Update From Housing Trenches – The 180 is Complete!

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Sacramento-area home owners beware…it may be time to prepare for the next leg down in the market! I regret to inform you that yours truly – yes, the same guy who wrote an impassioned renter’s manifesto in 2010 – now has a “long” position in the housing market. The cold hard math tilted so much […]

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The Atlanta Fed issued a chart illustrating where the “big money” is laying down cash for US homes – namely the areas that were hit the hardest by the bust (Arizona, California, Nevada, Atlanta). I know there are hedge funds buying up tracts of homes here in Sacramento, as I have a friend who was […]

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Pimco’s Mark Kiesel says he’s “back in” the housing market after renting the past six years.  Kiesel sold his last house in 2006, when he was presciently concerned that the US housing market was in a bubble. He admits that headwinds remain, but believes that fundamentals have improved to the point of making housing attractive […]

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When I graduated from college and moved to California in 2003, the housing market was already running away from reality.  All level-headed signs pointed to a bubble.  John Talbot’s The Coming Crash in the Housing Market hit the nail on the head, or so I believed.  I saw Talbot speak in Palo Alto in 2005 […]

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When QE2 launched,  we cited a WSJ op-ed by our friend and frequent guest Andy Kessler, where he made the case that Bernanke’s real motivation for QE2 was to prop up the woeful housing market: I have a different explanation for the Fed’s latest easing program: Without another $600 billion floating through the economy, Mr. […]

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Anecdotally, I’ve been hearing reports and thoughts that the US housing market, if not at a bottom yet, should be close to one.  While this may be true for certain markets, it doesn’t appear that a base is being formed, at least yet, across the board. From the WSJ: Home values fell 3% in the […]

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The Economist’s quarterly home price index was just published, concluding that while home prices have come down globally from their 2007 peak, they are still overvalued on the whole. Indeed, only in Hong Kong, Singapore and Switzerland is the property market more overvalued than it was before the global economic downturn began in the third […]

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Since March 2009, it’s been a bull market in just about everything! Source: Google Finance Well, except for housing that is… Source: www.csmonitor.com Housing remains the lone asset class that appears completely immune to QE.  Which is ironic, and perhaps appropriate, because smart people such as Andy Kessler have hypothesized that boosting real estate was […]

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Wow – I’d have guessed at least 10% lower if you’d asked me. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports (hat tip Dave Rosenberg): The median down payment in nine major U.S. cities rose to 22% last year on properties purchased through conventional mortgages, according to an analysis for The Wall Street Journal by real-estate portal Zillow.com. […]

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A headline that looks like it’s been in the queue for about two years just popped out of the oven over the weekend: Credit Unions Bailed Out Two years after the peak of the financial crisis, the federal government swooped in to stabilize a crucial part of the credit-union sector battered by losses on subprime […]

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