.
My 'personal' guess is that once again Brooks-Resource is poor, this time however they're "House Rich, and Cash Poor".
They might survive they may not, it all depends if we can have growth from 'real people' and bring them 'real jobs' and quick.
This is a dead horse, as MOST are leaving, and at best all we have coming is Les Schwab, and thats only 'IF' Juniper-Ridge gets developed, which from the UGB/URA meetings appears to be deferred until next year.
In summary these times are MOST likely the worst that Hollern has ever seen. Note also that during the Sisters depression of the 1960's 'real loggers' lost their jobs, but in modern Bend there never were 'jobs'. During the best of times modern Bend was only sustainable with HELOC's, and Flipping.
The real jobs will most likely never come to Bend because of the remote location, and certainly real people cannot even think about moving to a place without a job. Why Hollern separates kids from people is most likely a religious issue, personally I think its a disparagement against the offspring of the non-placebound people.
Why Hollern separates kids from people is most likely a religious issue, personally I think its a disparagement against the offspring of the non-placebound people.
Can you imagine what brats and parasites these children will grow up to be, having been raised by flippers. Always moving on to the next hot housing market. No permanence. No wonder Hollern begs for 'real kids' to be brought to Bend. Perhaps we get them from Africa or China?
My 'personal' guess is that once again Brooks-Resource is poor, this time however they're "House Rich, and Cash Poor".
Reminds me of Bill Gates. Extremely MSFT rich... the problem is liquidating Billions in paper w/o a deleterious effect on the price. How? Sell like a couple mill shares a quarter... for decades.
Home sellers typically don't have decades.
Home sellers typically don't have decades.
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1,000's of unsold central oregon homes is a maintenance nightmare. This is a whole different game than letting desert land sit for 25 years. These houses sit for 1-2 years, and they're going to be deer-mouse ( hantavirus ) domain.
Cash poor, land rich is one thing, in the desert its nothing, just create SB100, build Black-Butte, Sunriver, create UGB ( artificial land shortage ), and make a lot of money.
Now its a whole new game sitting on 1,000's of empty homes all over Central Oregon, Especially places like Prineville and Madras,
Bake sales?? What can you do? Can you get placement-bound 'real' people to central oregon quick? Even if there are NO jobs?
Brooks-Resource is poor, this time however they're "House Rich, and Cash Poor".
Reminds me of Bill Gates. Extremely MSFT rich... the problem is liquidating Billions in paper w/o a deleterious effect on the price.
Cash poor, Land rich, land that cost penny's an acre with no capital improvement can sit, and you sill a little here and there on contract to cover the bills, and thus Hollern Survived the 1980's.
But 'NOW' we developer property's unsold that cost millions to develop and loans that cannot fund until past property's sell.
Being 'House rich, and Cash poor", with a ton of debt, and no hope of selling the houses?
Like the subject of todays thread. Gold went down, it defies logic, yet makes sense, because people are selling the only thing they can sell that sells. Yet, there were more sellers of gold than buyers and it went down.
In bad times good stuff MUST be sold to get cash, What will Brooks sell ASAP to get cash??
It cannot be houses that nobody wants, nor desert land that cannot get development funding, because now you must pre-sell all developments to get funding.
Warning: Nasty language ahead
Interesting. A new term in the RE lexicon:
CONDOTEL
http://bend.craigslist.org/rfs/390552066.html
Uhhh, yeah. You PAY $199,000 and you get a 653sf "condo" that happens to be contained within the Bend Riverside MOTEL.
The cum-stained sheets do cost extra:
CONDOTEL. IT IS ZONED FOR OWNER OCC USE OR FOR HOTEL USE. IF IN RENTAL POOL, INCOME IS PRODUCED & HOAS ARE COVER'D. IF OWN-OCC HOAS=374/MO.
Huh? OWN-OCC = "Own y-own Cum Covered Sheets"?
I mean, 9 things are wrong with this:
1-8) GROSS!
9) WHAT!
OK, I'll pay like $20/night to live like a meth huffer, but bitch you ain't gonna get me on the mortgage hook to buy a chunk of a smelly cum-squirted shithole.
I mean, gross. Fuck me dead, that is gross as hell.
INCOME IS PRODUCED & HOAS ARE COVER'D. IF OWN-OCC HOAS=374/MO.
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This is how ALL these resort time shares are sold. If your in the pool then your unit 'pays its own hoa', otherwise YOU-PAY.
For the occasional golfer that just wants a room, and to feel like he 'owns a piece of Bend'.
We have apartment to condo conversion, so why not hotel? Besides hotels make all their money in july-august and this year was horrible. I know the Plaza is going to do this also,
It's actually a great scam, lets say you own the plaza, and the place doesn't rent as a hotel for $50/night. So you sell the units for $200k each, note twenty units is $4Million, perhaps the land is worth a million, but the building's are barely worth a couple $100K. So you sell the units on contract, and now you have income, then you have the $400/mo HOA for maintenance that the owner has to pay, so now your getting $1k/mo for each unit on contract plus $400/mo. If you as the Hotel owner, you would be getting nothing, and still have to pay maintenance.
Now the HOA, if your unit is in the pool and 'IF' it rents say 10X a month then the rent might pay you HOA, which means you wouldn't pay.
Again for a seller ( you cannot sell hotels in Bend ), this is great way to get 2X for your property, and not have to pay a nickel of your own money for maintenance.
On these deals ALL expenses are subtracted from the units actual rental-income, generally you need to rent 10+ times a month to break even, e.g. not have to put in the HOA. Also the HOA's can change anytime, like they did at INN@7th a few years ago and went from $50/mo to $1k/mo, when a new owner bought the complex.
Hotels are hurting bad right now, and there are a ton of DUMB tourists that want to own their own condo in Bend, and we all know that this shit appreciates 30%/yr.
Again, most of this stuff is sold on contract which means NO financing, and you generally take 10% down, and thus if the 'buyer' doesn't pay his $1k/mo or hoa, then you can cancel the contract and keep the $20k.
Great deal for all, WE LOVE BEND.
Anybody know what this is about?? I think its the new resort near EagleCrest, its a huge golf place
The Bulletin | Bend / Central Oregon
Redmond power crunch looms; Upgrades are needed to accommodate future growth, but plans could hinder a nearby resort development
The below is really no different than INN@7th, or any other resort in Central Oregon has been doing forever, most condos in SunRiver are in a pool.
It sounds like its still an active motel that is simply selling units, as-is. Hey a great way to increase income, and given the 'hotel' can make the HOA anything they want they have the lever of power to increase or decrease the resale of the unit.
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Located at BEND RIVERSIDE MOTEL CONDOS
This is a wonderful 653 sq ft condo FULLY FURNISHED!! 1 BR 2 BA, 3rd Floor
It has spectacular views from patio! Other amenities include: Pool, Sauna, Hot Tub.
CONDOTEL. IT IS ZONED FOR OWNER OCC USE OR FOR HOTEL USE. IF IN RENTAL POOL, INCOME IS PRODUCED & HOAS ARE COVER'D. IF OWN-OCC HOAS=374/MO.
GREAT VIEW/EASY LOC/FULLY FURNISHED. CALL MAIN DESK: 541-388-4000 TO SET SHOWING TIME - SHOW HRS APPROX. 11-5. Bend Riverside Motel & Ste's.
RLMS# 7071403
Look at the freakin' picture. It's just NASTY! Not tubgirl nasty... but pretty damn nasty.
DO NOT CLICK ON TUBGIRL.
Read the below carefully, note its illegal to call a 'condotel' a real estate investment, because in fact only the developer gets rich.
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A condo-hotel, hotel-condo, or a Condotel is a building used as both a condominium and a hotel.
This type of residential building meets several needs that make it attractive. As development costs increase, the cost of hotel development can make developing new hotels difficult, especially in major cities. By selling the units as condos, the developer moves much of the development cost to the condo owners. By owning units that can be rented as hotel rooms, the owners are able to get a return on their investment allowing them the ability to own a residence in a resort or major city.
The U.S. Government is very strict about the type of advertising that can be done vis a vis Condo Hotel projects. Some condo projects have advertised themselves as "Real Estate Investments" - since the value of these condos as a real estate investment is not entirely clear - the U.S. Government currently disallows use of this reference when advertising condo hotels.[citation needed]
Condo hotels have been criticized in California for allowing developers to skirt laws designed to protect public access to beaches. Because such a facility has hotel rooms, it can be classified as a public accommodation, even though the majority of the units are privately held, and the facility does little to accommodate the public. [1]
While not intended as a complete list, the most popular locations in the U.S. for condo hotels include: Chicago, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, the Las Vegas metropolitan area, New York City, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Orlando, Florida.
[edit]
Yo incomes produced cuz ya hoes is covered. Sheet, ya bitches make yo money. Gat Damn that's a good deal. I gotsta get me like 3 a dem cond-HO-tel. Bus'n out da back'a bitches 3 at'a time.
Look at the freakin' site. It's just NASTY! Not bendgirl nasty... but pretty damn nasty.
DO NOT CLICK ON bendgirl. Do NOT read content at site.
Regular readers of this blog knew the party is over, here is a first sign of the future the film festival a major draw source of tourists who buy CONDOTEL's is almost dead, as the city can no longer hand out money like candy to Aaron Switzer and Crony's ( Bend Event's R Us Assn ).
Bend Film Festival Needs Funds
By Joseph Friedrichs, 8-07-07
Bend’s only major movie festival announced Monday that it is in dire need of public financial support if it is to roll on this year as it has in the past.
BendFilm, as the festival is known as, is launching a 30-day fundraising campaign to raise funds for its 2007 BendFilm Festival.
The festival needs $80,000 in additional funds to ensure that this year’s festival will happen.
Money raised will be used to fund valuable festival activities, such as filmmaker travel and lodging, lectures and workshops, said Erik Jambor, the new executive director of BendFilm.
Jambor and his crew at BendFilm were hurt, financially speaking, when the city council opted not to give them a much-needed grant, as they have in the past. Of course, the city has only so much money to dish out, but it still puts BendFilm in a tight spot.
The BendFilm Festival is the only Oregon independent film festival east of the Cascade Mountain range, and has become an integral part of the culture of Bend, Jambor said.
A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, BendFilm is asking interested individuals or businesses to visit their Web site or to call (541) 388-3378.
Why is this pop up window sometimes resizable and sometimes locked? I prefer it to be resizable if you please.
Thank you,
Lurker.
Ok so I clicked on tubgirl.....I couldn't resist. Does anyone know a good therapist?
http://bend.craigslist.org/rfs/390917888.html
Here's a nice little craigs today, note we're almost to $180k, bet you this person would take close to that.
Note the first thing it says is INVESTMENT, I mean, everybody says that if you have 'investment property' in bend, dump it, I'm not talking a rental, I'm talking an empty house just sitting and rotting, and in Bend they call that 'investing'.
********
This is a great investment! Whether you want to move in or rent it out, this is an awesome house. Corner lot with a big front and backyard. Close to schools, shopping and hospital. Priced to sell!
3 Bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, double attached garage, fenced in backyard!
Call me anytime for details at 541-771-6564
I don't know if you folks have been following this, but the keyword is 'diversity', for generations the central-oregon city hall and COP SHOP has been nepotism. Now under new leadership they're trying to hire folks that aren't related by blood. Up in Redmond historically its been +60% by blood in the cop-shop.
Problem is now that they're looking for non-inbreds, they can't find anyone. Now that they're setting standards, they can't find anyone, its just like Iraq, time to drop the standards.
