Are we being too hard on Realtor associations?

I wanted to clear up a common misconception on this blog, that home price statistics provided by Realtors are somehow tainted or suspect. The insinuation is that Realtors have underestimated home price declines to save their shirts.

I disagree. And I've got the numbers to prove my point.

Many vouch for the superior accuracy of the S&P Case-Shiller Index. No doubt it's among the most accurate gauges out there. But Case Shiller actually shows smaller home price declines than Realtors do.

According to Case Shiller, Tampa Bay area home prices peaked in July 2006, when the index read 238. By February 2008, the index had fallen to 188.59. That's a drop of 20.7 percent from peak to present.

Meanwhile, Realtors say Tampa reached its peak median home price in June 2006 at $239,600. By February of this year, the median price had dropped to $178,900. That's a drop of 25.3 percent from peak to present.

If Realtors are toying with statistics to obscure the awfulness of the housing market, that's a strange way to do so.

The best explanation for the difference is that Case-Shiller weeds out foreclosure sales and other distortions of the market. Realtors report most everything that moved on the Multiple Listing Service, including sales of bank-owned properties and bottom basement short sales.

Assail Realtors for their "best time to buy" pronouncements if you wish. But their stats are fairly sound.

Tampa area new home closings down by about half

Our local new home market probably won't reach buyer/seller equilibrium for another year.

So says housing analyst Tony Polito, whose firm Metrostudy released new home sales data for the first three months of 2008. Polito initially thought the new home market would stabilize in late 2008. He no longer believes so.

Housing starts here were off 43 percent, from 2,240 in the first quarter of 2007 to 1,277 in the first quarter of this year. Metrostudy chalks up a start when a concrete slab is poured.

New home closings nosedived 47.5 percent year to year. They were 3,999 in first quarter 2007 versus 2,102 first quarter 208. Metrostudy is strict about how it defines closings. It has to see evidence somebody has actually moved in. That means vacant investor homes are discounted.

A glimmer of hope emerged from Polito's report. Builders continue to whittle down inventory, though declining sales have substantially slowed that effort.

“Because builders are not starting speculative homes, the number of finished vacant housing units continued to decline during the first quarter. This was the fourth quarter of declining finished vacant inventory in the Tampa Bay market. However, the months of supply of finished vacant inventory as measured by the annual closing rate, continued to increase,” Polito said.

Case Shiller: Tampa home prices down 17.5 percent

The S&P Case-Shiller Index, the well-regarded home price tracking service, has released more grim home price news.

You know it's bad when Tampa's prices were down 17.5 percent in February - and we're no where near the worst off. Here's the most depressed housing markets among the 20 metro areas on Case Shiller's list:

1. Las Vegas, -22.8 percent
2. Miami, -21.7 percent
3. Phoenix, -20.8 percent
4. Las Angeles, - 19.4 percent
5. San Diego, -19.2 percent
6. Tampa, -17.5 percent

According to the index, average Tampa area home prices are what they were three years ago. Here's a link with a home price chart.

Tampa military families can't sell their houses

Here's a piece by my Times colleague Jan Wesner about MacDill families unable to unload their homes. They're not speculators. They're simply military families tranferred to their next post. Talk about "motivated sellers"...

Here's a link.

Average Tampa real estate agent wage drops below $40,000

In the Tampa Bay area, the average annual wage for a real estate agent and broker is $38,000, according to the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation.

The "current" number hails from Sept. 30, 2007. I guess that's government efficiency at work.

Earnings for local real estate sales people topped out at nearly $47,000 in 2005, softened to $45,400 in 2006 and took a greater turn for the worse in 2007.

From 2005 to 2007, average wages fell by 19 percent. When you consider that hundreds of agents who dropped from the workforce, that's a pretty big drop.

Also keep in mind that the salaries of the higher paid brokers, typically the guys and gals that run the realty companies, are averaged into the equation.

Starbucks cites Florida housing slump to explain dearth of sippers

Say it ain't so. The housing slump is hurting the consumption of boiled water poured over pulverized roasted Colombian beans:

Starbucks Corporation reported preliminary second quarter fiscal 2008 results and revised its view of full-year fiscal 2008 earnings per share, both of which primarily reflect the sharp weakening in the U.S. consumer environment.

Contributing to the softness in revenues for the quarter was a mid-single-digit decline in U.S. comparable store sales, driven by decreased traffic. Of note, the California and Florida markets, where consumers have been especially impacted by the effects of the downturn in the housing market, account for 32 percent of Starbucks U.S. retail revenues and 31 percent of its U.S. company-operated retail store portfolio.

