Attention passengers: Your blog pilot is attaching his parachute. No cause for concern.
I'll be closing out this solo-produced blog starting April 19. I've taken a new job in journalism that promises excitement and better financial security for my family. My bosses haven't told me whether the blog will continue under a new reporter or reporters. Stay tuned.
It's been a pleasure writing this blog for 2 1/2 years, in addition to my other duties as a St. Petersburg Times reporter and columnist. The freedom of the Web is exhilarating. Rest assured I'm leaving on good terms, under no duress save the desire to improve my lot while remaining in Tampa.
Just as fun has been the verbal jousting with a core of dedicated, intelligent commentators. Thank you all for keeping this site entertaining, informative and blissfully free of politically motivated happy talk that seems to clog the comments sections on other stories. (See Crist, Charlie: Heroic defender of teachers)
We all know what a hellish exercise it has been to predict the behavior of a market made up of millions of consumers, if-it's-Tuesday-it-must-be-time-for-a-new-handout government and gun shy builders and bankers. ... Read more
Are we really still free falling? Not really.
Forbes.com places Tampa Bay on its list of "top five cities in a free fall." I confess I'm tired of these glib, chatty lists that obscure as much as they enlighten.
To whit: Forbes.com claims local median home prices have fallen only 32 percent from the peak. The truth is closer to 45 percent. And the article calls our region "Tampa-Clearwater," a sloppy misnomer that leaves out St. Petersburg.
Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater will experience more economic suffering. But the worst has passed. We bailed from our burning B-17 two years ago.
Mortgage misery: 4,700 Tampa Bay homeowners sued for foreclosure in March
The foreclosure crisis has grown statistically worse this year. March was no exception.
According to RealtyTrac, 4,696 Tampa Bay homes were sued for foreclosure in March. The total number of foreclosure filings, which include auction notices and home confiscations, was 7,397.
Anyway you slice it, it's a sorry trend. Foreclosure filings rose month-to-month and year-to-year. Here's a chart: Download Realtytrakmarch10
The number of Lis Pendens, the name of the initial foreclosure lawsuits, rose by 800 in the Tampa Bay area from February to March. As much as anything else, it suggests banks are less lenient than they were in 2009 about cleaning out what the see as mortgage deadweight.
In the county-by-county breakdown, only Pasco County showed a decline in the number of foreclosure suits in March. Pasco home sellers have slashed prices more deeply than sellers have in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties. ... Read more
Mighty March saves the day in Hillsborough housing market
I like the ring of these statistics released this week by the Greater Tampa Association of Realtors:
- Home sales up 16.5 percent from March 2009 to March 2010, from 1,526 to 1,778.
- Average home sales price bumps up to $161,846. That's still lags prices from a year earlier and in late 2009. But prices tracked upward from recent lows in January and February.
- The inventory of unsold homes, at 7.7 months, is the best it's been in 4 years. This is slightly deceptive - a not-so-hidden inventory of pre-foreclosure homes sits on the sidelines, threatening to flood the market with more el cheapo rooftops.
Here's a chart from the Realtors with a four-year perspective. Remember that they include sales from east/central Pasco County in their calculations: Download Gtarmarch10
Realtors release grim Florida foreclosure report
Here's a slide show from the National Association of Realtors crammed with colorful maps showing the extent of the foreclosure/distressed property albatross: Download Foreclosure_webinar031091
Tampa Bay records yearly decline in distressed sales
A little good news.
Sales of distressed homes accounted for about a third of the Tampa Bay housing market in January, a lower percentage than recorded a year earlier.
First American CoreLogic defines a distressed sale as either a short sale (selling your home for less than the mortgage with the permission of the bank) or an REO (banked-owned listing).
In places like Pasco County, conventional home sellers have had to compete against rows of foreclosure homes and have priced their properties accordingly. That my best explanation for the smaller share of distressed sales.
Why go distressed if you can get the rest?
Unfortunately, First American has flagged what it says is the start of another surge in sales of distressed sales. Still, Florida's sluggishly adversarial foreclosure process guarantees fewer distressed properties on the market: ... Read more
Hope for Clearwater homeowners: Bankrupt 25-story luxury condo tower has buyer
Opus South Development completed the 25-story Water's Edge condo tower with the best of business intentions in 2008.
You can guess the rest of the story.
Opus went bankrupt, Wachovia Bank repossessed the under-performing luxury tower in late 2009 and is now set to sell the property to a San Francisco buyer that specializes in "buying and rehabilitating medium- to large-sized apartment complexes."
Concierge Asset Management has a purchase contract for the building and some adjacent undeveloped property. Wachovia's unpaid mortgage on the building at repossession was $82 million. The lender paid $30.6 million at foreclosure auction to claim ownership. It's safe to say Concierge's offer fits in the $31 million to $82 million range.
The 153-unit Water's Edge rests on a bluff near Clearwater city hall, across the Intracoastal Waterway from Clearwater Beach. The building once claimed buyers for about 60 percent of its units, but most of the prospective owners bailed from contracts that averaged $750,000. ... Read more
More Tampa Bay residents stop paying mortgages
Me no like this. Remember that this represents the current stock of delinquent loans, not the percentage of new bad loans hitting the market in a given month. What this says is that the banking and court systems can't process foreclosures fast enough to make room for the new defaults entering the system. Any way you measure it, it's not good news for the Tampa Bay housing market. ... Read more
1 in 5 Tampa Bay offices vacant
The cross-bay twins - Tampa's Westshore business district and St. Petersburg's Gateway business district - continue to suffer from unusually high office vacancies.
Westshore is lumbering along with 21.7 percent of its offices unoccupied. Gateway's vacancy totals 23.4 percent. The numbers come from this first quarter report by Cushman & Wakefield: Download Cushman2010
Gateway is heading towards a better place. Its vacancy declined by nearly 50,000 square feet the past year. Westshore experienced another 139,000 square feet of office openings from March 31, 2009 to March 31, 2010.
The same pattern applies overall in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties. The percentage of vacant offices is higher in Pinellas but the county has closed the gap the past year.
On both sides of the bay, 9.3 million square feet of office space are empty out of 45.1 million square feet, Cushman & Wakefield said.
Strategic mortgage default: More common than you think
An in-depth look at the threat of strategic defaults, when financially stable households choose to walk away from their underwater mortgages:
What’s surprising isn’t how many homeowners choose to default strategically, but rather how few do so, given the strong monetary incentives. In many areas, prices have fallen so steeply that the monthly mortgage on a house—if it was acquired just before the housing bubble burst—is twice as expensive as the monthly rent on an identical house. If you were holding such a mortgage, why wouldn’t you default? ... Read more
About the blog
Housing market news is the focus of the (Un)Real Estate blog. It offers an inside look at the Florida housing market and real estate news, with a focus on Tampa Bay. Its goal? Simple: To help you keep a roof over your head without losing your shirt.
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