Region struggles to fill law enforcement uniforms
Bend Bulletin (subscription), OR - 5 hours ago
“The applicants we are seeing for our department are not meeting our standards,” said Bend Police Chief Andy Jordan. “We have seen the number and quality of ...
I'm glad that your paying attention to UGB.
Note that yes, its State Law, created in 1972 by SB100, and administered by LCDC.
Here in Eastern Oregon, they have tried to have it both ways, by saying we MUST grow using UGB, but NOT following the laws and rules of UGB. Nobody in Salem has ever cared about Central Oregon.
It's all odd SB100 was created by Gray & Hollern ( Sunriver & Black-Butte ), both timber men, that got SB100 passed under republican Tom McCall. The carrot for these timber men ( the richest men in Oregon ) was tax-exemption on forest land.
Then jump 30 years later, and the land has sat tax-free, and now its time to divide and sell. They got to avoid taxes using the law, but they never quite felt comfortable with the liberal carrot, e.g. UGB and protecting farm and forest land.
To date the liberal carrot simply never got implemented in eastern-oregon, but did in the Willamette Valley.
This is the essence of the story.
Lastly, Gray & Hollern, with SB100 locked out all other resorts after there's was done, and thus created and enriching monopoly.
It looks like starbucks, feels like starbucks, and has foo-foo drinks like Starbucks, but its a BANK @ NWXC. What the hell is it? and WHY?
Umpqua Bank Opens New Concept Store in Bend, Ore.
PORTLAND, Ore.-(Business Wire)-August 7, 2007 - Umpqua Bank, a subsidiary of Umpqua Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ: UMPQ), opened an Umpqua Bank neighborhood store in NorthWest Crossing, a mixed-use development in Bend, Ore. The Umpqua neighborhood store redefines conventional banking practices and design by providing residents and visitors with a place to view local merchandise, shop online, enjoy a cup of coffee and learn about community events and resources, in addition to performing bank transactions. This store is Umpqua's fifth location in Bend, Ore.
"Between the unique offerings found only in these stores and associates who live, play and volunteer in the neighborhood, this new concept store is a natural fit for the Bend area," said Ray Davis, president and CEO of Umpqua Bank. "We are excited to continue to grow in Central Oregon and to bring a new generation of banking to the area."
Umpqua's NorthWest Crossing store is located at 2755 NW Crossing Drive, Suite 113, Bend, Ore. The 1,500-square-foot store will be managed by Arden Dettwyler who previously managed Umpqua's Wall Street store, also situated in Bend, Ore. The NorthWest Crossing store will be open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Umpqua is the first bank in NorthWest Crossing, an award-winning residential mixed-use community located on the west side of Bend, Ore. The development was designed with community and livability in mind. The pedestrian friendly area is host to restaurants, shops, parks and schools, as well as walking trails.
About Neighborhood Stores
Unlike traditional banks, Umpqua's neighborhood stores feel more like cafes: in addition to bank products, stores feature in-depth community information as well as comfortable personal spaces called "MyBooth" that are equipped with computers and community resources. The stores also incorporate enhanced technologies, including cash recyclers that maximize space and improve store associate efficiency and security.
Umpqua's neighborhood stores also feature a one-of-a-kind, interactive Discover Wall. This multi-screen display delivers a choreographed video experience to customers as well as an interactive presentation of bank products and services.
Smaller in size, Umpqua's neighborhood store concept is designed to be about 1,500 square feet, can be built in 45 days compared to the industry average of 120 days, and cuts construction costs by approximately 50 percent, while continuing to deliver full service banking.
About Umpqua Bank
Umpqua Bank, headquartered in Roseburg, Ore., is a subsidiary of Umpqua Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ: UMPQ) and has 146 locations between Napa, Calif. and Bellevue, Wash., along the Oregon and Northern California Coast and in Central Oregon. Umpqua Bank has been recognized for its innovative customer experience and banking strategy by national publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fast Company and CNBC. The company also ranked 34th on Fortune Magazine's 2007 list of the country's "100 Best Companies To Work For." Umpqua Holdings also owns retail brokerage subsidiary Strand, Atkinson, Williams & York Inc., which has locations in Umpqua Bank stores and in dedicated offices throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington. Umpqua Bank's Private Client Services Division provides tailored financial services and products to individual customers. Umpqua Holdings Corporation is headquartered in Portland, Ore. For more information, visit www.umpquabank.com.
IHTBYB, or someone else please answer the following question,...
We know that the events are out of hand in downtown Bend. Tetherow just hired from Old Mill a gal who's only job is event coordination and PR @ tetherow.
We know that The Source's primary job in town is Event Notification and PR. We also know that the so called 'publisher' of the source Aaron Switzer, also owns quite a few of the downtown events that take place continually. So in effect the Source is a vehicle to market its own events.
We know that Black-Butte and Sunriver were used to bring ten's of thousands of wealthy people to Central Oregon, and many bought. We know that ALL the events are to keep them entertained.
My question for you or someone else is what is the actual relationship with Brooks Resources and "The Source" other than advertising and promoting their RE and Events?
I ask this because whenever I post anything that has "Brooks Resources" no matter how benign on "The Source" opinion site they always delete it within hours. Yet no matter how off the wall no other subject ever gets deleted.
HBM says that the Brooks-Scanlon has nothing to do with Brooks Resources, but even the Bulletin reported this past sunday. "Brooks Resources — formed in 1968 as the real estate arm of the old Brooks-Scanlon lumber company" Which pretty much explicitly says that Brooks-Scanlon & Brooks Resource are the same thing.
I have a suspicion that the 'real' owner and publisher for The Source is 'Brooks Resources', as in my forty years in Oregon, its always been the case that these small papers don't make enough from ads to publish, and there is always a rich guy behind the scenes.
There will be no ability for landowners to transfer development rights.
That is the gist of M49, the so called this to M37, right now you cannot transfer your pre 1972 rights to another party. What M37 fixes is that all pre 1972 people win the lottery, and all else win nada, until the next measure comes around,..
Measure 49 will fix some of the problems of Measure 37
By Mike Litt
, Aug 2, 2007 (10 Reader comments)
Alt Text
In her citizen’s view column in last week’s Review Carolyne Jones asked us not to “lose sight of the fact that voters OK’d Measure 37.”
But when the voters passed that measure, they were responding to TV ads showing an elderly woman – Dorothy English – who was frustrated because she could not build houses for her grandchildren on her rural land.
Most voters were unaware that the pro-Measure 37 campaign was largely bankrolled by a group of large timber companies.
According to the 1000 Friends of Oregon (www.friends.org), Timber Service Company wants waivers to build housing subdivisions with a total acreage larger than the area of McMinnville. Lone Rock Timber Company has demanded $29.2 million or the right to put subdivisions on 1,243 acres of land zoned for forest use.
Statewide, Stimson Lumber has 74 claims encompassing acreage equal to more than twice the size of the city of Bend.
Most voters were also unaware of the threat Measure 37 poses to Oregon’s farmland – especially farmland in areas close to urban growth boundaries. In Clackamas County alone, more than 2,000 claims have been filed, many of which are for large residential subdivisions or commercial and industrial activities such as shopping malls and gravel pits. (See http://egov.oregon.gov/ODA/NRD/m37.shtml for detailed maps of Measure 37 claims in Clackamas County and several other Oregon counties.) Such uses are incompatible with farming and, in other states, have strongly tended to drive out farming. At a time of high energy prices and concerns about global warming and the safety of imported food, it makes no sense to pave over our local sources of food.
After months of hearings, the Oregon Legislature, led by our Representative Greg Macpherson and others, referred to the voters a fix for Measure 37 that will appear on the November 2007 ballot as Measure 49.
Measure 49 protects the property rights of small individual landowners by immediately allowing them up to 3 houses on their property, if the law allowed it when they or their families bought their land. And it will pass those rights on to a surviving spouse or to someone who purchases the property from the current owner – something that Measure 37 did not do. Additionally, property owners can build up to 10 houses if they can document a financial loss equal to the value of the additional houses – as voters intended with passing 37: If property is high-value farmland, forests or places with limited water supplies – as defined in the act – then only up to 3 homesites may be added.
Measure 49 closes the loopholes and protects the places that make Oregon special, stopping the abuse of huge housing subdivisions, strip malls and industrial development where they simply don’t belong. Following passage of Measure 49, commercial and industrial development, as well as large subdivisions, must proceed through the existing land use planning and development processes.
What if it fails? There will be no limits on industrial and commercial development on farmland, forests or places where water supplies are limited. That means claims in progress, including the rock blasting and quarrying operations, riverfront landfills and shopping malls, can proceed. There will be no relief to the mess facing taxpayers – billions of dollars in compensation demands on the one hand or the huge cost of infrastructure for sprawling development on the other. There will be no limit on the size of housing subdivisions, even in places where roads, water supplies and other infrastructure simply cannot handle such large-scale development.
There will be no requirement for claimants to actually prove they have suffered the losses that would trigger the right to build. There will be no ability for landowners to transfer development rights.
This will hurt individuals and families who just want to provide a home or two for their children. We can kiss goodbye to Oregon’s farmland, forests and natural resources at an unprecedented rate, just like other parts of the world where land is usurped without the benefit of land use regulations. This isn’t just about quality of life: These resources are critical to a strong economy for our children and grandchildren.
For more information, or to volunteer to help the campaign, visit
I see the issue of is transference. M37 says you can build for yourself, and invest in your land, ... but you cannot transfer it to another party.
What M49 will do is allow the BIG-BOYS ( friends of oregon ), via lawyers to transfer their pre 1972 holdings, which is mostly logging and farming, tax deferred by SB100 ( 1972 ).
The issue here is that our pre 1972 people don't want to put their own money into the projects, they want to transfer them to NEWYORK REITS ( friends of oregon )
Thus all that M49 is, is a fix so the big boyz can get richer as planned, M37 and M49 have NOTHING to do with little people creating something for their grandchildren.
M37 has been a bonanza for lawyers. Nobody else has benefited. M49 will be a bonanza for bankers and realtors who can then actively sell the pre 1972 real-estate to out-of-state partys.
Brooks Resource used to be "Cash Poor, and Land Rich".
Today they're "Cash Poor, and House Rich". Trouble is Houses in Central Oregon no longer sell.
Thus now Brooks Resources will be in acts of desperation never seen before.
Currently the Big Push is a MONSTER development West of Summit High School. This development will be bigger than Shevlin.
Then there is the issue of UGB, Brooks is the largest holder of pre 1972 tax-exempt forest/farm land in Central Oregon. Trouble is the land will not sell, and pre 1972 people cannot develop it. Brooks has NO cash, and nothing to sell that people want ( like gold ).
Currently Brooks and their pet monkey at The Source, are pushing Measure-49, sort of a slut-sister of M37 that allowed pre 1972 people to build homes on their land, in spite of SB100 ( LCDC ).
With M37 Brooks will be able to transfer their VAST Central Oregon land-holdings to anyone they wish for fee or favor. That recipient of the transfer would then have FULL 1972 rights. Thus in effect with the passage of M37 all Brooks-Resource holdings would increase in value over-night, while all post 1972 holding would decrease in value in Central Oregon.
Brooks has really one BIG problem in Central Oregon. There are NO jobs, Certainly with M37 Brooks could give away vast land holdings to Fortune-500 corporations in hope of bringing jobs, which then would create demand for the 1,000's of unsellable Brooks homes.
Here's another spot today, pushy Bend, and saying in effect fuck the locals and what they think.
http://adage.com/smallagency/article?article_id=119737
This is 'advertising age' the biggest insider rag on marketing and advertising in America.
locals in Bend aren't terribly happy with the influx of people and construction -- but it is, without question, too late to stop the inevitable.