Pretty soon they'll blame melting polar ice on the housing slump.

Foreclosures are everyone's problem

A glut of foreclosures can really spoil a neighborhood. Problems run the gamut from brown lawns and overgrown shrubs to gangs and graffiti.

Here's a column spelling out the problem.

National new home sales worst since 1991

We published new home starts figures last week that showed the weakest market since 1991. New home sales are no exception.

Starts are generally when builders pour the concrete slabs for the new houses. Sales are just that - someone closes on the purchases of the house.

Starts that don't become sales are called cancellations. They've been high during the housing slump as buyers learned they couldn't qualify for loans (Or didn't want to buy a house no longer worth what they agreed to pay).

This link provides some details from the U.S. Commerce Dept.

What if we're only in the eye of the housing hurricane?

Here's a link to a grim Barron's opinion piece written by a Florida Realtor. His argument is that we're experiencing only a remission in our housing sickness before the full-blown symptoms return.

To summarize his arguments: Banks are ill prepared to handle the foreclosure wave. The result will be a surge in unsold homes at just the wrong time. Also, many of the home buyers returning to the market this spring simply can't get loans. So they represent false hope.

I think he errs a bit on the negative side, as if he woke up in a panic at 3 a.m. and committed his thoughts to the note pad on the nightstand. The Tampa region simply has more economic muscle than this Realtor's home base in Stuart, Fla.

New "short sale" scam taking root?

Predators always seem to find fresh prey, even when game is otherwise thin on the ground. That thought arose as I got a tip about a new get-rich-quick scam involving short sales.

Short sales occur when lenders agree to let home owners sell their properties for less than the mortgage balance. While the process involves debt forgiveness, banks often prefer short sales to the messiness of foreclosures.

Here's what's been happening in some less-than-transparent cases in the Tampa Bay area: Let's say a Realtor agrees to market a house for $150,000. A third party short sale company in cahoots with the Realtor convinces the bank to accept that price.

The Realtor then negotiates a $175,000 deal with a buyer behind the bank's and home owner's back. With a bit of financing and paperwork sleight of hand, the bank is presented with a closed sale for $150,000.

The Realtor and his accomplices make off with the $25,000 difference, money that by all rights belongs to the bank.

Some might argue that this is a normal property "flip." I beg to differ. The outstanding mortage on such a house might be $230,000. It smacks of fraud not to pass the full sales amount to the lender.

Let's be clear here: Most short sale rescue companies and short sale Realtors seem to be legitimate. But it pays to sniff out the bad eggs.

Realtors make money on commissions. In the scenario above, a full 6 percent commission on the $150,000 house would amount to $9,000. Isn't that enough? Apparently not.

   

Other parts of Florida catching the Miami, Tampa housing disease

Existing home sales in Florida slid 26 percent in March over the same a month a year earlier. About 9,142 homes sold last month versus 12,356 in March 2007.

Florida home prices were off 15 percent during the same period, from $242,800 to $205,600. A spurt in short sales - the practice of selling a home for less than the outstanding loan balance - has helped suppress prices.

Noteworthy in the March numbers was the how the real estate slump has spread to what had been relatively immune markets. Miami was one of the top sales losers, but places like Ocala, Jacksonville and Pensacola also had worse-than-average declines.

The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater figures were skewed for March. That's because Realtors from Pinellas and West Pasco counties failed to report their numbers. They blamed glitches with a new computer system.

So what we do have for the Tampa metro area is pretty much restricted to Hillsborough and central Pasco counties. And the numbers weren't all that horrendous - considering.

Single family home sales were down 11 percent year to year, from 1,107 to 1,250. Prices were off 18 percent, from $219,800 to $180,500.

Federal Reserve rates southeast region's real estate

The U.S. Federal Reserve put out a report last week on the state of the economy. Deeper down in the document is a look at real estate in the Atlanta District to which we belong:

Homebuilders and Realtors reported that new and existing home sales remained well below year-ago levels in March. Several homebuilders noted that traffic had picked up somewhat, although sales had not. Most Realtors reported that buying interest remained very weak. Home prices continued to trend lower in most parts of the District, while inventories remained at high levels. Overall, District housing markets are expected to remain subdued in the near term. Most contacts suggested that the spring selling season will be pivotal to the year’s performance.

Reports from District contractors indicated that commercial development had weakened. Nearly half of our contacts reported that commercial construction declined significantly during the first quarter of 2008 compared with a year ago. Meanwhile, order backlogs continued to shrink throughout much of the District. Contacts noted a sharp increase in material prices, while labor costs growth held fairly steady. Expectations for commercial development for the remainder of the year have weakened.

