First off, let me begin by saying that I value all the varied diaries [when are we going to start calling them posts, or did we discard that?] you people put on here.
Second I admit to recently having gotten a Pinterest account. Now Pinterest is mainly concerned with pictures that you "snag" off the net onto your "boards" allowing you to catalog your pins leading back to the original links. Most of it is shoes and gardening and decor. There are boards of LOLcats and funny sayings etc.; you can customize what you like and arrange it and name it whatever you wish. You can also upload your own stuff. This is helpful if you are bad at arranging your favorite links [like me], or in the habit of periodically killing hard drives [also like me].
I have recently begun pinning some diaries here. This requires that the diary have an image, at least one, so that I can pin the picture and then I can copy the gist of the diary in my description and further in a comments section if I think it needs more explaining. I started out with pinning graphs and charts and economics mainly. Some of my pins have gotten repinned, ie., somebody else saw my pin and repinned it to their board. If they by chance wander onto your board or your set of boards they can 'follow' you and when you pin something it goes into the stream of recently pinned submissions. Or they click onto your board and click your pin and follow it to the original link and read more.
For example, I pinned Steveingen's picture of Lisianthus which leads people back here to his photo diary of his beautiful gardening.
Since I like pictures in diaries and I am following my own advice on how to get pinned and get further exposure, here is one of my pins:
Now this is not to say this diary is worth pinning, but I do try to put an image in most of my diaries now. And I haven't gotten to the point yet, as my title suggests but I'm getting to that.
As I said before Pinterest is image based. You may see a recipe you like and you can pin it and it leads you back to the site where the recipe appears. I like interior and building design and have done quite a lot of it over my lifetime, so I have boards that categorize ideas that I like that have to do with houses and outbuildings, kitchens and fences among others. I have scads of pictures that have to do with attractive and utile chicken coops. I have been wanting a few chickens and while my lot here is certainly large enough, the county prohibits chickens on any lot smaller than 3 acres. I also like to garden, but the soil here is difficult, full of shale and clay and too acidic because of all the pine trees.
Not a few Pinterest offerings are real estate listings for houses people find attractive. There are a lot of pins from houzz.com which features a lot of high end architects' finished projects. All of which led me to thinking I could move. I think of moving periodically. But there are lots of variables to moving that hinge upon members of my immediate family and their needs regarding space and location and the type of property. There was no way anybody was moving when middle daughter was in school. There's no way I could seriously downsize with my husband's 'stuff'. Oldest and youngest and I are pretty flexible. Youngest only needs an internet connection and a room, all other considerations are moot. She really doesn't care about a room either, I often find her splayed out, sound asleep on two or three dining room chairs half under the table in what looks like a really uncomfortable arrangement.
ok the point........
Oldest and I are on the same page. We would like some arable dirt and some chickens. We would like a greenhouse, a big honking year-round one. We also would like some small wind generation and passive solar and solar voltaic. Oldest lives in my other house which is a nice patch but it is surrounded by farmers that use Roundup and plant genetically modified corn. There are no laws protecting the quiet enjoyment of your property to exclude the wind blowing toxic chemicals into your space/face unfortunately.
So off to the interwebz. We were musing about where there are no covenants that would restrict a VAWT or two or three with some acreage that was open and tillable with a house that would fit all of our needs and be something we could afford. This meant we were looking in the next county, which is in the neighboring state and we started by looking where a friend of hers lives and we happened across something else entirely.....
A huge house, and I mean huge. On a large patch. It was altogether perfect. And by perfect, it had problems. It had major problems on its face. But to me, these were good problems because I would have changed them anyway and the problems were the sort I have expertise with, or that I have access to the particular expertise so that I could fix them. The price was right. The property was about 60% off of what it would have been had it been finished, maintained, and not had problems. So I made an inquiry to the listing agent. Or rather I made my husband do it because he is a broker.