I started thinking more about the idea of "local." Jill and I just spent a few days in Bend, Oregon, about three hours from Portland in the central part of the state. For those of you not familiar, Bend is one of the fastest growing and beautiful cities in the west. It is in an interesting growth period where the locals aren't terribly happy with the influx of people and construction -- but it is, without question, too late to stop the inevitable.
One of the most prominent things about Bend is its connection to the outdoors. It seems that everyone there hikes, bikes, skis, snowboards, climbs rocks, plays golf and kayaks. With over 300 days of sun (Portland isn't quite as lucky), it's hard to imagine being inside.
Rent-a-cops PROHIBIT people from watching and/or listening to Les Schwab MUSAK in perimeter of LesSchwab sic prison/ampitheature.
I felt the same way saturday night downtown, all the streets had rent-a-cops, and they had the streets closed. I never saw the real Bend-Cops all night they must have been told to stay away. The rent-a-cops were passing the old cars through the streets where most were dragsters and roadsters with flames and full speed, and tons of noise. This went all night long on saturday. All the private rent-a-cops and their cars said "Redmond".
Given that almost all new community's in Bend are gated, and thus according to Randy Sebastian of Renaissance is how ALL buyers want these new developments. Given 100's of developments in Bend, and each has an HOA that is typically $500/month just for security. The job of the future in Bend for the 'poor people' will be security.
Rent-a-cops protecting the dozens of events Bend has every month, rent-a-cops keeping people away from Les Schwab, and rent-a-cops keeping people away from the gated community's.
This is the future of Bend, rent-a-cops with GUNS everywhere, and the fastest growing job description in Central Oregon.
I can get to Bauhofer later, for now more interested in ownership of Tetherow. It really appears that Tetherow is going to literally step on Broken-Top, and thus the baby-war. Bauhofer is building all kinds of roads to Century Drive, and many also will go through Broken-Top creating a traffic mess, and also pissing off the Highlands@BrokenTop Mega-Millionaires. This year with the RE implosion and the WAR of the RICH. It's going to be real fun.
FINANCING...
Marshall Group, financing $96Million
Tetherow Resort Bend, OR Construction/Mini-Perm $96.6 million
DEVELOPER...
Tetherow's developer, Arrowood, a partnership controlled by developers Don Bauhofer and John Lietz
If I recall correctly, Century, Skyliner, Metolius, and Hosmer are all going to bear the traffic. It's going to be nuts. Mt Washington might really jam up.
I don't think anyone in Broken Top or The Parks is enjoying the thought of that.
Imagine all those Tetherow cars heading to the grocery stores. Safeway, Rays, and Newport Market.
One obvious paths is Century, hitting the Century/Reed/Mt. Washington roundabout. That's a fund one when it's time for Cascade Middle School to start and end.
Then there's Simpson. Not even a roundabout there, though there should be! That's really ripping through the heart of Broken Top if you go that way.
Then there's Skyliner. The Skyliner/Mt. Washington roundabout is a fun one when Highlakes and Summit start and end.
Tetherow has one entry on Century Drive, One of Skyliners and Metolius Drive (a public road) from Mount Washington. All off these through roads in Tetherow are public. None "go through Broken Top". Broekn Top does border Metolius Drive on the South side.
Broken Top is happy to have Tetherow as a neighbor.
A very low density up scale development.
All money in Bend comes from 'investments', which means high-interest junk-bonds. There are no jobs in Bend, and nobody cares. Is this news? Now that the junk-bond high-income funds are going bankrupt, expect a lot of Bend's best citizens to have NO cash flow. What will they sell? To raise cash? Gold? Oil? Certainly not real estate.
External income big in Bend
Large chunk of all earnings comes from investments
By Anna Sowa / The Bulletin
Published: August 08. 2007 5:00AM
Bend area residents get more than 20 percent of their personal income from investments, one of the largest shares of external income among the state’s six metropolitan statistical areas, according to a federal report released Tuesday.
Twenty-one percent of all personal income earned last year came from interest, dividends and rent in the Bend Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of Deschutes County, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Bend trailed only Medford, 21.2 percent, and Corvallis, at 25.1 percent.
Portland residents made 16.5 percent of their incomes from investments, though the region had the highest percentage of wage-earned incomes in the state, at 71.7 percent.
The report confirms what employment officials and economists have said for years — many people move to Central Oregon with some sort of external income and do not join the work force.
“That makes perfect sense,” said Timothy Duy, adjunct assistant professor at the University of Oregon’s economics department. “This shows you the types of incomes coming here — wealthy retirees or people with some kind of external income source.”
Duy collects data on Central Oregon’s economy for The Bulletin and creates a quarterly index measuring its performance.
The amount of external wealth appears to be growing, says Steve Williams, regional economist for the Oregon Employment Department in Bend.
Income from dividends, interest and rent increased about 6.6 percent in Bend from 2005 to 2006, Williams said.
“That would typically equate to more wealthy folks coming in,” he said. “It could also be that people who are moving here rely on this type of income,” so don’t enter the local job market.
Not entering the job market can add to a tough labor climate, employment officials have said, because new residents are demanding goods and services but not joining the labor force that provides them. Deschutes County has some of the lowest unemployment rates in the state.
The U.S. Department of Commerce report also ranked Central Oregonians’ personal incomes in the top half of the nation’s MSAs.
The annual report studied personal income growth among 363 U.S. regions, of which the Bend area ranked 137, with a 2006 per capita personal income of $33,493, up 4.4 percent over 2005.
Bend’s income growth didn’t rank as high as other areas, notably Gulf Coast regions rebuilding their economies after being devastated by Hurricane Katrina two years ago.
Additionally, regions with the largest slowdowns in personal income growth throughout the country were around large Army and Marine Corps bases like Jacksonville, N.C., and Killeen, Texas. Military pay had grown at double-digit rates in these areas between 2003 and 2005 due to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to the report, and have slowed to single-digit growth or declines in the past year.
For areas that grew the fastest, construction activity was a common factor, the report said, linking to new homes for new residents.
Population growth is part of what’s driving Bend’s personal income changes, Williams said.
“The big story is that the area continues to grow, which helps the employment picture, which spurs wage gains,” he said.
Additionally, low unemployment rates have heightened employer competition for available workers, potentially creating an increase in certain industry wages. Industries with the largest wage gains from 2005 to 2006: utilities, construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade and finance and insurance.
Those numbers, however, do not count recent manufacturing layoffs including the closing of Seaswirl Boats in Culver, Williams noted.
Personal income is defined as income received by all persons from all sources, according to the federal report. It is the sum of net earnings by place of residence, rental income of persons, personal dividend income, personal interest income and personal current transfer receipts. Per capita personal income is calculated as the personal income of residents of a given area divided by the resident population of the area using the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual midyear population estimates.
Anna Sowa can be reached at 383-0304 or asowa@bendbulletin.com.
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the locals
Or those who call themselves such all came from somewhere else, like bendbust.
the locals
the ones that are desperately dreaming up ways to attract more buyers to the region, meanwhile claiming to detest what is happening to Bend.
the locals
are among the flippers and also the ones trying to bait them
the locals
make up the population of "honest Escalade driving, Starbucks sipping, down to earth realtors"
the locals
have no one to blame but themselves
A good example of flipper bait that is so old it is starting to smell.
http://bend.craigslist.org/rfs/392555601.html
Been trying to flip this since 2005 (it's still new?)and is now down under $300K and still falling.
Originally bought for $270K, after the first buyer flipped it to her after less than a month to her for a $68K windfall.
These FSBOs don't show up on any MLS summary of inventory, so the problem is bigger than any figures put out by the COAR
Mr. Wasn't born in Oregon, even GOD himself didn't come here until 1965, about the same time I came to Bend.
Mike Hollern of Brook Resources aka Born in 1938 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mike’s mother was a Brooks of the Brooks-Scanlon lumber company. As a young man, Mike didn’t immediately join the Brooks-Scanlon organization after graduating college. He wanted to prove to himself that he could achieve something on his own, so he took a job as a television announcer in Billings Montana.
After a year, he moved his young wife to California. He spent two years earning an MBA at Stanford University.
In 1965 an opportunity to join his family’s company arose, this time in Central Oregon.
Read the below carefully notice the works 'presold', note 'nothing-down', note that ground hasn't broken.
http://bend.craigslist.org/rfs/392562440.html
Get Paid $70K To Buy A House!!!
Reply to: hous-392562440@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-08-08, 5:10PM PDT
Do you want to get paid $70,000.00 to buy a house?
My company, SLJ Investments LLC has 22 lots in a new subdivision in North East Bend which is breaking ground next week. 22 brand new homes will be completed by years end, are in the 1700 to 2100 sq. foot range, and will have many upgrades including: hard wood floors, tile countertops, central air, etc!
These homes, based on CURRENT market conditions, are appraising in the $370-$390K range but, if pre-sold, will be offered in the $290-$310K range. The company financing the project will carry the construction loan and there will be NO down payment AND NO out of pocket expense!
If you live in the area, I can show you plans and/or walk the lots with you. If you live outside the area and would like a second home/vacation home/or Investment please contact me and I can send you copies of plans and photos of the home sites. (We have a property management company which can/will manage your rental for you should you chose that option.)
With a refinance upon completion of construction you could take the equity out of the house and live in the home for free (until you used up the equity); or you could leave the equity in and make a low mortgage payment; or you could rent it and have a free (or even positive cashflow) property which would increase in value.
If interested, please contact Shane Borza via this ad, or:
phone: 541-410-7210
e-mail: shaneborza@gmail.com
Thank you,
Shane M Borza
SLJ Investments, LLC
Bend, OR
541-410-7210
shaneborza@gmail.com
http://bend.craigslist.org/rfs/392630856.html
Here's another interesting "Will buy your home today", note
"we just sold a beautiful large new home of our own that was in a great location just a little too far from Bend for our needs" People are starting to discover that Siberian desert homes don't sell. If you don't have a strong bitter stomach stop now, this story will make you cry.
It is a 3/2 or larger, preferably single level, either recently updated or with strong potential, has a very large lot (prefer at least a half acre lot), and is located in Bend (not OWW or DRW) or towards Tumalo, and is in a nice neighborhood away from major road noise and barking dogs.
After major price reductions, we just sold a beautiful large new home of our own that was in a great location just a little too far from Bend for our needs. To sell this home, we basically had to take a loss on a pristine property.
The reality of the Bend real estate market is that the bottom of the market is currently nowhere in sight, and it will most likely be another full year at least before price drops start to level off as the surplus inventory is absorbed and the market starts to normalize. Currently dozens of price reductions and new listings are hitting the market each day, and the rental market is being flooded with homes which can't be sold, driving down rental prices as well.
If you have a home that meets our needs, and you fully understand the reality of this market, need to sell, and are willing to go straight to your bottom line number, please contact us with a description of your property, pictures, address, contact info and bottom line no haggle price. We will drive by your property, and if it and the price looks right, we will contact you for an inside showing. We are strong cash buyers and are not wanting to waste either your time or our time. We're focusing on the 350K and under range, and have comp's for all neighborhoods so we can recognize bottom line pricing vs. fishing ventures.
So please feel free to contact us if you have a match-up, and good luck to all with the sale of their property!!