We knew most of this already, didn't we?

At least it wasn't an "F": Housing consultant grades the Tampa region

A well-known California housing consultant gives our region's housing market a "D" for dismal. Or depressed. Or delinquent.

Let's put it in perspective, though. Previously resilient markets like those in North Carolina and Washington State are earning the same just-above-failing grades. As far as I could see, only Dallas gets a "C."

When you dig into the Florida data we look quite a bit better than our in-state competitors. In Miami, for example, housing costs devour 61 percent of a typical income. In Tampa-St. Pete, where the median home price has fallen to $172,500, it's only 31 percent.

Here's the Web site. Find Tampa on the map and hover the mouse over the symbol. To go directly to a national chart that includes Tampa, here's a short cut.

Real signs of recovery or just a mirage?

Sometimes you've got to accentuate the positive. From Friday's St. Petersburg Times:

Our housing slump has marked its two-year anniversary. Those of us invested in real estate — let's say the vast majority of us — keep our eyes peeled for that flicker of a recovery that becomes a glimmer that becomes a glare.

Let's train our telescopes on the few flickers that are brightening the housing horizon:

Flicker No. 1: Multiple offers on single houses. The Pinellas Realtor Organization issued a statement last week celebrating the return of multiple offers. I double-checked with other sales people and learned multiple offers are rearing their pretty heads again. "I have not seen them in two years but just last week I had multiple offers on three different properties," one St. Petersburg Realtor said. Realtors say these bidding wars — more like bidding skirmishes — tend to break out when home sellers concede they won't get top dollar. Lesson: A bargain still attracts finicky buyers.

Flicker No. 2: Vacant homes are moving slowly off the market. One of the sad sights of the downturn are the thousands of homes in the bay area bought as investments that never found buyers. But after peaking at more than 10,000 last summer, the number of vacant homes for sale ebbed to 8,770 in March. Not every explanation for the decline is encouraging. Some may be rented. Others were foreclosed on. On a similar trend, builders are slimming their inventory of vacant new homes. The number of such idle new homes dropped by 200 so far this year, but remains high at 3,400.

Flicker No. 3: Home sales statistics suggested a decent trend. The Greater Tampa Association of Realtors said sales in Hillsborough and central Pasco counties were down 14 percent from March 2007 to March 2008. Bad news? Not quite. A month earlier, February sales were off 33 percent from a year earlier. That trend, if real, portends a market reaching bottom. Further support comes from pending home sales. Across the Tampa Bay area in March, they were about the same as they were a year earlier. A word of warning: Since most of these yet-to-close sales depend on buyers getting mortgages, tighter lending could stymie many deals.

We can dicker over the significance of each flicker. But these words from Pinellas Realtors make as much sense as any: "It will take a while to have a healthy market, but it is good to hear about positive trends."

Office market starting to feel housing market's pain

When the residential real estate market catches a cold, it's not long before the retail and office markets get the sniffles. Or is it post-nasal drip?

In any case, here's the latest word of waning demand among office tenants in the Tampa Bay area:

Tampa Bay area office vacancy inched up in the first three months of 2008, hurt by a sluggish economy that's left fewer large tenants to go around. Fifteen large move-outs totaling 366,000 square feet lifted vacancy from 11 percent at the end of 2007 to 11.7 percent by March 31, according to real estate company Colliers Arnold. Among the biggest defections was the closing of the 750-employee Home Depot call center in Brandon. Colliers hinted that vacancies could rise further with the construction of 1.1-million square feet of new offices, half in Tampa's Westshore district. Further pressure comes from 1.1-million square feet of vacant space available for sublet, the highest total since 2002

Foreclosed properties stiffing homeowner, condo associations

An ironic twist on the foreclosure problem: What if the banks that repossess all those houses and condos for non-payment are none-too-strict about making their homeowner and condo association payments?

That seems to be a widespread problem in Florida, according to a survey of associations released this week. Here's a snippet:

Nearly two-thirds of survey participants said that banks and mortgage lenders now holding title to the foreclosed units or homes currently are not meeting their legal obligation to pay fees or other assessments owing to the association

Survey respondents cited issues such as electricity and water shut-off to vacant units or homes, pools left unattended, mold and pest control. As one concerned property owner asked: “What will happen during the hot, humid summer months? I'm very worried about mold problems and will be asking our Board to take on the electric charges for the health of the buildings.”

