Author: Brian

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1736710,00.html

The black bus rivals a greyhound in size but has an interior like a limo–and it gets a few curious looks as we wander into the dense neighborhoods of Elk Grove, Calif., a quiet suburb 15 minutes south of Sacramento. Five of us–a mortgage counselor, three investors and I–are looking at 10 recently foreclosed homes dubbed “excellent deals” by the O’Brien Co., the agency that set up the trip.

These “magical misery tours” are real estate agents’ attempts to move their ever increasing inventory fast, as the mortgage crisis forces more and more homeowners into foreclosure. The idea originated in nearby Stockton last year and has migrated to other cities in California, Michigan, Florida and Massachusetts. Elk Grove alone has about 2,120 bank-owned houses for sale and 1,280 in pre-foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac, a real-estate-data website. The places we see vary from spotless to foul-smelling. One house, which appears to have been vacated in a hurry, has enormous stuffed animals on the windowsills and children’s artwork still pasted on a wall. This three-bedroom, two-bath home is going for $210,000–about half the $400,000 it sold for in June 2005.

Like many communities across the U.S. that boomed during the housing bubble, Elk Grove is feeling the pain of the housing burst. For the most part, the trauma of eviction is hidden–the suburb has the occasional overgrown yard, although not as many as I’d expected, and FOR SALE signs dot the streets. But a funny thing happened on the way to Elk Grove’s demise: it has started to come back. Over the past six months, investors and first-time home buyers have moved in, snapping up homes now priced at less than $250,000. Residents are working to make sure the neighborhoods they traded up to remain desirable, getting together to mow lawns of bank-owned homes, partner with the police and draft ordinances to hold landlords accountable for disheveled properties. “We’ve just changed our mind-set,” says resident Phillip Stark. “It’s no longer what can the city do for me, but what can I do for the city.”

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080313/news_1c13tvm.html

Real estate may have cooled considerably as an investment, but not real estate television.

House flipping and home renovation programs are still big hits on cable. While “for sale” signs sprout on lawns across the country, TV programmers are like developers who plow ahead with new housing projects anyway.

A new season of the A&E Network’s “Flip This House” – one of a troika with TLC’s “Flip That House” and Bravo’s “Flipping Out” – premieres Saturday night.

A&E has several new programs in development. At least six new ones are beginning on TLC in the next year, starting with “Date My House,” where former “Bachelor” Bob Guiney hosts a program where potential buyers spend a night in a home on the market.

HGTV had its highest prime-time ratings ever in January. Nine of its top 10 series deal with the housing market, including “House Hunters,” “My First Place,” “Hidden Potential,” “Buy Me” and “Design to Sell.” The network did a special Feb. 29 theme day of “taking the big leap,” or investing in that first house.

“What’s driving interest right now is that people are worried about it – ‘What’s the value of my home? How can I increase interest in my home?’ ” said Jim Samples, HGTV president. “And then there’s the ‘life goes on’ factor. People are still changing jobs, families are still getting bigger. If anything, they tend to nest in this environment.”

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2009/03/squat_your_way_to_a_beautiful_home.php

NBC4 Los Angeles reported yesterday on the trend of the week: hometending. While banks wait to sell foreclosed homes, they need folks to keep up appearances by filling the space with their furniture and accessories, tidy up, and make the residences safer with their presence. What do the professional squatters get out of the deal? A major break on rent. The NBC story mentioned a hometender who was paying $1,100 on a Toluca Lake house that would have gone for over $3,000. Additionally, this Hometenders.net site is advertising some deals in San Antonio, Texas (seen above), while closer to home, here’s a designer hometending company with an office in Los Angeles. There are also some hometending listings on Craigslist (here’s a three-bedroom in the Hollywood Hills renting for $1,100 a month). A few caveats to hometending: you can’t smoke, can’t have pets, and could get the boot within a few days notice.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/us/30walkaway.html?ref=us

Mercy James thought she had lost her rental property here to foreclosure. A date for a sheriff’s sale had been set, and notices about the foreclosure process were piling up in her mailbox.

Ms. James had the tenants move out, and soon her white house at the corner of Thomas and Maple Streets fell into the hands of looters and vandals, and then, into disrepair. Dejected and broke, Ms. James said she salvaged but a lesson from her loss.

So imagine her surprise when the City of South Bend contacted her recently, demanding that she resume maintenance on the property. The sheriff’s sale had been canceled at the last minute, leaving the property title — and a world of trouble — in her name.

“I thought, ‘What kind of game is this?’ ” Ms. James, 41, said while picking at trash at the house, now so worthless the city plans to demolish it — another bill for which she will be liable.

City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.