The below from our $70k free buddy on craigs. Note that you can 'pre-buy' now ( so he gets bank money to build ), and then buy from him on a contract. Then you can REFI a $300k home at $1800/mo with int,tax,insur, and rent the house and thus get a FREE house! Also the house (that doesn't exist) has $70k of equity which is yours for the taking. Folks builders and developers are beyond desperate. Anybody want to place bets if this gets built? Is it ficticious? Note there is NO SLC,Inc anywhere in Bend on the web. There is NO name for this east-side development...
* ( The following is from craigs )
With a refinance upon completion of construction you could take the equity out of the house and live in the home for free (until you used up the equity); or you could leave the equity in and make a low mortgage payment; or you could rent it and have a free (or even positive cashflow) property which would increase in value.
"The complete evaporation of liquidity"
BNP Paribas Freezes Security Funds
Thursday August 9, 9:52 am ET
BNP Paribas Freezes 3 Securities Funds Amid Subprime Market Problems
PARIS (AP) -- A major French bank, BNP Paribas, announced Thursday that it was suspending three of its asset-backed securities funds, saying it could no longer value them accurately because of problems in the U.S. subprime mortgage market.
ADVERTISEMENT
The announcement by the bank's BNP Paribas Investment Partners unit sent shock waves through an already sensitive money market.
The bank, France's largest bank by market value, said it was suspending three funds worth a total of 2 billion euros ($2.75 billion): Parvest Dynamic ABS, BNP Paribas ABS Euribor and BNP Paribas ABS Eonia. All funds combined at BNP Paribas Investment Partners are worth more than 350 billion euros ($482.79 billion).
"The complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the U.S. securitization market has made it impossible to value certain assets fairly regardless of their quality or credit rating," BNP Paribas SA said in a statement.
"The situation is such that it is no longer possible to value fairly the underlying U.S. ABS assets in the three above-mentioned funds" and "therefore unable to calculate a reliable net asset value, NAV, for the funds," the company said.
A good example of flipper bait that is so old it is starting to smell.
Dang.... that is some nasty flipper bait! Cheap, cheesy. Yarg. Geez, how much of this town is made up of that stuff? 10-20%? That stuff's been rotting in the Sun for months.
the locals
have no one to blame but themselves
*
Nada, long ago the 'locals' tried to create a moratorium on building and developing in Bend.
Then Hollern ( Brook Resources ) hired the BEST PR that money could buy, and via dog&pony shows, and beautiful people pulled "smart-growth" out of their ass.
To this day Bend is been ran by out of state investment ( REITS ), using the 'smart-growth' paradigm.
Products of Brooks 'smart-growth' most well known is there North-West-Crossing a vast village of flipper bait and empty homes.
The locals tried as they could, but City Hall, Planning, County, and regional are now all ran by EDCO and Brooks Resources private interest.
The good news is that once again Brooks is cash-poor, today they're sitting on a billion dollars of homes in central-oregon that will NOT sell.
Banks will no longer loan on construction unless the home pre-sell, and nothing is selling, because there is now on average a 30 inventory in some parts of central oregon.
During the last five years many locals left, some stayed to fight. Most that did play the 'get rich quick game' are now heading towards bankruptcy.
The boss-hogs that RUN bend will use the plunge to justify the next generation of building in central oregon a vast pool of affordable housing, as its clear that the so called 'rich' are no longer an option.
There still is the job issue, mtg, re, construction jobs are going, gone. The ONLY job in central oregon is private rent-a-cop in gated community. That is the central oregon career path, problem they all live and operate out of Redmond.
I have been writing about this for months, most statistics are done via wire, and it could be that Latinos are using Paypal, but the fact is the dollar is becoming worthless, and the inflation for food is taking off. Thus no money to send home, it will not be long before people quit coming here. Which means that Hollern's ( BRooks Resources ) comment about absence of 'real kids' in Bend, means there will be nobody to do the shit work, as Bend kids being the offspring of flipper's don't work. They like their parents make their living off 'investments'.
Fewer Mexicans sending money home, study says
August 9, 2007
A lower percentage of Mexican workers in the U.S. is sending money to family members back home, a report showed Wednesday.
The percentage of workers who regularly sent remittances home fell to 64% in the first half of 2007 from 71% in the same period last year, the Inter-American Development Bank said in a study of remittance patterns.
The reduction was deepest in 40 U.S. states where Latin American immigration is a more recent trend, such as Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where it plunged to 56% this year from the average 80% in 2006.
"In the new destination states, around half a million migrants have stopped sending money home," said Donald F. Terry, the bank's Multilateral Investment Fund official who commissioned the survey.
Bend 'real kid' problem resolved. You have heard of flipper-bait, here's the central oregon recipe for bush-bait. If this doesn't make you want to run down and enlist your children what will?
Local recruits on way to becoming Marines
Aug 8, 2007 08:43 PM
By Deanne Goodman, KTVZ.COM
All last week, I was on assignment in Southern California with the Marine Corps, watching young men from Central Oregon go through boot camp.
The transformation from civilian to Marine is physically and mentally grueling. While there, I met with local recruits past the halfway point of their 13-week training in San Diego.
For Michael Carlin, becoming a Marine has been a weighty issue. The Klamath Falls recruit spent eight months losing 60 pounds just to get into boot camp and has since lost another thirty plus. The experience has changed him: "Much more mature now, more confidence in myself."
Confidence is a key part of training. Recruits are constantly pushed to the limits.
At MCRD San Dieg,o they go through confidence courses, and at Camp Pendleton they endure "The Crucible." It's a 54-hour test where recruits cover more than 40 miles terrain on four hours of sleep a night and one meal a day.
Recruits carry their M-16 everywhere - in the pool and on land. Every Marine is a rifleman and must be able to successfully shoot a target from 500 yards. Recruits who either have skills lacking or perhaps they are beginners at using a gun, train on a simulator. It's cost-efficient because you don't waste money on real ammunition.
During boot camp, recruits can not wear contacts and must wear issued glasses. Bend-area recruit Matthew Clark was wearing the glasses when I caught up with him during his 10th week of boot camp.
Here's why he joined the Marines: "This recruit wasn't going anywhere in life, just wanted change and to take responsibility. Decided the Marine Corps was the best way to do that. "
About 92 percent of the recruits make it to graduation. The ones who don't typically get injured during training.
Erik Merklin, a recruit from Portland, smiled as he said boot camp "is better than I thought it would be. "
Watching the recruits go through boot camp was better than I thought it would be, too. But then again, I didn't have to do any of the physically and mentally grueling challenges.
Fallout from the US sub-prime market forced the ECB and Fed to inject more than €100bn into money markets today. Shares in London and on Wall St plunged.
*
Europeans are getting out of US money market accounts. Today FED had to create $100Billion dollars to cover the lack of cash for withdrawls.
Except Asian to start getting out of US funds.
The ONLY recourse US nows has is 20% interest rate on US investing, just like the 1970's. Otherwise nobody will risk their principal by investing in the US.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article2229381.ece
Yesterday, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, also played down the threat posed by recent market turbulence. “It is not an international financial crisis,” he said as he unveiled the Bank’s latest Inflation Report.
*
There you go when the the Governor of the Bank of England has to tell you that its NOT a crisis you know that the emperor has no clothes.
Expect a bank holiday soon.
Historically a bank-holiday is when the bank closes in order to stop withdrawals.
It just isn't Bend that will not force developers to pay for infrastructure, its the American way to not maintain, and not properly plan in the first place. Note,that just fixing stuff, not even correctly will cost $2Trillion, the known cost to date of the Iraq war. This will be good for all, lots of construction jobs. Bad news for Bend, being a new city, there is no crisis here, e.g. we don't have 100 year old bridges.
Expect all our beautiful dump trucks to soon, go elsewhere, e.g. where the money is.
Is creaking America on the road to ruin?
Suzy Jagger in New York
The collapse of a 40-year-old bridge in Minneapolis last week was as unsurprising as it was horrific. America’s infrastructure, its roads, bridges, tunnels and water systems, is old, underfunded and badly in need of repair and replacement.
Last month a 24in steam pipe, built in the 1920s, exploded in Central Manhattan in the middle of rush hour, leaving one woman dead and at least sixteen people injured. The flooding of New Orleans two years ago can be blamed not on Hurricane Katrina but on the Big Easy’s lousy engineering system, the failure of its network of levees – embankments – that should have prevented the city, almost half of which is below sea-level, from flooding.
Much of America’s infrastructure was built in the first half of the 20th century, propelled by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal public works funding in the 1930s and Eisenhower's interstate highway system of the 1950s. In the 21st century, the United States faces a looming crisis over the repair and replacements costs. According to a report by Ernst & Young, the consultancy group, published in June, the US has a funding shortfall for infrastructure of $1.6 trillion (£785 billion), a sum needed merely to repair and bring the existing infrastructure back up to scratch. The funding gap and unreliable infrastructure raises questions over whether US growth could be affected.
Chris Laughton, one of the authors of the report, said: “There was significant investment in the middle of the last century, but now there’s not much built then which isn’t starting to creak. There is a funding crisis which is looming. And it’s going to hit relatively soon.”
Related Links
* Fear prompts nationwide campaign of inspections
* Debris impedes Minneapolis recovery
The report, published before the Minneapolis bridge collapse, asked: “Who wants to pay more taxes or higher bills to maintain and repair [freeways, sewage pipes, water lines] as long as they seem to be working? Can anyone calculate the consequences of putting off repairs or upgrades beyond the stress of roadway congestion and displeasure of rust in the tap water? Most likely, it takes a Hurricane Katrina or a car-falls-through-a-bridge mishap to help us connect the dots.”
America spent about $75 billion on roads last year, according to official figures. This puts investment at about 0.65 per cent of GDP. China spends about 9 per cent of GDP. While the reluctance to raise taxes is easy to understand, the American public also harbours a deep suspicion of private companies taking over public projects – particularly, private equity companies. That suspicion has seen a number of proposals for Public Private Partnerships, ubiquitous in the UK and in Europe, scrapped because of local opposition.
The deep scepticism of the public towards private funding for such public projects has put off many infrastructure funds from even looking at the US. One European infrastructure fund manager, who declined to be named, said: “There is a real suspicion of private money for projects in the US. A number of Americans have very defined expectations of what government should and shouldn’t be responsible for. Projects such as highways, bridges, sewage works all fall into the category of the Government’s lot. People are wary of trying the private sector out. Minneapolis won’t change the debate, sadly, it only draws attention to the need for funding.”
There have been successful PPPs in America, but only a few. In Chicago, a consortium of Macquarie, the Australian infrastructure giant, and Cintra, a smaller Spanish rival, won a $1.83 billion auction in January 2005 for the city’s skyway – a 99-year lease to maintain the city’s expressway. The city used the funds to pay off some state debt, shovelled $500 million into a reserve fund for the city and invested part of the rest into annuities to mitigate the need for tax increases. Now Chicago is considering auctioning the lease for the Midway airport to private investors.
Indiana tried to follow suit. While it managed to secure $3.8 billion from the same infrastructure funds in 2006 for a 75-year lease of its Indiana toll road – a 157-mile stretch of highway that links up with the Chicago Skyway – the door was shut after local opposition to new projects.
So what does the future of America’s groaning infrastructure look like? The Ernst & Young report concludes: “Public skittishness will persist regarding turning over public franchises to private for profit operators . . . but eventually, public/private partnerships in the US will follow the UK model.”
One in Four Bend Homes will default in 2011. Looks like years of cold to come. Finally the analysts have worked out the numbers. Those that bought homes in last 1/2 of 2006 at the peak of the bend market, are assumed to default one in five, and in the factor that most Bend homes were 'investment' property add another +10% to risk, and thus you can easily predict that in 2011 25% of all homes bought in last 1/2 of 2006 will default by 2011.