Read the whole thing here if you wish: Download fl_comm_assoc_mortgage_foreclosure_survey__final_report59.doc

A local look at new home starts: Down 43 percent

Builders like Lennar and Centex suggest that new home sales have picked up a bit in the Tampa Bay area, but such positive momentum is scarcely visible in the overall numbers.

Housing starts in the first three months of 2008 totaled 1,277, according to a Tampa housing consultant Metrostudy. That’s 43 percent below the 2,240 starts recorded a year earlier and 13.7 percent down from the last quarter of 2007.

Metrostudy’s Tony Polito marked a decline of 200 in the number of finished vacant homes, a sign that the new home glut is slowly receding. About 3,393 such homes wallowed on the market at the end of March.

Owing to affordability, the best sellers in the region are smaller houses and town homes from $150,000 to $210,000. The top selling community in the region continued to be Meadow Pointe in Pasco County.

Builders giving their hammers an involuntary rest

New home construction is predictably poor. Tell us something we don't know. Within the week I'll publish Tampa Bay area numbers showing how well new home sales went in the first quarter of 2008. Here's what's happening nationally:

WASHINGTON — The construction of new homes plunged in March to the lowest level in 17 years, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

Housing construction dropped by 11.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 947,000 units, a much bigger decline than economists had been forecasting.

Building permits also fell in March, signaling even more problems ahead for the beleaguered housing industry.

To repeat what I've been saying for months, we won't reduce the housing glut until builders take it easy for a while. With apologies to all the good people in the building business, we just don't need more supply when demand is so weak.

***UPDATE: Click here to see historical new home start data and note that March 2008 starts are weakest since March 1991.

What bad housing market? Home & patio show storms Tampa

You gotta hand it to an industry that just doesn't say die. Witness the hundreds of exhibitors at the Home & Patio show that runs from 2 p.m. Friday to 6 p.m. Sunday at the Tampa Convention Center.

The show deals mostly with remodeling, decorating and landscaping.  One company's even building a "lushly landscaped Caribbean backyard retreat" in the convention hall. Another is pushing green products like solar powered ceiling fans.

In light of the down market, an obvious question the show will answer is what remodeling projects make sense when you'll be staying in your house a few years.

Tickets are under $10. 

Tampa Bay area foreclosures: Down from Feburary but up over year

Fewer homes entered the foreclosure process in March than in February in three of the four counties in the Tampa Bay area.

But the year-to-year comparisons still show foreclosures nearly doubling in Pinellas, Pasco, Hillsborough and Hernando counties. Foreclosures now affect one of every 337 homes in the area, making us the 38th worst in the nation in that regard.

The firm RealtyTrac reported 3,837 foreclosure filings in the region in March, 1,100 of which had advanced to the point that banks were auctioning off or repossessing the homes.

That was down from 4,265 filings in February, but up from 1,991 filings in March 2007. Hillsborough was the only county to show an increase from February to March.

A word of caution about RealtyTrac statistics. The company counts multiple foreclosure filings on single properties. That makes the foreclosure problem appear worse than it really is. 

With that in mind, here's a county by county breakdown of foreclosure cases in March:

1. Pinellas - 1,217
2. Pasco - 645
3. Hillsborough - 1,736
4. Hernando - 239

****UPDATE: Here's a Excel file charting month by month local foreclosure filings. I had RealtyTrac ship it over. You'll need an Excel reader to see it: Download realtytrac.xls   

PMI: Tampa ninth riskiest home market in U.S.

Mortgage insurer PMI ranks Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater the ninth riskiest housing market in the country.

What does the company mean by risk? PMI defines it as the likelihood that homes price will be lower in 2 years than they are today. We're still making up for the "unsustainable gains" of the boom years, PMI says.

Two Florida metro areas - Orlando and West Palm Beach - ranked even worse than us. Needless to say all the Sunbelt states that became Speculation Central during 2005 are well represented. Think California, Arizona and Nevada.

Here's PMI's Spring 2008 report with charts and maps: Download pmi_eret08v2s.pdf

Flippers manipulate federal laws to bail from condo contracts

Flippers were all hot for South Florida condos. No longer. They're trying to get out of contracts by the hundreds. Two big shot lawyers question their honesty and tactics. Meanwhile tens of thousands of condos clutter the market. Here's part of a column that appeared in another paper:

Individuals who purchased Florida condo units in good faith in recent years face yet another threat to their property’s value from a rising tide of lawsuits by speculative investors seeking to exploit loopholes in a 40-year old law known as the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act, say two prominent South Florida attorneys.