The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches. Technically, they still owe on the mortgage, but as a practicality, rarely would a mortgage holder receive any more payments on the loan. The way mortgages are bundled and resold, it can be enormously time-consuming just trying to determine what company holds the loan on a property thought to be in foreclosure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/business/economy/17econ.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1296162246-ak9mwEcE17XdeiYGVtWlxQ

Construction of new homes fell sharply last month, and foreclosures surged in the first quarter, according to reports released on Thursday, signaling a still-struggling housing market.

The government reported that new home starts fell 10.8 percent in March from February, just a month after a spike in new-home construction raised hopes that the country’s housing market was beginning to make a comeback as credit conditions eased.

Home construction in March fell to an annual rate of 510,000 units, the Commerce Department reported, less than expectations by economists of 540,000 units. It was the second-lowest level on record and 48.4 percent lower than housing starts in March 2008.

“There’s still no clear indication that the construction market is coming back,” said Mike Larson, a housing analyst at Weiss Research. “Even if companies want to start projects, they’re having a harder time getting the money to do so. We’re being overwhelmed by distressed inventory as well as regular sellers trying to get out of their homes. There’s not a heck of a lot of incentive for builders to ramp up construction.”

Still, some housing experts say the decline in home building was a crucial step toward lowering the glut of unsold houses and condominiums on the market so that housing supply once again lines up with demand.

Also on Thursday, the data firm RealtyTrac reported that foreclosure filings surged 9 percent, to 803,489 properties, in the first quarter of 2009. RealtyTrac said that foreclosure notices increased 17 percent in March from February.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/08/entertainment/et-hgtv8

Kelley Alexander, a 47-year-old mother, is appearing on a new reality television series with something unusual at stake: her Sherman Oaks house.

If she and her sister can beat four other neighborhood families on HGTV’s new reality show “$250,000 Challenge,” which debuts at the end of the month, Alexander gets a quarter-million-dollar windfall, which she says is enough to save her from a looming foreclosure. But if she loses the contest, the home, which she shares with her two teenage children, will likely be gone.

“We have a bad mortgage,” said Alexander as a small army of camera operators and production assistants prepared to shoot more footage outside the sliding-glass doors of her bedroom. “On the first day of [the show], they put foreclosure papers on my door.”

Alexander, a divorcee whose ex-husband has helped support the family with his income as a TV writer, doesn’t live in the Inland Empire, where foreclosure rates have been among the highest in Southern California. She lives on a leafy street in what was once a solidly middle-class neighborhood in Sherman Oaks. But an economy that’s afflicted even once-secure families has her turning to a reality show for financial salvation.

In better times, reality television about real estate usually meant shows about lavish home design, rescuing neglected properties and even building brand-new homes for families down on their luck. But HGTV saw an opportunity amid the rubble of a crumbling economy to lend a helping hand to the middle class.

The new show, hosted by Drew Lachey and starting May 31, is fully embracing the consequences of the recession. It has families compete in a series of weekly home improvement and design challenges with the winner ultimately walking away with a newly renovated home and the huge cash prize. (The network says a second season is in the works.)

“A lot of these homes need updating. And people are nervous about spending money because of falling [real estate] values,” said Amy Quimby, the director of original programming at HGTV, as she stood on the street outside the Alexanders’ home. “These are everyday people that needed a leg up.”

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890400,00.html

Richard Cory, richer than a king, “fluttered pulses when he said,/ ‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.” And in the shocking final line of E.A. Robinson’s famous poem, this outwardly ideal man “went home and put a bullet through his head.”

Some lives are like Hollywood soundstages, all façade, and suicide is the instrument by which their hollowness is revealed. Increasingly, though, this tragedy works in reverse. Hollow men (it’s almost always men) add mass murder to their suicidal outbursts, hoping to mask their nothingness with a front of brutal significance.

Jiverly Wong was unknown and unremarkable in life. Had he gone quietly like Cory, he would have died unnoticed–evidently a fate too much to bear. Instead, he blocked the rear exit of an immigrant center in Binghamton, N.Y., and walked with guns drawn through the front door. Thirteen people died to create Wong’s illusion of importance. Or maybe illusion is the wrong word, for he certainly made himself important to them.

A rash of mass murder–suicides has left more than 50 people dead in the U.S. over the past month. Criminologist James Alan Fox, attempting to explain the killings to the Washington Post, said, “The economic pie is shrinking to the point where it looks more like a Pop-Tart.” But the Dow was above 12,000 on the April morning two years ago when Cho Seung-Hui made his bid for significance at Virginia Tech. And the rampage of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School, 10 Aprils ago, came during a delirious bull run.

Those who blame America’s gun culture note that sales of weapons and ammo have been brisk lately, fueled by fear of a recession-related crime wave and fear that the Obama Administration might tighten gun laws. But remember what Linda Loman said as her husband, the failed salesman Willy, headed toward his suicide: “Attention must be paid.” When Arthur Miller wrote that, 60 years ago, it was a lament. Now it’s a deadly threat.