Mortgage Resets: Record bill due
More than 2 million hybrid adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) come up for reset this fall - peaking in October with more than $50 billion due.
Borrowers who took out hybrid ARMs in 2004 and 2005 to secure low "teaser" rates for the first two or three years of the loan may see their monthly mortgage payments climb by 35 percent or more.
Foreclosures could explode, which would hurt everyone on the food chain: Borrowers lose their homes; lenders lose their payments; local governments lose tax base; and neighborhoods lose resiliency.
The already poor performance of many mortgage loans will worsen substantially through the rest of the year, according to an analysis in late July by Moody's Economy.com.
The company predicts that 2.5 million first mortgages will default this year, with little chance for improvement soon - Economy.com expects delinquencies to peak in the summer of 2008 at 3.6 percent of all outstanding mortgage debt, up from 2.9 percent during the first three months of 2007.
The worst-hit loan category will be subprime adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs). Economy.com expects foreclosures for those loans to hit 10 percent of that group by mid-2008. The foreclosure rate for that group is currently 4 percent and was as low as 2.5 percent in 2005.
Subprime ARMs issued during the last three months of 2006 could fare worst of all, with a projected foreclosure rate of just under 20 percent during the fall of 2011. That would mean a full one in five owners still paying off subprime ARMs from late 2006 - about 12,000 in all - would lose their homes. Many others from that group would have already lost their homes to foreclosure in the previous years.
One in Four Bend Homes will default in 2011. Looks like years of cold to come.
I wrote this over on BendBB:
Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 10:18 am Post
What's interesting about this is The Fatally Flawed Math Of Incrementalism:
Example: Clearly a LOT of people in Bend bought into the Bubble. Great. Builders who built 5 homes, and kept one for themselves up on Awbrey with plans to make the payments when the other 4 sold.
Now everyone seems to think that maybe we built 10% too many homes in this country & maybe that's right. In Bend, I'll bet it's much higher.
Now this builder probably had golden credit when he started his venture. But he's blown thru his loan money, and is making monthly payments with loan principal after months of holding & reducing price.
What do you do when you have $50K in the bank, and $2,000 loan payments on 5 homes, one of which is your residence, 3 are rented and one is vacant?
I think there are quite a few who will preserve their credit to the bitter end, cuz once you blow that, it's Game Over... no one loans to you again, and you don't work or the Company is shut down. So you keep paying until the money is gone... then ALL 5 homes go up for sale. Like a frog that jumps in warm water and just stays as the water gets hotter & hotter... until he boils to death.
I mean, given the occupancy of 80%, it seems the "overhang" should be the 1 empty house... when really ALL the homes are at risk for forced sale.
I think THIS (Forced Liquidation) is the nightmare scenario that Bend faces. Just clearing out the vacant homes indicates we'll be OK in a year or two, or maybe three. This is what you hear from experts like Brooks Resources President Hollern. But the Forced Liquidation scenario suggests that there may well be a cascading selling nightmare fueled by a Liquidity Implosion.
The housing implosion continues to confound "experts" as being worse than "rationality" suggests... The selling won't be limited to Vacant homes... it'll be a cascading of foreclosures to occupied homes also. And it's not just Middle America or the Poor. The extremely wealthy in Bend are about to Bust massively across the board on the massive markdowns and instant ill-liquidity of ALL Bend RE. The liquidity of Bend RE has fueled millions in income... that's ALL OVER.
We probably have several times the U.S. AVG % of vacant homes, so the damage we'll suffer will be multiples of the U.S. housing market.
Soak it up folks: We are, this very minute, witnessing the catastrophic implosion of Bends largest industry. Things won't be like 2006 FOR DECADES.
I'm not sure what it is, but I feel like the old fart whose back hurts rght before it rains. And my back HURTS! I just have a tremendous, forbidding feeling of absolute catastrophe coming to Bend. Of course, it's been foreshadowed by a home market that has totally evaporated.
Don't know How Bad it'll get... I just know it'll be Damn Bad. Like the Dark Matter of undetected homes/land for sale that's not on the Official Radar, there is a Dark Matter regarding terribly deteriorating circumstances in the RE industry in Cent OR. It'll be a BEM-espoused Unknown that whomps us upside the head, that "No One Saw Coming".
You'll see RE execs do some Monday morning QB-ing: "Wow, no one could have seen THAT coming!".
Wow... from Marketwatch
In past 2 weeks, another $43 billion in busted bonds
Loans and related risky debt deals reach staggering levels as more go bust
By Murray Coleman, MarketWatch
Last Update: 4:33 PM ET Aug 9, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- In the past two weeks, another 13 corporate loan or bond deals have been postponed or reduced, representing slightly less than $43 billion, according to new research released Thursday by Baring Asset Management.
That lifts the total number of deals pulled since June 22nd to 46, analysts at the firm said. They valued those at more than $60 billion. Last year, no pulled deals were counted by the firm's research staff.
The amount of incomplete cash-financed leveraged buyouts and management-led buyouts sitting on bank balance sheets remains substantial, wrote Toby Nangle, a fixed-income manager at Barings, in a note.
He estimated that such debt totaled around $400 billion. "The bond and loan markets know that banks will come knocking sooner or later, asking to refinance loans that they have made to private-equity firms," Nangle added.
Bankers thought that such loans would only present short-term credit risk, the analyst said. "Given their inability to pass this credit risk on to the market, their short-term acquisition finance is increasingly looking like a series of long-term loans," Nangle added. "As a result, many financiers are unwilling to stretch themselves further, and bond market participants can continue to ask for more attractive terms before committing capital to risky corporate loans and bonds.
He said: "The lack of demand for structured credit, which is ultimately where much of the private equity funding has previously been ending up, is a key factor and should it fail to return, the conditions in credit markets may become even tougher."
So the liquidity contagion has spread from Joe Sixpack to the LBO crowd. And commercial banks. And Central Banks.
So the folks from whom you borrow... cannot borrow. Seems the pesky little subprime problem of last Feb has grown slightly to envelope... BILLIONAIRES.
So the liquidity contagion has spread from Joe Sixpack to the LBO crowd. And commercial banks. And Central Banks.
Who's next?
Possibly Uncle Sam. The New Lender of Last Resort is no longer the U.S. It's China, with a mind-boggling $1.33 TRILLION in foreign reserves, $900+ billion of it U.S. treasuries.
They have got us by the short hairs. When they exercise that power, kiss 5% mortgages goodbye. Treasuries will be priced like the junk bonds they are, and we'll be back in double digits in no time.
Who's next?
Possibly Uncle Sam.
*
Yup, uncle dubya is the biggest sub-prime borrower of all.
What have you been saying about printing money ( hyper-inflation )? Now the FED is printing money as quick as it can to cover INTERNATIONAL withdrawals, nobody wants DOLLARS, nobody.
The only fix as in the late 70's is 20% interest on the dollar, that is the only thing that will bring the world back to the dollar.
Want to buy a house? Or REFI? You had better have 100% cash, thus its all over.
Now rhetorical question. Why in the hell does Brooks Resources and fodder keep building?
It'll be a BEM-espoused Unknown that whomps us upside the head, that "No One Saw Coming".
You'll see RE execs do some Monday morning QB-ing: "Wow, no one could have seen THAT coming!". - IHTBYB
*
I really think its going to be Brooks Resources. They cannot handle being "cash poor, housing rich". Northwest Crossing is now at a standstill, and Miller-Nash Legal is demanding he huge development on their behalf out west of Summit High.
Brooks Resources is the largest employer in Bend, and its all marketing, events, summer is now over, and noting happened that was supposed to happen. I expect to see massive Brooks layoffs across the board.
Golf season will be over in a month, and little to nothing at Tetherow has sold. Like all depressions, its now just rich suing rich. Walk by the Franklin Crossing's Tetherow Sales office for the "Best Resort in Bend" that doesn't exist, and you'll not see a soul. The folks that loaned the most recent $100Million to build the infrastructure at Tetherow must be shitting their shorts.
the locals
have no one to blame but themselves
*
Nada, long ago the 'locals' tried to create a moratorium on building and developing in Bend.
Then Hollern ( Brook Resources ) hired the BEST PR that money could buy, and via dog&pony shows, and beautiful people pulled "smart-growth" out of their ass.
To this day Bend is been ran by out of state investment ( REITS ), using the 'smart-growth' paradigm.
Products of Brooks 'smart-growth' most well known is there North-West-Crossing a vast village of flipper bait and empty homes.
The locals tried as they could, but City Hall, Planning, County, and regional are now all ran by EDCO and Brooks Resources private interest.
The good news is that once again Brooks is cash-poor, today they're sitting on a billion dollars of homes in central-oregon that will NOT sell.
The local little guy is NOT at fault, we tried to place a moratorium and building and development. Now we're stuck with a 10-30 glut of unneeded housing in Central Oregon.
If you must blame, blame Brooks Resources over the over-building and over-selling of central Oregon.
The locals tried as they could, but City Hall, Planning, County, and regional are now all ran by EDCO and Brooks Resources private interest.
The good news is that once again Brooks is cash-poor, today they're sitting on a billion dollars of homes in central-oregon that will NOT sell. Yesterday it was "cash poor, land rich", now its "cash poor, house rich".
The local little guy is NOT at fault, we tried to place a moratorium on building and development in Bend years ago. Now we're stuck with a 10-30 year glut of unneeded housing in Central Oregon.
If you must blame, blame Brooks Resources over the over-building and over-selling of central Oregon. Mike Hollern of Brooks blames mobile people, and the lack of real children.
Nada, what you sow so shall ye reap. Ever since Black-Butte Ranch Mr. Hollern has been in total control of the outcome of Bend development, and the type of people it would attract.
" ... its the American way to not maintain, and not properly plan in the first place."
It wasn't "the American way" until the radical right wing got control of the country 30 years ago and make everybody think "gummint is the problem." Well, guess what -- unless "gummint" takes care of the roads, bridges and other infrastructure they fall apart, and then the national economy falls apart.
The United States is well on its way to becoming a banana republic, and we have the radical right to thank for it.
OK, boyz It's Happened #1 Country wide is BLEEDING-TO-DEATH. The 'B' is NOW Belly-Up. It's doesnt' get any bigger, #1 insurance today AIG if fucked, #1 MTG country wide is fucked,
All pending MTG's are now fucked, now more closing's, cash only deals.
*
NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal
Aug. 9, 2007
Countrywide, the nation's biggest mortgage lender in terms of loan volume, said it faces "unprecedented disruptions" in debt and mortgage-finance markets that could hurt earnings and the company's financial condition. In its quarterly filing with the SEC, the bank said "the situation is rapidly evolving and the impact on the company is unknown."
wasn't "the American way" until the radical right wing got control of the country 30 years ago and make everybody think "gummint is the problem." Well, guess what -- unless "gummint" takes care of the roads, bridges and other infrastructure they fall apart, and then the national economy falls apart.
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You give the 'radical right' too much credit, DUBYA is like Clinton, aka BUSH-LITE.
Ol, Hillary gets more money from Wall-Street than BUSH1&2 ever thought about.
America is a new country, back east is built up and run down, now its the west like our bend, its all new.
Like our manufacturing post WWII, we were number one because everyone else got their's destroyed. Since WWII or shorty thereafter not a dime has been spent. Ol, Eisenhower built the FWY's to quickly move mobile ICBM's.
We have passed peak-oil, there really is no point in they HWY system.
The problem is NOT right verus left.