In an Opinion piece published Saturday in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, attorneys Alan Becker and Allen Levine of the law firm Becker & Poliakoff  write that the mushrooming litigation, based on perceived loopholes in the federal legislation, known as ILSA, and governing regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), represents a serious problem for the residential real estate market, particularly in Florida and potentially nationwide.

Becker, who is a co-founder and Managing Shareholder of the firm, and Levine, who leads Becker & Poliakoff’s statewide real estate litigation practice, have called on the U.S. Congress and HUD to immediately address the problems with the ILSA legislation and governing regulations, which threaten to exacerbate the already troubled Florida residential condominium market.

“ILSA was originally intended to protect unknowing home buyers from unscrupulous developers who were selling property on swampland or wasteland unsuitable for development,” Becker & Levine said in their article. While the legislation made sense 40 years ago when parts of Florida were truly undeveloped, they added, “now that the condo market is in a slump, some purchasers are taking advantage of the ambiguously worded regulations” to get out of contracts in highly developed areas.

“The majority of buyers behind these lawsuits are speculative short-term investors, commonly referred to as ‘flippers,’ who purchased units in highly developed areas of Florida but are now worried they won’t be able to resell the units or make as much of a profit as they had hoped,” the attorneys continued. “If these lawsuits are successful, it will set a dangerous precedent for large numbers of buyers skipping out on their contracts every time the market takes a downward turn, despite being provided with the completed unit they originally purchased.”

Becker and Levine called on Congress and Florida legislators, in particular, to work together with HUD and “take immediate action to close the loopholes in ILSA before the real estate market is dragged down even further, harming not only developers and lenders but the true consumers that the law was originally designed to protect.”

Locally, condo buyers used similar tactics, arguing that if the unit wasn't built in two years as promised, they could bail on the contract. Of course, developers can cite various "acts of God" that knocked them off schedule.

Perplexity: Pinellas Realtors contradict Hillsborough Realtors

Why do you get the feeling that housing statistics provided by Realtors are little more than slippery eels lubricated with extra baby oil.

Last week the Greater Tampa Association of Realtors (GTAR) put out a cushy report showing a mere 14 percent home sales decline, a vast improvement over February's numbers.

I double checked those numbers against stats released by the Pinellas Realtor Organization (PRO). They just don't match up, no matter how you slice it.

Here's what PRO says: From March 2007 to March 2008, Hillsborough single family homes sales declined 41 percent (883 to 521). Condo sales were off 53 percent the same year (290 to 136).

GTAR includes central Pasco County sales in its compilation, but even if you throw Pasco into the mix, the numbers still don't hoe the same row. Pasco single-family home sales dipped 21 percent in March. Its condos were off 44 percent. So said PRO.

Overall, PRO said Tampa Bay area single family home sales are down 31 percent, from 1,946 in March 2007 to 1,342 in March 2008. Condo sales dropped 43.4 percent, from 832 last year to 466 this year.

In true, nothing to cheer about. Are these two organizations working on the same page?

Signs of stabilization in Hillsborough County housing market?

Are we finally approaching some sort of home sales stability? Signs are encouraging in Hillsborough County.

While March home sales are still down year to year, the steepness of the decline was much less than it was in February.

Observe these numbers from the Greater Tampa Association of Realtors: February's home sales fell 32.8 percent from 1,209 in Feb. 2007 to 813 in Feb. 2008. But in March, sales fell only 14.4 percent, from 1357 in March 2007 to 1,162 in March 2008.

Prices over the year are down 10 percent, from an average of 254,856 last year to $230,204 this year.

This seems to confirm buzz from Realtors that spring could bring a resurgence of buyers. They say sellers are unhappy about the low prices, but at least things are moving more briskly.

I'll post some numbers specific to Pinellas and Pasco numbers when I get them. Keep in mind that the Tampa Realtors include central and east Pasco sales in their data, but leave out densely populated west Pasco.

Here's a chart with historical comparisons: Download gtarmarch.pdf

Not all foreclosure "victims" deserve sympathy

Here's a column from Friday's St. Petersburg Times:

There it was again in the headline: President Bush to help "victims" of foreclosure.

Your mind conjures up highwaymen ambushing another honest traveler on the road of life: Stand and deliver, your deed or your life.

Don't get me wrong, the word "victim" applies to some foreclosure cases. Sickness, unemployment, divorce, even an ill-timed job transfer can place house payments out of reach. But those types of foreclosures are always with us, in good times and bad.

