Some good articles regarding some insight and sentiments going into 2010 for residential R.E markets.
More Home Owners Walk Away
A growing number of home owners in Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada—where prices have fallen the most—are walking away from their properties.
They are leaving the deal behind not because they can’t pay but because they don’t want to. A study by researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago concludes that as many as 25 percent of defaults are driven by strategy, not necessity.
If many other people follow suit, “It’s going to be really difficult to prevent a cascade effect,” says Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at Northwestern.
Brent White, an associate law professor at the University of Arizona, points to actions by banks themselves to avoid staying in bad business deals as an example of why homeowners should make a decision “unclouded by unnecessary guilt or shame.”
For instance, on Thursday, financial services firm Morgan Stanley announced that it is turning five San Francisco office buildings back over to its lender two years after it purchased them when the market was at its priciest. The buildings are estimated to be worth about half of what Morgan Stanley paid.
“This isn’t a default or foreclosure situation,” spokeswoman Alyson Barnes told Bloomberg News. “We are going to give them the properties to get out of the loan obligation.”
Morgan Stanley is apparently current on the loan, so this is what is known as a “strategic default.”
Some might ask: If strategic defaults are OK for banks, why aren’t they OK for ordinary homeowners?
Coming Soon: More Foreclosures
More than 1.7 million homeowners were verging on foreclosure this fall, making it likely that these houses will soon end up on the market one way or the other, driving down overall housing values.
“We’re going to be dealing with high levels of distressed (sales) in the marketplace for at least a couple of years,” says Mark Fleming, chief economist of researcher First American CoreLogic, which has been studying the problem.
Some real estate practitioners say they fear that this onslaught is coming.
“We’ve been in recovery mode for most of the year. How many foreclosures do they have to dump on the market to affect that? I don’t know,” says Deborah Farmer, owner of StarLight Realty in Tampa, Fla. “Any house priced under $225,000 will be affected by a large increase in foreclosures in this market.”
Interest Rates Predicted to Reach 6%
Interest rates are likely to rise to 6 percent by the end of 2010, predicted Amy Crews Cutts, deputy chief economist at Freddie Mac.
The end of the Federal Reserve program that buys mortgage-backed securities will drive rates higher because private buyers will demand more return than the Fed.
“Extraordinary resources have been put into keeping the rates down and supporting the mortgage markets and it’s hard to imagine that the rates can go much lower than they are,” Crews Cutts said. “Anything we get at or below 5 percent is a gift at this point.”