Boomer’s Blog

Bloomberg had some interesting news about real estate investors earlier this month. “As the U.S. housing recession enters its fourth year, there’s no sign of a recovery because speculators account for most of the rise in sales.”

What is Recovery?

This got me thinking: How do they define recovery? In terms of the housing market, how will recovery ultimately be measured? Price stabilization? Fewer foreclosures?  More accessible home loans? More reasonable terms? Housing Inventories that don’t match the number burgers served by McDonalds?

Though some of us may look great in tights and a cape — members of or proud and independent profession are ill-equipped to go back in time and undo the havoc that has been unleashed on or economy by unbridled Wall Street greed and Main Street folly, but at least we’re doing or part to clean up the mess.

According to a National Association of Realtors (NAR) report released at the end of 2008, there were 4.2 million homes on the market in November, falling from a record peak of 4.6 million in July. What does Bloomberg call that? A death rattle?

The REI Light at the End of the Tunnel

Most signs of recovery seem to relate back to confidence in the market. If real estate investors are out there in the trenches, securing financing and taking chances on houses that the mainstream has written off as blight, aren’t we leaders on the road to recovery?

According to the FDIC, half of all U.S. purchases in November were foreclosures, and at the end of Q3, banks owned a record $11.5 billion of repossessed homes.  What do these data tell us?

Can Our Efforts Turn the Tide?

While much of the nation is sitting on the couch, watching the news and wondering why their credit cards suddenly stopped working, and lenders continue panhandling  Congress for their next financial bottle of Night Train, we’re out there in droves,sweating real bullets, replacing miles of copper wire that’s been gutted from abandoned (bank-owned) properties, finding homes for abandoned pets, painting, landscaping and committing other wanton acts of rehabbiness.

These efforts aren’t just entrepreneurial wizardry, they’re American in spirit. And it’s going to take a lot more of where that came from in every every economic sector to get this train back on the tracks.

If We Can’t Spur Recovery, How Can We Trigger the Next Crash?!

While the media may be slightly more reluctant than banks to give credit where it is due heading into 2009 with a fresh, new federal administration, this Bloomberg article does raise an interesting point about our mighty force in the rapidly evolving housing market.

Robert Shiller, father of the popular Case-Shiller real estate price index and current Yale University professor told Bloomberg: “You don’t have [the market] in strong hands, you have flippers. These speculators are preventing the market from crashing now, and when they get out, it could fall again.”

Is it just me, or is it ironic that the same article that prematurely credits us for the next crash gives us none when it comes to setting the recovery wheels in motion? Read the article for yourself and let me know what you think.

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Stay tuned for tips on using Google for free and effective online lead generation, a step-by-step guide for finding the best probate real estate deals in your market … and how A&E TV network’s “Flip this House” star Than Merrill just added REI Spy to his already illustrious resume.

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Technologies offering free on-line property information are changing the real estate business and quietly building a mighty force that is poised to obliterate the National Association of Realtors‘ (NAR) virtual monopoly on property information and decimate the concept of the 6 percent agent commission.

Until recently, it was challenging to operate in the residential real estate market without access to the NAR’s multiple-listing service (MLS) because only realtors really knew what homes in any given area were selling for. Realtors who shared the information generally expected a return for their data sharing and professional services, usually in the form of a 6 percent commission on subsequent property transactions. But times are rapidly changing.

The Holy Grail: Data Accuracy
Soon, an estimate for just about any home’s value will be available online from sources such as Zillow.com. Many already are. But are the data accurate? A 2007 Wall Street Journal analysis of 1,000 home sales shows that Zillow’s “Zestimates” often are accurate, often within a few percentage points of the actual price paid. But when Zillow is off, the disparity can be dramatic.

Zillow.com officials say that constant refinements to their system make the data more accurate today than ever. Changes to the back-end of the system and enhancements like adding a process whereby owners can update their property information in Zillow.com’s system all work to maximize on-target data reporting.

Objectivity Fuels Credibility
Still, services such as those offered by Zillow.com are not yet perfect. Zillow’s valuation protocol is most accurate for mid-price homes in areas where there is high property turnover; it is less effective in neighborhoods where people seldom move. But the time may come when Zillow is seen as more reliable than human brokers, Money magazine reports.

Often, brokers and owners have an incentive to inflate estimates to win prospective clients and are not always tuned in to market changes. Data from sources such as Zillow.com are far more objective and are becoming more widely used by consumers, brokers and by major media media outlets to establish important benchmarks in the real estate market.

