FSBO BLOG

a three-year inventory of homes in foreclosure for sale! On average foreclosure properties on the market are 35% less than comparable properties. Over 30% of all sales are foreclosed properties. This all gets back to the owners of these properties, the banks & government.  We have unveiled the Theo Plan to eliminate these from the market place and our plan has been delivered to the Federal Reserve, US Senate and the Presidents office. More to come…

Have you ever seen a ‘hand painted’ for sale sign in a yard or nailed to a tree. What was your impression? Real Estate agents will tell you the more professional the Yard Sign the more traffic and higher price you will receive. FSBO.com offers that as one of our many services, you should take advantage of this.

New home sales report today showed record low 175,000 new homes available for sale last month, down 2.8 percent from the prior month. At April’s sales pace, the supply of new homes on the market dropped to 6.5 months’ worth, the lowest since April last year, from 7.2 months’ worth in March.

As long as inventories decrease faster than sales decrease, the turn around gets closer. We are seeing this same shortening of ‘months on market’ drop in resale properties all across the country.

Used car prices are at a 16 year high according to the NADA.  People are holding on to cars a year longer than they did before the recession, which has created a tight supply of used vehicles. Dealers are paying an average of $11,660 for a used car, up almost 30% since December 2008. “You’re not going to find a situation like this very often,” says Jonathan Banks, executive auto analyst for the National Automobile Dealers Association used-car pricing guide. David Whiston, auto analyst for Morningstar, says “That’s probably a good indication that prices are at or near a peak.” Thus creating a ‘pent up’ demand for new cars in the future. Real Estate is seeing the same pent up demand building as rents increase and families hold off on buying up or down.

Wow, mortgage rates again have dropped to the lowest this year. We are jumping out of our chair encouraging buyers to do it now. 30 yr below 4% or 15 yr at 3.25%. Here is a quick link to view:

http://www.fsbo.com/Buyers/Mortgages.aspx

Five years ago, everyone was confident in their job, their real estate & retirement money increasing, the future, etc. then suddenly everything reversed. Now we have just the opposite; concerns over jobs, house values, economic recovery, government spending, etc.  Could we see another quick reversal to the upside?

Absolutely, because the government has pumped so much extra cash into our system, prices will go up, but so will inflation. Your buying power will seem less, but your values will be higher.  With rates back down, this could be your last chance to pick up an excellent mortgage rate and a house below normal value.

When experts predicted Miami, Las Vegas, Arizona, etc. would see a boom in housing, the builders/investors/speculators rushed in to build more housing. Unfortunately they all read the same reports and overbuilt. Now, just the opposite is happening. All experts are now predicting, more foreclosures and more price declines for this year.  These recent predictions are based on the lastest sales, which 35-40% are bank or govt owned properties.  FSBO.com still predicts that when the turn around occurs, it will be faster and more dramatic than anyone could predict. Buyers need to act now, in 2-3 years they will look back on the summer of 2011 and say “man, I should have bought in 2011″

Instead of using their cash to provide new mortgages, which support real estate prices, banks bought $65 billion of U.S. debt in the past seven weeks, as their total holdings reached $1.68 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data.

If they put that $1.68 trillion into the residential housing market, prices/sales would stablize (and go up), foreclosures would drop dramatically, and employment would increase.  The banks own over 1 million properties, they would immediately help themselves and the economy.