The foreclosure wave this time is more complex — and more troubling. A story I wrote on Sunday zeroed in on a foreclosure-plagued Clearwater Realtor with six homes worth $7-million. He's not alone. Real estate professionals account for thousands of stressed properties jamming the market.

If they're all victims, who's preying on them? Even a gambler bled dry in a casino can rail against the owner of the blackjack table. It's not so easy to cast blame when your own acquisitiveness led you astray.

The question of victimhood is critical. It's an election year, and politicians are market-testing new rescue schemes for people in danger of losing their homes. The worst I've heard is a government mandate that lenders freeze mortgage rates for five years, as if private contracts were so much Charmin.

The recent Florida property tax reform created another layer of separate-and-unequal taxation. If you bought after March 1, 2007, you can use tax portability to lower your bill. If you bought before then you're usually stuck with your old, higher tax bill.

Now, well-intentioned but misguided home-salvage proposals threaten to enshrine other inequalities. And many of the bailouts would go to the financially reckless.

A story from my own neighborhood could suffice. Two neighbors live in same-sized, newly built houses. One earns more than the other.

But the higher earner overspent on luxuries and finds himself in financial trouble. He's persuaded the bank to forgive $100,000 in mortgage debt if he finds a buyer for the house. It's called a short sale.

Meanwhile, the other homeowner dutifully makes house payments he struggles to afford. No one's offering a bailout. And the benchmark set by the short sale of his neighbor's house could drop the value of his house by tens of thousands of dollars.

Before we buy the latest salve from BushObamaHill, let's make sure the people who gamed the banking system during the boom aren't the ones gaming the government during the bust.

Forty Four Tampa area homes auctioned off

With their rapid fire, sing-song country patter, the auctioneers at Hudson & Marshall could have been selling off hogs or antiques or tractors.

But the auction last night at the Doubletree Hotel near Tampa International Airport was peddling bank-owned foreclosure homes, 44 of them to be exact.

As you might imagine, many of the houses had their share of weeds, rough paint and cracked driveways. But their prices were right.

The average sales price was about $90,000. The lowest price, $25,500, was for a 576-square-foot condo in a converted Sarasota apartment building. A waterfront town home in Oldsmar, 1,834 square feet, collected the highest price at $210,000.

Not all the auction winners were home free. The homes still were "subject to confirmation." In other words, the banks had right of refusal. But Hudson & Marshall, a Texas auctioneer, said the bank acceptance rate is about 85- to 90 percent.

Let's say the banks are "motivated."

Bargains were everywhere, if the buyer didn't mind slathering on a coat of paint and doing a little rehabbing.

Older St. Petersburg, Tampa and Clearwater houses ranging from about 1,000- to 1,600 square feet sold for between $30,000 and $60,000. I'm sure some of the neighborhoods were rough, but the price was right.

Some of the nicer houses in nicer subdivisions nabbed prices close to what the market's getting.

An example: A 1,740-square foot stucco house in the Gulf Harbor neighborhood in New Port Richey went for $169,000. The home sold two years ago for $257,200, but the area has depreciated since then.

We still haven't reached the bottom of the foreclosure market: Hudson & Marshall said they'll return 2 or 3 more times this year to auction more Tampa bank owned properties.

Was it something we said? Pinellas Realtors put gag on March home sales stats

After generously providing month-by-month home sales breakdowns for the media and public, the Pinellas Realtor Organization (PRO) has had second thoughts.

The first sign of a change of heart was when PRO pulled February sales statistics right after they appeared on this blog.

Coincidence? I think not.

In place of the fine charts and graphs they used to provide, PRO is publishing a monthly "analysis" from its president, Ann Guiberson.

Still, beggers can't be choosy. They're a private organization and owe us no favors. You can still glimpse some statistical signposts amid the fog of Realtor PR:

Hey, wait a minute. Aren’t we in a slow market? What’s this about multiple offers?

You are reading the headline correctly. Multiple offers are back in the marketplace and they aren’t just on foreclosed properties and short sales. Well-priced homes are seeing more than one offer coming in.

Further, this is not an isolated incident. Brokers from all over the county are reporting one, two, and even more offers for homes that have moved into the sweet spot of prices buyers are willing and able to purchase.

It seems rather bizarre that we have the market continuing to lag even last year’s sales, yet when the right property and the right price come together, there is plenty of activity.

The number of listings on the market continues to plummet for single family homes. At the end of March, they were down over 21% from 2007. In the sales area, the number of sales continues to slowly rise as it has over the past five months. Still, in comparison to 2007, unit sales are down 30% and year over year, the median price dropped by 10% and now closely parallels median prices in 2003.