Look at todays BULLETIN, front page, "BEND HAS BRIDGE PROBLEMS", everyone is on the bandwagon for federal money, problem is bend has NO problem like the East, SE,...
I hate to say this, but the only thing that will cause a rebuilding on OUR SOIL, is a WAR on our soil.
NOBODY is going to invest in the USA, people are investing in the developing world. USA is like the UK, its game-over.
I could go on, but the above is enough for now.
>>You'll see RE execs do some Monday morning QB-ing: "Wow, no one could have seen THAT coming!".
Actually, that line is already being used.
"No one could have seen it coming?"
Except this time, the people who saw it coming caan be googled.
Check of the date on Robert Shiller's 2nd Edition of Irrational Exhuberance--a pretty popular and well known book for all these RE mavens to be claimin that "no one could have seen it."
It's clear Shiller saw it coming. He's 2/2 on bubble detection. Of course, he's smart enough not to ever make predictions about WHEN the pop will come. Bubbles always last longer than they SHOULD. That's what MAKES them bubbles.
--TT
the national economy falls apart
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USA CEO's have been buying Italian villas as quick as they can the past twenty years.
USA is fifteen years behind UK, been there lately? Very sad, filthy, the tube and the health of the people is terrible.
Everybody in the world knows that the USA's days are over, that is why we made the last grab for the oil. Plan A didn't work, now we'll have to beg for oil.
Chinese say something like this, ... Get the fuck out of the Oil-World or we'll sell all the T-BILLs, and the USA economy is OVER.
Whose fault?? All those people who shop at walmart, for that is why the chinese had to buy t-bills.
The chinese aren't going to sit around and watch the USA steal all the worlds oil, they just sat on their hands long enough for the USA to spend 2 Trillion on the war, money that could have been spent on infrastructure, now the USA is terminal.
Expect the world to demand repatriations from the USA for war-crimes.
How do you spell "Les Schwab"??
US Distributor Recalls 255000 Chinese Tires
Washington Post - 1 hour ago
By Sholnn Freeman A New Jersey tire distributor yesterday recalled 255000 defective Chinese tires as concerns grow over the safety of Chinese goods.
Why is it that IHTBYB, Bendbb, BEM, ... have no balls?
Because they're all on the HBM Brooks payroll.
Both OIA & "The Source" want M49, as it will allow Brooks Resources to sell their Skyline-Forest 33,000 acres between Bend and Redmond to Chinese investors. Right now, only principals can develop with M37. If M49 passes then the pre 1972 rights can be transferred.
The attempt to make M49 look like the OIA are opposed is just an attempt by "Friends of Oregon" to make the old argument, that an enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The fact is that M49 is an evil attempt to sell what remains of Central Oregon to Foriegn Investors.
Both OIA & "The Source" want M49, as it will allow Brooks Resources to sell their Skyline-Forest 33,000 acres between Bend and Redmond to Chinese investors.
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Whoops too much drinking with BENDBB tonight, Skyline-Forest owned by Brooks-Resources is between Bend & Sisters.
USA CEO's have been buying Italian villas as quick as they can the past twenty years.
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There is this myth of American Exceptional-ism. Since day-one America was always a penal colony.
The majority of Americans know that like ALL great empires the day is over, we're now at the point where everyone is trying to get theirs for the long 'cold-years' ahead. Thus is the way of dying empires.
Man,
You guys are a depressing bunch of Mofo's. Henny Penny, the sky is falling. We're all going to Hell. The USA has fallen. Fuck man, maybe you guys need to get laid. The real estate is definitely focked up. The econonmy is heading for a down turn. But man, who do you turn this into the U.S. days are over. Peaks and Valleys Bro. There is no better place then the good ol U.S.A.
There is no better place then the good ol U.S.A.
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If that were true, then why have the richest men in America been buying Italian Villas for the past twenty years? Second place is Portugal.
The USA spends the most on health, and has the worse health care. The USA spends the most on politics, and has the most corrupt political system.
It's old travel argument here, anybody who says the USA is the best place in the world, simply hasn't traveled.
Yes, I'll concur Filipino's, Latinos, and Africans want to come here, but that is about it.
Over a hundred years ago Tocqueville came here and wrote a little book about this penal colony, and everything he predicted has came true.
OK. They buy villas in Italy. Great. But they still spend most time here. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are #1 & #2, and they live here full time.
>>Yes, I'll concur Filipino's, Latinos, and Africans want to come here, but that is about it.
There's nothing wrong with those people. They are as worthy as all the Europeans who came 100 years ago. The US is still the #1 destination for migration.
Does the US suck Yep. Guess what--EVERYWHERE sucks. there's no perfect place. Any place is what you make of it.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are #1 & #2, and they live here full time.
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Bill Gates has his own island north of Kauai, and that's where he spends most of his time.
Warren is a true American.
These two are siamese twins of American. They don't represent what the 99% of CEO's have done since the 1980's. Read a little book Bartlett&Steele "America What Went Wrong".
Warren & Gates have NOTHING to do with the REAL America. They don't represent the average CEO. Buffet & Gates are both 'founders' that made great companys.
The typical CEO today that actually runs this country has replaced worthless paper with pension cash. They have bought offshore villas because they know that the shit is going to hit the fan in this country 2008->2015
>>Yes, I'll concur Filipino's, Latinos, and Africans want to come here, but that is about it.
There's nothing wrong with those people. They are as worthy as all the Europeans who came 100 years ago.
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MORE WORTHY THAT WHITE TRASH THEY ARE.
BUT that is besides the POINT. The flipinos, africans, and latinos we get are the un-educated ones.
We're NOT getting 'Tocqueville' educated europeans.
The poorest people in the world struggle to come to the USA to do OUR shit-work.
This makes the USA a plantation. There are house niggers, field niggers and plantation owners.
The field niggers are jealous of the house niggers. In USA everyone thinks they're a 'plantation owner', but the fact is DEBT makes them a house-nigger, and the 'immigrants' are our modern day field-niggers.
Welcome to America.
Again the problem is unless you have traveled the entire world, its impossible to see where america is-is.
I like what special-forces teach their recruits ... "USA is a third world colony, with nukes".
Just read the CIA world-fact book, we have the lowest reading&writing, highest drug use, ... On a scale of 'comfort' USA is a third world country. An educated public, the USA remains near bottom, our public education system is considered the worst in the world.
Does the US suck Yep.
{ Most people in prison in the history of the world, how in the hell are we going to pay for it?? Privatization }
Guess what--EVERYWHERE sucks.
{ It all depends if your rich or not. }
there's no perfect place.
{ All depends where your at, if your on Gates Hawaiian Island, life could be good. }
Any place is what you make of it.
{ Yes, stay out of war-zones, and that is the problem with the US, and this is why people are moving to BEND, 90% of the USA today ( New-Orleans,...) is a war-zone. If you can live in a clean, safe place, raise your kids without fear they'll die day-to-day, then life is good. Sadly, there are fewer and fewer of these places. }
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The issue here is to travel. There are many good places, Bend could be a good place if it were not RAN by kleptocrats and parasites. If the Realtor god's didn't run the city-hall. If Brooks Resources didn't have 1,000 tandem dump-trucks running through the streets 24-7,...
Take a look at the BOND Market right now
AAA 87
AA 68
A 46
BBB 35
T-bills of course are holding, the best bonds 87 cents on the dollar, safer sub-prime mtg's 35 cents on the dollar ( If you can find a buyer ). Interest rates will have to sky-rocket in order to pay for the risk. Note that even 'AAA' you need 13% just to break even.
Nobody wants to BUY this shit, everybody wants to sell.
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"Everything is lower today except for Treasuries. That reflects the ongoing liquidity issues and expectations of further losses to come out of the subprime and CDO sectors," said Derrick Wulf, portfolio manager, Dwight Asset Management Co. in Burlington, Vermont, referring to collateralized debt obligations.
The ABX 07-1 "AAA" and "AA" indexes traded down 2-1/2 points to 87.50 and 68.50, respectively, while the "A" index fell by three points to 46.50, traders said.
The bottom-tier ABX 07-1 "BBB-" index also fell one point to trade at 35.50, traders said. The index has fallen over 60 percent this year as the subprime mortgage crisis intensified. However, over recent weeks the weakness has rippled through higher-tier indexes.
Below is a good one, Bear-Stearns has hired a law firm, to figure out how they lost $20 Billion dollars. This is the largest broker in USA, and they have to hire a lawyer. Why don't they just admit they're covering ass, their own ass, from the investors who just lost $20 Billion. How about a return of ALL the 100's billions of commissions made in the last few years on LBO junk-bonds.
Bear Stearns Cos. has hired a law firm By Martha Graybow
NEW YORK, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Bear Stearns Cos. (BSC.N: Quote, Profile , Research) has hired a law firm to conduct an inquiry into its two collapsed hedge funds tied to risky home loans, a person at the law firm said on Friday.
The firm Davis Polk & Wardwell was hired by the audit committee of the investment bank's board of directors to investigate the funds' stakes in the subprime mortgage markets, said the law firm representative, who asked not to be named.
Davis Polk partners Robert Fiske and Lawrence Portnoy will head up the probe, this person said.
A Bear Stearns representative was not immediately available for comment.
Bear Stearns' shares, and its reputation, have been hurt by the collapse of two of its hedge funds, which made large, wrong-way bets on securities underpinned by mortgages to people with poor credit. Defaults by such borrowers have surged.
The company's shares have dropped more than 30 percent this year, and Bear ousted a top-ranking executive, former co-President Warren Spector, amid the turmoil.
The two hedge funds at one point controlled assets of more than $20 billion, but in mid-July Bear said the funds had very little value remaining.
On July 31, the funds filed for bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan as they attempt to be liquidated in the Cayman Islands, where they are registered.
Earlier this week, a limited partner in one of the failed funds sued Bear Stearns and its asset management division. The lawsuit, in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, contends that the investment bank took only small steps to prevent the fund's collapse.
Bear Stearns has said the lawsuit is without merit and that it plans a vigorous defense.
anybody who says the USA is the best place in the world, simply hasn't traveled.
i would add to that, that anybody who thinks the rest of the world wants to be like America also hasn't traveled much.
That said, the USA is still a good place to live, but if I was born in Switzerland for example I wouldn't be interested in moving here.
WASHINGTON MUTUAL BITES THE DUST
My FAVORITE sleazy MTG company in the Pacific NW is finally getting hammered. These folks are the sub-prime kings in PDX, I don't know what they're coverage is in BEND, but they were handing out loans for dumps in the worst part of PDX for the past five years. The silly thing is most of these folks were all renters, and thus none of the homes have been maintained, as the folks have no money after paying the MTG,PMI,INS,...
WaMu fall on heightened mortgage worry
By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Countrywide Financial Corp (CFC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) led shares of U.S. mortgage companies lower on Friday as investors received fresh reminders that a shortage of liquidity might crimp profits.
Shares of Countrywide fell as much as 13.7 percent after the largest U.S. mortgage lender said in a regulatory filing that it was facing "unprecedented disruptions" in the market to buy and sell home loans, and that the ultimate impact was unknown.
Washington Mutual Inc (WM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), the largest U.S. savings and loan, said in a separate filing that market liquidity had "diminished significantly," and that it would be "adversely affected" while this persisted. Its shares fell as much as 5.6 percent.
I would add to that, that anybody who thinks the rest of the world wants to be like America also hasn't traveled much.
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Yes, like they all say about 'democracy', there is Democracy, and there is USA-DEMOCRACY, and like the man said in the USA "Democracy is Hypocrisy".
Nobody in the world wants USA-Democracy, they want "Tocqueville Democracy". The trouble is the USA goes all over the world killing people forcing it to adopt USA-Democracy.
