College kids capitalize on post-foreclosure-crisis prices
posted at 3:40 pm on November 14, 2011 by Tina Korbe
Maybe it’s that the Occupy Wall Street protests have reawakened a latent sense of avarice in me. Maybe it’s that Michael Moore’s vacation home makes me believe I need not be super rich to have a huge house. (After all, according to him, he’s not a member of the 1 percent — and he has two megahomes!). Maybe it’s just that I’ve visited one too many an antebellum mansion (I do do that). Whatever the reason, I’ve found myself fantasizing about my dream home a lot lately.
To make it a reality, I should move to Merced, Calif. There, University of California at Merced students have scored a luxury lifestyle at astonishingly low prices:
Merced, in the heart of San Joaquin Valley, was ranked the third hardest-hit city in the country for home foreclosures, leaving whole communities of sparkling luxury homes vacant and depreciating, the New York Times reported. For these UC students, the “housing crisis” is an embarrassment of riches.
“I mean, I have it all!” Patricia Dugan, a senior majoring in management, told the Times from her master bedroom suite flooded with California sunshine.
The five — sometimes six — bedroom manses that often feature chandeliers, Jacuzzis, walk-in closets and swimming pools can be had by students for peanuts. Several thousand McMansion dormers who have their own bedroom and a private bath pay just $200-$350 in monthly rent.
As Heritage Foundation housing expert Ron Utt said in an e-mail, “It’s nice to see some productive, revenue-generating uses for otherwise vacant property.”
But while the students strike it lucky, their mortgaged, non-foreclosed neighbors are still underwater, some paying $3,000 a month for homes that were once worth half a million and now would draw just a couple hundred thousand. Sadly, they’re not alone. Some 11 million — or nearly a quarter — of homes are in negative equity, according to Jim Pethokoukis. We’ve already seen that President Obama’s recent unilateral proposals to help homeowners are likely to be ineffective. Negative equity is a problem that can’t be solved just by helping folks to make their payments: Home values will go back up when an increased number of qualified buyers swell demand. For that to happen, we have to solve the unemployment problem — and, to do that, we have to implement common-sense solutions, chief among them a reduction in regulations.
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Which is why the administration wanted to inundate the networks with the gun control topic before such good news.
rogerb on January 17, 2013 at 2:44 PM
Uneducated guess:
Hiring is to enable 3 part-timers versus 2 full-timers?
tomg51 on January 17, 2013 at 2:45 PM
Ha!
Bmore on January 17, 2013 at 2:46 PM
How come seasonally-adjusted data is always better than unadjusted, 12 months in a year?
Archivarix on January 17, 2013 at 2:48 PM
all this will get readjusted in a couple of weeks with much worse numbers and no coverage
DanMan on January 17, 2013 at 2:50 PM
Sorry, I just do not believe anything that has to do with numbers that comes out of dc. It seems they always make the numbers look good for bho? And in a month or so, they get revised up?
L
letget on January 17, 2013 at 2:52 PM
Yawn, whatever.
sauldalinsky on January 17, 2013 at 2:56 PM
“Good news” is the economy sucking a tiny bit less than it has been?
Guess the definition of good news has changed.
Rebar on January 17, 2013 at 2:59 PM
This topic is going to be like a dog whistle for all the trolls to start showing up to gloat about how “brave and brilliant” their Lord and Master is.
UltimateBob on January 17, 2013 at 3:00 PM
So HOW many people are unemployed as of now ?
Just in absolute plain numbers, not percentages, not rates of numbers, just HOW MANY ???????
burrata on January 17, 2013 at 3:04 PM
Same pie, more slices…..yyaaaaayyyy :O
burrata on January 17, 2013 at 3:07 PM
Welcome to the new “normal.”
UltimateBob on January 17, 2013 at 3:08 PM
Data such as this indicates that increased effort on the part of the administration is required to further depress and contract the economy, which fully explains the need to raise taxes and borrow more money from the Chinese.