Nineteen and one-half percent of the homes sold were in the $140,000 to $180,000 range and another nineteen percent were in the $200,000 to $300,000 range. Average days on the market held steady at 103, and there has been a definite increase in FHA loans.

In the condo market, there are fewer listings on the market than last month, but year over year there is an increase of 8%. In sales, we saw the first decline in unit sales for this year with sales down 8.7%. The median price year over year is down 8.6%, but in this case it is tracking with the first part of 2005. 21% of the sales were in the $100,000 to $140,000 range with another 22% in the $200,000 to $300,000 range. Average days on market seem to be settling down at about 126 to 128 days.

One last thing to mention: the number of vacant homes listings appears to be dropping. Single family vacant properties are down 6% and condos are down 11%. Investors and vacation homeowners may have decided to rent and wait a while, or worse – foreclosure may have occurred.

Looking ahead there is an increase in pending sales reported for March and that may be the tip of the iceberg. Many sales are related to short sales and foreclosures and waiting for bank approval is taking a long time which pushes closings out even farther than the typical 60 days from contract to closing.

I’m glad to hear members reporting that they are busy, writing contracts, and, yes, even having to deal with multiple offers on well-priced homes. It will take a while to have a healthy market, but it is good to hear about positive trends.

Appraiser slashes home values, taxes to decline

I don't know what you're seeing on your own property assessments, but the Pasco County Property Appraiser has been slashing the market value of homes in my neighborhood.

In less than a year, he's depreciated my home 20 percent. Ummm....thanks.

On the one hand I'm glad to get $1,000 off my property tax bill. On the other hand, it's depressing to know how much money I've lost, at least on paper.

I hope the Hillsborough and Pinellas county appraisers follow suit. You hear a lot of rumbling, especially in coastal areas like Clearwater, about monster tax increases no longer justified by declining homes values.

In about a month appraisers typically release total assessments for each county. I'm sure commercial property, unprotected by the Save Our Homes cap, will bear the biggest burden.

Pending homes sales slump. Does it suggest tough spring ahead?

All housing markets are local, so I don't put too much stock in national home sales statistics. But the pending home sales data released this week by the National Association of Realtors isn't that encouraging.

In the South region that includes Florida, pending sales are off 30 percent year to year.  That's pretty consistent with the monthly home sales reports we've been seeing the past few months.

Realtors chief economic Lawrence Yun predicts better times ahead, but wields weasel words to protect himself: He said sales will improve soon "unless there are some additional economic problems or excessive inflationary pressure."

How much do you want to bet we'll have "additional economic problems" to blur his crystal ball?

Here's the press release put out by Realtors. Pending sales mean buyers have placed contracts on properties but have yet to close on the deals. Realtors will release the all-important March home sales figures later this month.

Anecdotally, Tampa-St. Petersburg Realtors keep talking about all the traffic they're seeing, but I'll believe it when I see the numbers.

Countrywide: Buy our foreclosure homes, get 100 percent financing

Countrywide is still providing 100-percent home financing but it comes with a twist: You have to buy one of their discounted foreclosure homes.

Here's a short story discussing how the nation's biggest mortgage provider is adapting to the down market it helped create.

Mortgage companies aren't always forgiving

A doleful trend in the housing industry is short sales - dumping a house for less than its loan balance. But as this story suggests, banks are still reluctant to play the game. Can't say I blame them. Debt foregiveness isn't exactly a profitable proposition:

A third of all home sales planned to prevent foreclosure fail, due largely to sluggish response from mortgage companies that service the loans, a survey showed on Thursday.

The study of more than 3,000 real estate agents last month by Campbell Communications found it takes mortgage servicers an average of 4.5 weeks to provide answers on so-called short sales, in which the sale price is below the balance of an existing loan.

Short-sales and other pre-foreclosure sales are of increasing importance to the U.S. housing market, which is suffering from falling prices, rising defaults and high inventories. Together, the sales account for one in every five transactions nationwide, the survey said.

Full story here.

Realtor's unusual deals blamed for crippling Clearwater neighborhood

Published an investigative piece in Sunday's St. Petersburg Times that highlighted how a high-flying Realtor in Clearwater's Island Estates neighborhood helped hobble the housing market there. It's a place with $1-million homes, so the aftermath hasn't been pretty.

Here's the link

How reliable are median home prices in gauging market health?

It's an old debate: To get a handle on home price changes do you use the average sales price, the median sales price or maybe another entirely different calculation?

