June 17th, 2008
When horses and sprawl collide
As housing seemingly stretches across the entire state, horse-related businesses are finding it more difficult to operate without garnering complaints from their residential neighbors.
As housing seemingly stretches across the entire state, horse-related businesses are finding it more difficult to operate without garnering complaints from their residential neighbors.
According to the National Association of Realtors the housing slump is causing fewer people to purchase second homes. And that is causing an interesting side effect: As the number of unsold vacation homes on the market continues to rise, their owners — who can’t unload them as quickly or for as high a price as they once could — are competing harder than ever to find renters.
The media aren’t causing the housing slump. Real estate agents, mortgage loan officers, greedy homeowners and lazy legislators all worked together to do that. Let’s put the blame where it belongs.
Where you live could have a significant impact on how painful rising gasoline costs are.
This allows homeowners to first buy their new home and then — in what is known as the “buy and bail” — stop paying the mortgage on their first home, letting it fall into foreclosure. In the end, the homeowner is left with a new house with a lower mortgage payment. Not a bad deal.
There’s an interesting debate going on now between members of Congress and the Federal Housing Administration. Congress has proposed legislation requiring the FHA to back up to $300 billion worth of risky mortgage loans. The commissioner of the FHA, Brian Montgomery, opposes this legislation, saying that taking on so many bad loans would hurt his agency.
According to Prashant Gopal, a writer for BusinessWeek, the next big real estate crisis will hit the country in April of next year. That’s when hundreds of thousands of adjustable-rate mortgages are scheduled to reset to higher interest rates, and, of course, higher monthly mortgage payments. Expect this to bring on a new round of foreclosure activity.
If you’d like some good news to go along with my daily dose of pessimism, then I’ve found the perfect site: www.happyrenews.com. That’s right folks, it’s really called Happy Real Estate News.com. Seriously.
The operators of real estate schools — which help train future real estate agents — are seeing attendance at their facilities dropping.
The news earlier this month that former Tonight Show sidekick Ed McMahon may lose his home in Beverly Hills to foreclosure is such a shocker to some. But anyone who’s been paying attention to the foreclosure mess should have realized by now that no one is immune to mortgage-payment woes.
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