BobMbx on January 17, 2013 at 3:09 PM
Two words…Superstorm Sandy. Housing and construction is UP…duh. Not that this impresses me as to the overall picture. I just know construction workers at the Jersey shore are jumping for joy.
NJ Red on January 17, 2013 at 3:12 PM
Here’s a question. With the implementation of Obamacare, and the recent announcements of many employers that employee hours are being cut below sometimes across the board, i.e., both part time and full time, how will that show up in employment statistics and how long will it take for that to wend it’s way through the system affecting such things as housing prices and starts? Will that even be track-able, or will we just see more anemic growth?
Dusty on January 17, 2013 at 3:14 PM
If it was good there would be:
* No need for QE
* No need to have ZIRP
* No expansion of FHA (or bailout)
* No need to have banks withhold inventory.
Don’t piss on my leg and say it’s raining.
Oil Can on January 17, 2013 at 3:17 PM
…WE’RE NUMB BY NOW!
KOOLAID2 on January 17, 2013 at 3:17 PM
…they have prostate problems!
KOOLAID2 on January 17, 2013 at 3:19 PM
IIUC, there is a huge inventory of UNSOLD
( new as well as pre-owned) homes, currently sitting in the market. To this number , add the number of potential foreclosures which will further increase that inventory in the next few months.
So the question is :
WHY are builders constructing even more new houses ?
Maybe they know something that we all don’t know . Yet.
Hmmmm…..
burrata on January 17, 2013 at 3:19 PM
This thread ain’t going anywhere. Anybody heard from Hillary regarding Algeria and Mali?
DanMan on January 17, 2013 at 3:20 PM
Are those the other two
wiveshusbands mentioned by Bill?Oil Can on January 17, 2013 at 3:24 PM
Why must Ed always couch this crapola in neutral tones, pretending there are no nistorical trends or momentum? It’s a form of journalistic malpractice / malfeasance. He probably thinks he’s being ‘non biased’, instead of context-absent.
rayra on January 17, 2013 at 3:26 PM
The economy is not in total destruction for the simple reasons:
The Federal reserve is printing trillions of dollars to pay government debt and bills…
The Federal reserve is allowing banks to borrow the printed money for free…
Wall Street (dominated by Limousine liberals) love the free money printed by the goverment because it is allowing them to make profits like never before, in fact they are the biggest profiteers by far from the Obama Presidency and hence they are faking the facade of good markets (DOW, S&P, NASDAQ)… Although Wall Street and the “Real Economy” have not been connected for the last 20 years…
The question is how long they can keep doing it and at what point the Federal Reserve can print more money without causing absolute and total collapse of the economy… Is it 10 trillions dollars, 20 trillions, 100 trillions?…
mnjg on January 17, 2013 at 3:34 PM
..which is why they were really stupid. The issue was significant to approximately 2-4% percent of the people (Gallup poll in the wake of Newtown) and their hectoring and limp-dick EO measures have succeeded in spinning a record 3 million more guns into law-abiding Americans’ hands over the last two months.
Molon Labe takes on a whole new meaning, don’t it?
The War Planner on January 17, 2013 at 3:34 PM
Neither: Cheap money, FHA guarantees, and adjusting to Obama’s New Economic Order, add up to economic activity.
PattyJ on January 17, 2013 at 4:20 PM
Ed! jeepers. 555,000 people filed for unemployment last week and 520k the week before that are you seriously buying that “seasonal adjustment” CRAP? Over a million people filed for unemployment. No amount of malarky with the numbers is gonna change that and you know too that if we had a Republican in the white house the media would be screaming that to the heavens.
dogsoldier on January 17, 2013 at 4:26 PM
You want reality or the official bull excrement?
Last I checked 89 million were no longer in the workforce. I estimate that over 90 now. A year ago people were throwing around the number 23 million unemployed and looking, in reality it was close to 30. I now estimate it over 30. Average stay on unemployment is over six months. We’ve added one million unadjusted actual real people to the rolls since January 1.
dogsoldier on January 17, 2013 at 4:32 PM
The housing market is not coming back. There are a lot of homes still up for sale after months of being on the market.