In regards to FOLKS that say the bloggers are DOOM & GLOOM, there is NO DOOM & GLOOM, just folks talking reality.
........
First of all I don't know where these doom & gloom's are, I think most of the bloggers feel this is a healthy long due correction for Bend.
Post 911, the government over-primed the pipe, Greenspan dropped the interest rate to 1%, and allowed the FED to completely let Wall Street take over home mortgage's. Now everything has collapsed, its going to take months and or years to put back together again, in the old form where home loans originated from banks.
I don't watch TV period. So, and the reason is I feel its complete bullshit 24-7-365.
What to watch for is folks jumping out of windows, and I have NOT heard of this yet, we saw a little post dot-com. A lot of folks have been making $1Mil/yr or more during the past few years consulting, trading, brokering, and right now everything is dried up. For the little guy - "What's the big deal?" These things take months to trickle down.
It's NOT useful for US-TODAY to tell people to withdrawal their money from the bank, and put it under the mattress.
Look at the Great Depression, it lasted 13 years, and while folks jumped from windows in 1929, it didn't hit 'main-street' HARD until 1933. Then it was 7-9 lean years getting people back to work.
The current analysts are saying the 5/1 Arm's from second 1/2 of 2006 will not even reset until 2011. The prediction for Bend is that 25% of these will then default. That's four years from now, The analogy of turning around a battle-ship is appropriate.
Lastly, lets talk about people. When your neighbor loses his job its a "recession", when you lose your job its a "depression". A WHOLE LOT of people in Bend are going to lose their jobs in the next four years, and most in the next two. Let's just hope its orderly, and we don't have to read everyday about folks jumping out of windows, of course in Bend, it will be people blowing their brains out.
I feel the primary purpose for documenting and debating the bubble is for people to prepare, and survive the bubble. Those have that denied things all along are not prepared.
It's always important to know what is happening.
Everywhere sucks.
If USA sucks so much more than everywhere else, well, then, by all means, get outta here!
If Bend is the suckiest place, then go elsewhere that don't suck as much.
Stop complaining and do something, like leave!
You suck. And whine.
Randy Sebastian of Renaissance paints his truck green. Wow this is the kind of news that could recover Bend's Bubble.
Renaissance Homes unveils wagon in living green
The Times, Aug 9, 2007
The new symbol of Renaissance Homes’ Living Green package of environmentally sound building systems and materials is rolled out by Karl Lange (right), building science manager, and firm president Randy Sebastian. Lange recently took possession of the 1979 Mercedes G Wagon, painted “environmental” green and converted to run on biodiesel.
They’re going to see Renaissance Homes’ Karl Lange coming.
At least that’s the hope of the Lake Oswego-based residential builder Renaissance Homes as it adds a visible symbol to underscore its commitment to environmentally sound use of building materials and building practices at its neighborhoods here and in Bend.
Lange, Renaissance’ manager of building science, recently took possession of a 1979 Mercedes G Wagon which has been painted “environmental” green and converted to run on biodiesel. Emblazoned with the “Living Green” logo of Renaissance’ green building program, Lange will use it in his day-to-day work as well as displaying it at such special events as the Renaissance Homes Concerts on the Lawn in the amphitheater at McMenamin Brothers Edgefield Lodge in Troutdale this summer. The firm is the series’ major sponsor.
“When people see our Living Green Mercedes, we hope they’ll be reminded of how seriously we take our green building program and how hard we’re working to continually improve and upgrade it,” said Renaissance President Randy Sebastian.
Sebastian added Lange’s position about a year ago. Renaissance’ new manager of building science was Oregon’s first full time builder-based position dedicated totally to expanding and improving his firm’s green building program.
Sebastian chose to convert the nearly 30-year-old Mercedes because “part of being environmentally responsible is to recycle things. It’s an unusual looking car with enough room to be practical and with an engine that was relatively easy to convert to biodiesel.
“DEQ certified the G-wagon as having zero CO2 emissions during a recent test . . . and the exhaust smells like french fries cooking,” said Lange, who oversees Renaissance’ series of green building and energy efficiency systems it has been including in its homes for more than four years.
Besides partnering with the Energy Star and Earth Advantage programs, Living Green incorporates the Rain Screen siding system into all Renaissance Homes built west of the Cascade Mountains.
Developed in Canada, Rain Screen is an exterior wall system that furs out the siding by a half inch to allow a channel of air circulation between the siding and the housewrap. This circulates air throughout the exterior of the house so it can “breathe” better. Any moisture which invades the space also runs through rather than seeping behind house wrap or house sheathing and causing rot or mold.
Home buyers are becoming more green conscious, said Lange, who feels his firm is perfectly positioned to take advantage of growing environmental consciousness.
Working with contractors and consultants, Lange has begun researching new systems which might prove cost-effective for Renaissance and for the buyer.
Lange said he is testing prototypes of new systems “to find and use the best systems available and to make sure they’re cost-effective. This isn’t always done which can result in systems which are mismatched to the climate,” he said. “We’re continually looking to upgrade our program and are currently building a prototype home with a wide range of green systems in Washougal. We’ll be announcing additional green options over the next few months.”
Although Lange is coordinating and improving his firm’s entire Living Green program, energy efficiency measures are getting an outsized portion of his attention.”
“We have a lot of buyers from California, where energy efficiency is an economic issue,” said Lange. “They come from a state where energy costs are higher. For Oregonians, it is a feel-good issue, but to many people from out of state, it’s definitely a practical matter.”
Besides researching and developing effective new ideas and products, educating Renaissance sales and construction staff and conducting job site inspections, Lange has been working to convince other area builders of the merits of environmentally sound building products and systems.
“We want to continue being a leader in green building and, selfishly, the more contractors using these methods, the more research and innovative products there’ll be and the cheaper they’ll become for us and for the homeowner,” Lange said.
And, he believes, Renaissance’ new Living Green wagon is one way to increase the program’s visibility. Lange wants people to see him coming.
If Bend is the suckiest place, then go elsewhere that don't suck as much. - moron
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Dear Moron,
Cowards and sheep go elsewhere, there are some of us that don't think Bend has to be a 'sucky' place ( whatever the fuck that means ).
We'll stay and fight, and force the city government to care for the people, and not the Brook Resources.
What's good for Brooks is NOT GOOD for Bend.
I guess Renaissance being "Green" does not include preserving trees. They basically clear cut their development along Brookswood to shoe horn in as many homes as possible. Their recently approved River Rim development will cut off the Elk Herds to the river. Yeah good ole Randy looking out for the environment.
Yeah good ole Randy looking out for the environment.
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Yeh, and he drives a thirty year old mercede diesel burning hummer, I love oregon, throw some green paint on a whore, and bring her home to mom.
We'll stay and fight, and force the city government to care for the people, and not the Brook Resources.
What's good for Brooks is NOT GOOD for Bend.
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Good for you, Mr Suck.
Glad to hear that you are going to stay and fight the good fight against the evil ones.
Better to fight than just spout off about how much Bend sucks.
My comment was directed at those who only whined about how much Bend (and USA) sucked, and was not directed to those who want to take action and fight.
More fighting. Less whining.
My comment was directed at those who only whined about how much Bend (and USA) sucked, and was not directed to those who want to take action and fight.
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I hate to tell you this for all those flag waving 'Amerikans' out there, but its always been this way, there is NOTHING new,
It's not dem vs repub, or left vs right,
It's always been plantation owner, house nigger, and field nigger.
The plantation owners these days are lawyers, bush's, clinton's, the very rich,... +98% of all other 'amerikans' are just plain niggers, and of course the house niggers they they got something to fight for because it could be worse, they could be in them fields.
The field niggers, imagine how nice it must be to stay in the house all day, ...
The fact is all you niggers, have no idea about what the plantation owners think or do, but one thing is certain they got a lot of field niggers dying right now over in Iraq so the plantation owners can maintain there way of life.
It's always been this way, replacing clinton for bush, future or past will always been the same.
Slavery is over and now everyone a nigger, and most black people know this, its only the dumb white folk that think they're 'free' in america.
The current correction is a good thing. It will eventually lead to a much healthier state of affairs. People will be forced to fight for what counts, and cut back on their pompous materialism. The status of symbols of today will be looked on as mere foolishness. The entire country is obese in all senses of the word. Fat asses in fat ugly cars in fat inefficient homes glued to massive tvs eating fat unhealthy slop and thinking themselves rich and in control of the world. What a joke this culture has become. It needs some belt tightening.
I guess Renaissance being "Green" does not include preserving trees. They basically clear cut their development along Brookswood to shoe horn in as many homes as possible. Their recently approved River Rim development will cut off the Elk Herds to the river. Yeah good ole Randy looking out for the environment.
Amen, brother.
1979 Mercedes? Dang... probably a diversion from Big Muscly Arms getting 6-7 Lexus's repo'd
Everywhere sucks.
If USA sucks so much more than everywhere else, well, then, by all means, get outta here!
If Bend is the suckiest place, then go elsewhere that don't suck as much.
Stop complaining and do something, like leave!
You suck. And whine.
Shouldn't you be out getting some listings... instead of whining?
+98% of all other 'amerikans' are just plain niggers, and of course the house niggers they they got something to fight for because it could be worse, they could be in them fields.
I guess Silver Moon Happy Hour is over...
It'll be a BEM-espoused Unknown that whomps us upside the head, that "No One Saw Coming".
Well you can be absolutely sure that when significant price declines are locked in in Bend and the question becomes, finally, "what's next?", you'll know what the Becky Breezes will be saying.
They'll be saying that the bust was caused by hedge funds and securitizations and rating agencies and fixed-income instrument market crashes that no one in the Bend RE community knew anything about or had anything to do with.
They'll say that were it not for the subprime problems ELSEWHERE, Bend homes would have still been enjoying healthy appreciation. But hey, force majeure - hedge funds, fixed-income, subprime.
All of us following the bubble knew that there were other areas (Gulf Coast Florida, CA Central Valley, Merced, Bakersfield) where foreclosures were up and prices were falling before the subprime meltdown became a mainstream news item. Because it was an investment bubble, and declines were inevitable. However, lucky for Bend RE folks, they'll have plausible deniability, and the party line will be "the only thing that could stop Bend home price appreciation was a huge, worldwide liquidity crisis."
However, lucky for Bend RE folks, they'll have plausible deniability, and the party line will be "the only thing that could stop Bend home price appreciation was a huge, worldwide liquidity crisis." - bem
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What about the fact that for the past two years we were #1 in being over-valued?
What goes up, must come down.
That said I care little why Mrs. Breeze and the Conod-Ho assn get hosed, what's important is they get hosed.
+98% of all other 'amerikans' are just plain (plantation) niggers,..
I guess Silver Moon Happy Hour is over...
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The south's plantation niggers had their music, and soul-food, the bend plantation niggers have their beer.
America is and has ALWAYS been a plantation colony. Today the apt analogy is blue collar for field-niggers, and white-collar for house-niggers, buts its all the same.
Silver Moon is a blue-collar place, ain't seen no suits there.
The Deschutes Brewpub has marketed itself into a tourist resort destination for out-of-state plantation owners, aka golfers. That said most 'plantation owners' are wine drinkers. Thus, it ain't working. Deschutes is in Big trouble I hope they survive. The one to watch is Cascade Locks. They have about 1/2 a dozen pub's in central oregon now, and they're trying to do the mcMenamins things by having each be special.
I think for the local field-niggers its going to be silver-moon, taco-shack, and pizza-mondo for a long-long time. Our Bend soul-food moon-shine.