In other words, if everyone uses the data, the provider can become a significant force in the market. For example, financial news giant Bloomberg recently reported that U.S. home values dropped 7.7 percent in the first quarter to the lowest in almost three years, based on estimates by Zillow.com. The article says this is the largest decline in 12 years of data compiled by the Seattle-based online data provider. When the media major players cite a particular data provider as a source, it lends great credibility to the quality of the information outfits like Zillow.com provide.

All Aboard the Gravy Train
Zillow.com launched its Web site in 2006 to provide homeowners, real estate agents and potential buyers with value assessments called “zestimates” for single-family homes, co- operative apartments and condominiums. The company has since become a real estate powerhouse, recently expanding its operation to provide mortgage market information services. In the past couple of years, competitors have sprung up for a taste of the gravy snatched from the plates of brokers and others working from the tradtional MLS system data model.

According to Online Media Daily, in December 2007, San Francisco-based Trulia.com managed to edge out Zillow.com, AOL Real Estate and HouseValues in terms of unique visitors. The site nearly tripled its audience from the previous year, growing from 579,000 unique visitors to 1.6 million. Trulia recently sweetened the user experience by offering not only listing info and photos, but access to view the property via Google’s popular Street View Map option. Google Street View where it’s available, gives users an interactive, mobile, street-level view of properties and neighborhoods.

John Vogel, who teaches economics and real estate at Dartmouth, says that the democratization of real estate data imperils the future off the 6 percent real estate commission. Real estate brokers will retain a role as marketers, especially in tough markets. But, Money magazine says, like stock brokers before them, they’ll find that as they lose their traditional monopoly on information, they just can’t command their traditional price.

Below is a list of five top real estate valuation Web sites (My personal favorites are Trulia and Zillow).

• AOL Real Estate
• HomeGain.com
• RealEstateABC.com
• Trulia.com
• Zillow.com

Federal housing authorities have reached a $31.4 million settlement with ousted Fannie Mae CEO and Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar Franklin Raines and some of his former staff. The agreement follows allegations that Raines and his deputies inflated earnings reports while at the helm of largest mortgage-finance company in the nation. The deal settles $215 million lawsuit filed by Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) against the crew in late 2006 over an assessed $6.3 billion in misstatements issued by Fannie Mae, a government-chartered company.

Bloomberg reports that as part of the settlement deal, Raines has agreed to pay $24.7 million in fines and penalties and will forfeit stock options. But the buck doesn’t stop there. Former Fannie Mae CFO Timothy Howard will fork over $6.4 million, and former controller Leanne Spencer was fined $275,000. The penalties however, won’t be paid in full by Raines, Howard or Spencer. Fannie Mae’s insurance carrier will cover the $3 million cash portion of the settlement.

Raines himself will pay a $2 million fine to the federal government; relinquish claims on stock options valued at $15.6 million when they were issued; donate $1.8 million in proceeds from the sale of Fannie Mae stock to charitable programs that help struggling homeowners; and forfeit about $5.3 million in other benefits so far unspecified by OFHEO. He received the stock options in 2000-2003 for 932,000 shares at exercise prices ranging from $69.43 to $80.95 a share. After he was booted, the shares never rose above $72 and now trade at less than $30, rendering his relinquished options worthless on the market.

Insurance will cover Howard’s $750,000 fine, but he’ll give up $5.2 million in stock options, contribute $200,000 in proceeds from stock sales to charity and loose unspecified benefits valued at $240,000, OFHEO said.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created to boost homeownership. Their profits stem from holding mortgages and mortgage bonds as investments and by charging fees to guarantee and package the loans as securities. The government requires them to reserve capital to cover losses on those mortgages. The companies came under greater regulatory scrutiny in 2003, when accounting blunders first became painfully evident.

In a similar settlement deal, OFHEO documents show that former Freddie Mac CEO Leland Brendsel agreed in November to pay $16.4 million in penalties for his role in that company’s bogus accounting statements. Brendsel resigned under pressure from Freddie Mac in 2003, and on his way out agreed to pay a $2.5 million penalty, return $10.5 million in compensation and drop a claim to $3.4 million in additional earnings.

In the wake of the announcement, Fannie Mae climbed 30 cents to $28.55 Friday in NYSE composite trading, while Freddie Mac jumped 25 cents to $27.06. The two companies own or guarantee more than 40 percent of the $11.5 trillion in outstanding U.S. home loans.