There are a lot of “housing starts” in the suburbs W / SW of the Twin Cities metro area, but that is all that they are: housing starts. They’ve been started, but not finished and no one living in them.
Mirimichi on January 17, 2013 at 5:57 PM
Meaningless…twitches of the dying.
Mimzey on January 17, 2013 at 5:57 PM
The 4-week average is still around 360K and there will not be much excitement until it goes below 350K, but in general these numbers are going in the right direction and are good news … Housing clearly bottomed last year after the foreclosure logjam was broken, and has been coming back for some time. Builder confidence continues to be high, and growing consensus that housing may take the lead in the recovery this year … December retail sales also came in stronger than expected this week, and it may be that 4Q12 GDP will not be as light as first feared after all. We’ll see soon … Meanwhile, the markets continue to climb. SP500 at a 5-year high, Dow topping 13,500 as the bulls get ready to charge. More turbulence ahead as the politicians do their dances, but after that … look out …
TouchdownBuddha on January 17, 2013 at 6:09 PM
Mostly because seasonal adjustments, properly applied, allow for comparison between different weeks (or months in a monthly series of statistics). When comparing the same week (or month) in different years, the unseasoned numbers are generally the ones to use, especially in a week that does not have a holiday or a month change affecting it like this past week.
Steve Eggleston on January 17, 2013 at 6:47 PM
Books are cooked; doesn’t matter anymore. No matter what the numbers really are, Barky and Co. will juice them somehow. They will never reflect that we will become Part-Time Nation by the end of the year (if we have jobs).
Philly on January 17, 2013 at 7:06 PM
As for the housing starts, it’s a lot less impessive than it seems. While it is the best December since 2007, prior to that, it is significantly weaker than the weakest December between 1993 and 2006. Indeed, other than recessionary periods, there wasn’t a December this weak going all the way back to 1959, the first year the Census Bureau kept this statistic.
Moreover, the 2012 total housing starts of 780,000, while easily the best of the Obama regime, is not only well behind 2008′s 906,000 starts, it is 234,000 lower than the weakest year between 1959 and 2007 – 1991′s 1,014,000.
In short, if there’s a housing “comeback”, it’s to a level far lower than we’ve had in modern history.
Steve Eggleston on January 17, 2013 at 7:08 PM
market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=216241
The diffusion index, if you remember, was positive last month. I was guardeded optimistic that we might have seen at least somewhat of a local bottom. Nope. It’s -5.8 this month.
We have a serious problem here; New Orders collapsed to -4.3 from 4.9. Shipments went flat and the rest of the internals look like crap as well.
Probably most important to the economy, both employees (-5.2 from -0.2) and workweek (-8.3 from 0.4) went strongly negative.
This is a crap report. The six month forward expectations are somewhere north of fantasy land, with the biggest surprises being in new orders, shipments and prices received and paid, all of which are ridiculously above current levels.
In addition note that the “fiscal policy developments” (a special question in this survey) were cited as reducing hiring plans by 37% of the respondents, with 49.3% saying it made no change.
We are back to sucksville for January folks; Richmond ought to be very interesting.
Obama sucks.
tom daschle concerned on January 17, 2013 at 8:20 PM
This says it all on the state of the economy…
Does this look like a recovery?
voiceofreason on January 17, 2013 at 9:36 PM
Florida alone is losing 2000 jobs because a grocery store chain is closing 33 of their stores.
In fact, nationwide there are dozens of stores from small family businesses to some major chains shutting down. And then there’s all the layoffs.
Heck, even Cirque du Soleil is axing 400 employees.
Dr. ZhivBlago on January 17, 2013 at 9:42 PM
Ya’ really think this is good news? When companies are down to the bare minimum of employees that they need to stay in business then there’s no more to layoff until they get down to having to close the business.
stukinIL4now on January 17, 2013 at 10:09 PM
I can’t help but envision all of these sickly looking people striking out headlines and recording their changes in their tiny little cubicles inside the Ministry of Truth.
Greenshield on January 18, 2013 at 8:59 AM