Zillow, the national home evaluation service, has taken to poo pooing the median home price measurement. And for a very good reason.

Median prices are fine if a neighborhood had only one price category. But what if you have a mix of $500,000 and $180,000 homes?

A shift in buyers from expensive homes to cheaper homes would suggest the price of each house is falling, when in some cases it simply means a greater preference for smaller homes.

That doesn't mean prices aren't falling in the Tampa Bay area. They are. But the best measure is probably price per square foot. It helps smooth out the problems with the median. Unfortunately, Realtors are stingy about releasing that information unless you hire them.

And let's not forget that Zillow is touting it's own proprietary home pricing model. It makes business sense to attack competitors reliant on median prices.

Here's an article Zillow posted addressing the issue. It's a bit technical, but it contains some food for thought.

Why didn't builders and banks have rainy day funds?

From a St. Petersburg Times column today:

If you disregard some of the mumbo jumbo emanating from the financial world, the misery afflicting new-home builders and mortgage lenders seems to boil down to one thing: Many didn't save for a rainy day.

A gross oversimplification? Perhaps. The headlines are full of builders and banks suffering multibillion-dollar losses. We're often reminded that it's our own greed and sloth — our failure to repay our housing debts — that has brought about the crisis.

But in a society afflicted with short-term-itis, we forget that just two years ago, these same companies were making record profits. Let's look at some corporate riches-to-rags tales:

• Countrywide Home Loans lost $703-million last year, so bad that it was acquired by Bank of America. Let's shed no tears. As one of the country's biggest home loan originators, Countrywide raked in profits of more than $10-billion in the preceding five years.

• Standard Pacific Homes is a builder active in the Tampa Bay area routinely cited as a bankruptcy risk. It lost $695-million last year. Cry me a river. The company had $1.2-billion in profits from 2002 to 2006.

• Bear Stearns is the financial powerhouse whose failure could have toppled the entire economy. That's what the government said as it arranged a bailout last month. The company's mortgage losses threatened its solvency. Yet the company's profits the past five years totaled $6.2-billion.

Profits are good. But a wise executive squirrels away earnings. Which of these squirrels running which of these companies failed to bury their nuts?

I spoke this week to an insider whose words rang true: In the housing and banking industry, the fast-money folks were equated with angels. The cautious souls were damned to perdition. Patient accumulation and prudent oversight were too often tossed aside.

Financial sophisticates will say that idle profits are lost profits. A builder that made $4-billion had to keep investing and churning or risk betraying his shareholders. Churn to your heart's content, but don't demand bailouts when the bills come due.

Families have to save up for hard times or else face dislocation and depression. Is the same too much to ask of our corporations?

Not so good: Zillow rates home values in Tampa Bay area

Zillow.com, the national home valuation service, has released a huge dump of data taking in the Tampa Bay area.

If you use their data with caution - they don't have a clue about my home's value for example - you can find some use from it.

Zillow said home values in the fourth quarter 2007 were down 12.9 percent here.  That's pretty much in line with other data from organizations like the Florida Association of Realtors.

In the county by county home value breakdown, Hernando dropped the worst at 16.6 percent, Pinellas next at 13.8 percent, then HIllsborough at 11.8 percent and finally Pasco at 10.4 percent.

Here's a spread sheet where you can slice and dice the data. Check out your own neighborhood and zip code from among the nearly 300 Zillow measures.

Click on bottom of chart to change categories: county, city, neighborhood, etc.

Download zillow3.xls

Developer wants to put affordable housing at Trop site

Tampa developer Joel Cantor, building the giant Signature Place condo tower in downtown St. Petersburg, is offering to buy the Tropicana Field property for $100-million.

The Rays baseball team hopes to move to a new waterfront stadium and Cantor wants to redevelop the team's old home along Interstate 275. Part of the plan is to build 2,600 "affordable housing units."

Click here to see his proposal: Download tropicana_site_offer_from_cantor21.pdf

Cantor is the real deal. I did a story on him last year. You can read it here.

No surprise to Floridians: Vacation home sales suffer worse

It's common sense to assume sales of vacation homes have suffered worse than sales of primary residences. But I didn't know it was this big a difference.

The National Association of Realtors reports that vacation homes in 2007 suffered triple the decline of primary residences.

While vacation home sales plunged 31 percent in 2007, sales of first homes dropped 10 percent. Investment home sales fell 18 percent.

Lawrence Yun, the association's ever-optimistic economist, assures the public that vacation homes are ripe for a rebound.

Here's the press release.