Shouldn't you be out getting some listings... instead of whining?
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I talked to a realor-buddy the other day.
He's been in Bend for twenty years.
Said its the worst he has ever seen.
Is having to work four times harder than he has in his whole life, and is making 1/2 the money at the worst low he has ever seen, and its going to get worse. Note and this is during the July/August, there are little to closing's on anyone's calendar.
Supplement, whether its 2,000 realtors in bend or 1 in 200, we have too many realtors, but like most things 90-10 rule 10% make 90% of the commissions.
I'm sure that the 1800 that never did anything other than be there for the ride will go back to what they did.
My personal experience is that a lot of our 'cali-retirees' came to bend with an RE license, and assumed that they could-would 'supplement income'
With bonds ( high-income ) cash investing collapsing, and no supplement other than Walmart greeting, we should see some retires start moving out of dodge once the 401k is NULL.
The entire country is obese in all senses of the word. Fat asses in fat ugly cars in fat inefficient homes glued to massive tvs eating fat unhealthy slop and thinking themselves rich and in control of the world. - anon
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Lard Arse Rush Limbaugh type's in Escalades on Cell phones going forty through Bend Round-abouts. 80HP golf-carts @ widgi to move them around. TV ( porn ) going 24-7 in the Escalade. When the PORN's not running, there is FOX news telling them how 'their' war is winning, and the there will be cheap fuel again,...
This all gets back to the decline-of-America thing. The Roman empire at the end times had a mercenary army that turned on it, the money became worthless because of dilution, the granaries became empty, because farmers wouldn't bring wheat to rome for paper money.
Today we have criminals fighting OUR Iraq war, because the 'obese' pay others to do their killing. The chinese make our food & Toys , and are getting tired of taking our worthless paper. Hell even the iPod is made in China. Hell the Chinese even make our Dog's food.
The whole world watches the USA burn.
Like a person earlier said, and most depression children I know have passed away, I was raised by depression children, and know their storys well. American excess has been insane since the 1980's, since the late 1990's the American's have had a negative saving's rate.
The USA itself and all its citizens are sub-prime borrowers, and the rest of the world is getting real tired of the USA's arrogant bullshit. Hypocrisy can go a long way as long as it pay's its bill's.
Today the FED talks about reducing interest rates, but this is BULLSHIT, the USA had better start paying foreigners 20%/yr to buy t-bills, because the dollar is dropping like a rock. For the FED to keep dumping $40billion a day into the economy is the same kind of dilution that made Rome's currency worthless.
( For those that like to read see Spenglers 1920 classic "decline of the west" - two volumes, a story on how 'western' mercantile economy's always collapse - The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes) is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler )
The Bend-Bubble, like tulip-mania, madness of the crowds, is not a new story, Spengler clearly explains great western civilizations over the past 2,000 over and over run themselves into the ground.
Doom and Gloom? Hell no, look at Greece the greatest western civilization in the history of the West, and today its a great place, with great reflective people.
The problem with America today is that Obese TV watching parasites are not living, because they're too busy running the world. People in Greece know how to live. Thus, the USA has a wonderful future.
They'll say that were it not for the subprime problems ELSEWHERE, Bend homes would have still been enjoying healthy appreciation. But hey, force majeure - hedge funds, fixed-income, subprime.
Don't forget the Freakin French! PNB Paribas had a hedge fund or two implode this week. Gat dang French been holding down the Bend market forever...
And yes... the Becky Breeze scenario makes 100% sense. Dead on...
The Story Bend,Oregon - Field Niggers, House Niggers, and Plantation owners.
Once upon a time there was a little desert logging town called Bend, Oregon. Where people worked, and fished, and hunted. Post civil-war, post slavery they drifted west and many ended up in Bend.
The boss-hogs created Brooks-Scanlon, which made Bend into a 'company-town'
In the 1960's Boss-Hog-Hollern came to town and decided to make Bend into a plantation town. A fresh MBA from california, he set out to develop the "Bend Plantation". First order was Black-Butte Ranch a Plantation Owners garden of Eden.
Over the ensuing twenty years Bend went from logging to house niggers ( RE & MTG ), and field niggers ( construction ). Favorite fishing holes were built on, and hunting was banned. The only job in town was boss-hogg's Brooks-Resources.
Soon other plantation owners decided they too wanted to be be like Boss-Hogg-Hollern. John Gray of Omark built Sunriver, later came Eagle Crest. Plantation owners from all over America could come to Bend and golf.
Sometime in the 1990's nobody in Bend wanted to be a field nigger or a house nigger, everybody had become obese and decided they wanted to be a plantation owner. Thus they started bringing in the Mexicans. By 2002 a fool could become a plantation owner, just by buying a home in Bend, thus the boom had begun. Mexicans became the field niggers ( construction ), and house niggers ( restaurant ).
By 2006 there were no more fools, and the Bend home price had reached its peak.
Today in Bend there are 1,000's of plantation owners with tons of debt. Soon carpet baggers will swoon in from abroad or afar and buy all the Bend real-estate for pennys on the dollar.
All the Brooks Resources assets were sold to foreigners for pennys on the dollar. Over years the plantation owners of bend drifted away. Bend once again became a town of people who just lived to fish, hunt, explore, hike, and live. With the absence of the plantation-owner everyone was free. They were able to reclaim their government, and thus get their government off their back, as the plantation-owners had controlled the police as means to control the working classes.
Becky Breeze scenario makes 100% sense. Dead on...- bem
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For months I have been saying the Mrs Breeze will be demanding a bail-out, so that her ilk don't lose their shorts.
It would be a sad thing for Bends finest and most beautiful citizens to become bankrupt.
Condo's that don't sell loans that will reset, bankers who will demand sale once the property's fall below 80% loan-to-equity value.
It's ALL our responsibility to save the condo-ho's they are our legacy.
It's not their fault the French screwed up Bend. I say we the taxpayer bailout Mrs. Breeze, and declare war on the French.
>>Is having to work four times harder than he has in his whole life, and is making 1/2 the money at the worst low he has ever seen, and its going to get worse.
And that makes sense, given the drop in sales, for the "average" Realtor. The best Realtors will absolutely lord over the worst. Soon all those waitresses and construction dudes who became Realtors for easy money in 2005 will be gone (they probably already are).
And as for working, yeah. Endless hopeless Open Houses filled with nosy neighbors and haughty almost-buyers who say, "I think these will come down another $100k." Expensive advertising with no results. Paying for a bunch of Lunesta and Ambien CR.
The Bend Bulletin is the most obvious winner.
--TT
Endless hopeless Open Houses filled with nosy neighbors and haughty almost-buyers who say, "I think these will come down another $100k...
--TT
My wife just told me that her sister ( a realtor ) has announced that her and her boyfriend are broke. Basically they're both top performers. Problem is there are a lot of buyers, but NOBODY is qualifying. Another interesting comment I got was that 100% want 100% down, and guess what NOBODY is offering 100% loans, and NOBODY has 20% down.
Basically what they're doing is talking, and pre-qualifying that the person has the 20% down to close, and then and only then working for the person. They're NOT telling these people the truth, because NO realtor wants to be the bearer of bad news, which is what sales is all about, but the hardest part is the fact that 1 in a 100 has the down.
My wife who saves like a mad women, casually commented on why nobody has a down payment, and her realtor sister simply said, because nobody has any money.
They'll be saying that the bust was caused by hedge funds ... crashes that no one in the Bend RE community knew anything about or had anything to do with. - bem
Yes, and like the blind men and the elephant, they're all partially correct, but MANY of us some years ago demanded a moratorium on building. Then Hollern of Brooks-Resources paid out of town clowns with k-mart suits to sell "Smart-Growth", then we got the mess we have today with NWXC, and Old-Mill Condo's.
They said build smart, and the smart will come. Nobody came, and now we have paved over the best places on the River for nuttin.
Blame hedgies, ... that's just a money problem, the real problem with Mrs. Breeze, Mrs. Dubois, ... is that they built too much crap, that nobody will buy, except carpet baggers for pennys on the dollar.
Like the blind philosopher and the elephant they're all partially right, its sad that Hollern railroaded all this shit, in my mind Breeze & Dubois are just PR bunny's for the program.
When the boss of a company town makes a mistake your not likely to see anyone tell the emperor he has no clothes. Thus you'll probably see a lot of people just take it in the shorts.
Let's hope that Breeze & Dubois have stuffed enough cash in the mattress to buy food for the coming 6+ years.
I used to estimate recover 2-3 years after crash ( now know to be 2006 ), but given the new stat's on 2006 defaults to hit the hardest in 2011, I'm beginning to think this thing will not see an uptick until 2012.
Perhaps ol Hollern is right about 20 years things will return, right now it looks like things will be slow the next 5->20 years.
100% want 100% down, and guess what NOBODY is offering 100% loans, and NOBODY has 20% down.
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What was meant was that 100% of MTG folks now will no longer ACCEPT ZERO DOWN.
Thus smart Realtors are no longer wasting their time, because NO loans are going through unless they have cash on the table, no matter how good the credit.
In the past five years the way loans were packaged was that you took out the 80% loan and then borrowed another 20% which paid 100% of the loan. These deals are no longer done, and thus now folks must pay 100% of the down in cash, thus to purchase a $400k home, you must have $80k cash on hand.
99% of the public doesn't have this kind of cash, and virtually Real Estate deals are no longer closing.
Of course all this was predicted long ago on this blog.
Given that the average American has a negative savings rate, building the cash-down means NO new homeowners to the pool for a long time. Everybody that could buy a house, and in Bend many bought 3 or 4.
With all the resets coming in now and until 2011 there will be tons of people who cannot afford the new mortgage who must sell or walk, those that had paid zero-down will have to walk as all the homes are now worth less than purchase.
Given that the recovery point always predicted would be 4X, e.g. in Bend $40k household income means that average people would qualify for a $160k home, but its going to take years to save $32k.
All the government can do is make it easy to get loans, no investor is going to risk even 80% in a market of falling RE prices.
Even the Government cannot guarantee to catch a falling knife. Thus promises have no meaning, and we just have to let stuff play out.
If you owe $150k or less on your average Bend home, and the payments are less than $1k/mo, and you have a job, you should survive. I think those with higher than $150k mortgage debt will be under water.
Note, that the bigger homes always get hit the hardest, and it seems in Bend that +3Ksq-ft had been the rage. Now Brooks is starting to build very small stuff up at NWXC.
In summary all this was predicted, the point of the post is that we're here. We're at the point where MTG is no longer available zero-down, which means that +80% or most likely more BUYERS are completely out of the game.
Most likely any FLIPPER/BUYER who bought post 2004 will never flip again because they're under-water, the only ones that can flip are those who dip in the 401K to inject cash to SELL.
Expect the government to make a WINDFALL on all the 10% penalty's for early retirement withdrawals from pension funds.
I agree. And those who have the old-fashioned 20% ready have an incredible amount of bargaining power now. But the problem for those among us with the down payment ready is this: Why should we buy now when the houses are still priced as if everyone who wants a house can get an 100% loan? There's no reason. The sellers, if they really want to sell, have to compete for the very limited pool of buyers. Prices have to come down to where they were before nutty loans were available. Maybe even further than that.
If Mr. California can only buy his house contingent on a sale in California, you have a heartbreak situation developing as cascading contingencies fail somewhere along the line.
--TT
"I hadn't caught that Hollern had said, "real" people, "real" kids, "real" jobs."
As opposed to what? The fake people, fake jobs and fake kids that had been coming in? Who says something like this?
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