The house is a foreclosure. It's been on the market for no less than two and a half years being steadily marked down. All the while, people have been taking whatever isn't nailed down like the air handlers for the A/C, plumbing fixtures and maybe the kitchen appliances. The house was never occupied and it was unfinished and now some of the systems components are gone. Despite all of this, the listing agent says he has two cash offers already for more than full price, but the bank, Deutsche Bank USA, won't entertain any of them. According to him, they won't even look at any offers. Upon further meanderings on the interwebz it looks like at some point IndyMac owned the note on the house. IndyMac failed and Deutsche Bank gobbled whatever crumbs IndyMac was still holding. A google search of Duetsche Bank shows a long list of foreclosure lawsuits and their being mixed up in problems regarding robosigning and assertions that they couldn't prove ownership on the properties they were foreclosing upon.
My husband joked that the bank probably wishes the whole thing would burn down. But that isn't the case. You can't insure a property if it isn't occupied for more than 6 months. The longer the house sits, the worse its problems become. Even if you ignore the house, the surrounding property needs to be at least mowed and you have to pay the property taxes, which in this case are hefty. The bank wants a cash deal but they won't entertain any offers. There's no way you could get a mortgage because the house isn't finished and it has a lot of problems. It's not an insurable asset because it isn't insurable.
The property was removed from the market 3 days ago. I had occasion to drive by it yesterday and saw a long limousine type SUV parked outside. Otherwise I would have driven in and taken a close up look of the house and the lot. I still haven't ruled it out and I have done a lot of searching and research of similar properties within a large radius which includes 3 states and various counties. There isn't anything really similar but the price points and the lot sizes but I got an overview of the market in foreclosures and the market in houses over a certain price.
Foreclosures aren't selling, especially those that would be good deals and are between $500K-$1M+. There a lot of them, mostly vacant, accumulating problems and being devalued because of lack of upkeep or rehabbing. So what is going on? The banks are in a hot hurry to foreclose but they refuse to sell. Most property info is available online now, it's not as if the relative values are a secret. If you hit Zillow you can see how long a property has been on the market, who listed it, who listed it before them and whether it is a foreclosure and a lot of other things. This info is available on properties that are not on the market also, along with current and past tax info.
What is going on:
^"mark to market"
As long as the banks hold onto distressed property, they don't have to write in their ledgers what the property sells for, so they don't sell it, they keep it on the books as an asset. They keep paying the taxes and the property sits. Meanwhile it shows up on their ledgers a $1M asset, when in reality, the market will only bear $400-$500K and if they sold it, they would have to show a mark down of 50%-60%.
In fact, studies have shown, the more expensive the house is and the more money that is owed, the longer the bank will take to foreclose. They'll swoop right in on people that have a lot of equity at the smaller price points though, and they have. The big properties/debts they leave alone because it chips away at their portfolio faster.
There is no "free market" going on here. The banks are protecting the higher end of the market to cook their books. Meanwhile, down in the median to lower markets, the prices are still not hitting bottom and they won't until the banks come off the higher priced properties. Which is to say, they aren't going to correct in a proper economic way, meaning we aren't going to recover soon, if ever. The deck is stacked.
In addition to all of this, the banks may have problems sorting out ownership on these various notes they have acquired due to the robosigning debacle. If you are going to buy a house, make sure you get owner's title insurance, and I mean ANY property.
As housing is a necessity and we have a glut of it, most of it unaffordable because of the income disparity and the lack of jobs pushing down wages, we have a serious problem. It's true that housing has come down a bit, but not enough to even out the reasonable flow of transactions that make our economy work. We're in stall mode. We're in this mode because the conservatives are not participating in our economy. They are conserving what they have and making money off of their inflated ledgers while we pay the maintenance on this country. If people like Eric Cantor had their way it would be even more extreme. What plans does Mitt Romney have to better the economy? I haven't heard any of them. He certainly isn't going to force a mark to market sell off to represent the real dollar value of anything, that's how he manipulated a large part of his fortune to make more money. He accumulated debt and then walked away from going concerns.
Take for instance the property cited in this diary, if it had been properly maintained, it would have thrown $200K into the economy at the least. That's how much work it needs, retail. Instead, the bank is sitting on it paying the taxes and letting it rot. Multiply that property times 5 and we're talking $1M. I could find 4 more in about 5 minutes in the same county. This is: jobs that are not available, goods that are not purchased, taxes that are never realized and an economy that is not improving except on paper at the very top. It is price fixing. It is price gouging. There is no free market.
There is no free market unless and until the housing market is forced to reach its real price point.