Housing Bubble Part 2

Mortgage Standards Are Plunging – It’s Muppet Fleecing Time All Over Again

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In February, I highlighted the fact that subprime loans were about to make a return in my piece: Subprime Mortgages are Back…This Time Marketed as “Second Chance Purchase Programs.” In that article, I posited that with the “all cash” private equity shops and hedge funds no longer able to make good returns through buying new homes to rent, these investors would need some sucker to sell to in order to realize a return (Blackstone’s purchases have plunged 70% recently). That sucker, as always, will be the retail muppets, and those muppets will be lured in through subprime. This is now starting to happen in earnest.

The following article from the Wall Street Journal is both depressing and disturbing. Rather than allowing home prices to reset at a lower level after the 2008 crash where to normal buyers could afford a sane 20% mortgage, our central planners decided to do “whatever it takes” to re-inflate the housing bubble. This was achieved through wealthy investment pools buying properties for all cash. The trouble is, with home prices now inflated by these financial buyers and no real increase in wages, homes are simply unaffordable. So what do you do? You bring back subprime and get the peasants long real estate with essentially zero money down all over again. Truly remarkable.

From the Wall Street Journal:

While standards remain tight by historical measures, lenders have started to accept lower credit scores and to reduce down-payment requirements.

One such lender is TD Bank, Toronto-Dominion Bank’s U.S. unit, which on Friday began accepting down payments as low as 3% through an initiative called “Right Step,” geared toward first-time buyers and low- and moderate-income buyers. TD initially launched the program last year with a 5% down payment. It keeps the product on its books and doesn’t charge for insurance. Borrowers also don’t need to put down any of their own cash if a family, state or nonprofit group provides a down-payment gift.

So a measly 5% downpayment wasn’t good enough. They had to drop it to 3%. Frightening.

The changes also are a recognition by lenders that the business of refinancing old mortgages, which had been a huge profit center for banks, is nearly tapped out. To generate future profits, banks will have to compete for borrowers who may not have perfect credit or large down payments.

Valley National Bank, a community bank based in Wayne, N.J., lowered down-payment requirements to 5% from 25% this month on mortgages for certain buyers in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Next month, Arlington Community Federal Credit Union, based in Arlington, Va., will begin accepting 3% down payments on mortgages up to $417,000, down from 5%.

Yes, you read that right, 25% to 5%. Holy fuck.

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Luxury Home Foreclosures Soar – Up 61% Versus Last Year

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I’ve always wondered what would happen once private equity players decided enough was enough and foreign oligarchs finished their real estate money laundering transactions. Well, we might be about to find out.

According to RealtyTrac, foreclosures for homes worth $5 million or more are up 61% this year despite the fact that overall foreclosures are down 23%. The question is, does this merely represent holdouts from the prior housing bubble, or is it a sign of things to come? Only time will tell. From CBS:

Foreclosures in the ultra-high-end housing market — homes worth $5 million or more — have skyrocketed 61 percent over last year.

That growth bucks the trend: Overall foreclosures are down 23 percent, according to a new report from Irvine, Calif.-based real estate information site RealtyTrac.

Until lately, that is. “Recently, we’ve been hearing from agents that they’re starting to see the high-end properties go to foreclosure and there turned out to be some data to support this notion that high-end holdouts are finally moving through the foreclosure process,” he said.

It may be a sign that lenders are now financially stable enough to start moving on ultra-high-end delinquencies and take the substantial losses these multi-million dollar homes represent.

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The Carlyle Group’s Latest Investment…Trailer Parks

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Earlier this month, I highlighted the fact that the Carlyle Group was the latest in a series of “smart money” private equity firms to decide it was time to exit the suddenly extremely crowded “buy-to rent” residential real estate trade. At the time I noted that:

As it sells apartments, Carlyle is focusing investments in areas such as senior housing, self-storage units and manufactured homes, where demand tends to be driven by life changes such as retirement or marriages, and isn’t so closely tied to changes in employment and gross domestic product, Stuckey said.

Well it appears Carlyle has already started to make its move. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday: Carlyle Jumps Into Niche Space – Private-Equity Firm Adds Trailer Parks to Its Diverse Portfolio. In case you can’t figure out what appears to be the key logic behind the shift in focus, try this line on for size: 

Because the cost of relocating a home is expensive, residents are less likely to move away. “Our customers have no alternative shot at homeownership, nor do they [normally] even have the credit scores and quality to seek anything better,” Mr. Rolfe said. “They never leave the park they are in, and the revenues are unbelievably stable as a result.”

In neo-feudalistic America, always, always go long serfdom.

More from the WSJ:

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The Carlyle Group is the Latest “Smart Money” Investor to Ditch the Buy-to-Rent Trade

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At first, the rise in residential real estate prices across the U.S. was hard to explain. The economy remained in the dumps, while college kids were saddled with debts and poor paying jobs. A large portion of the demographic that typically enters the first home market was simply put, not in the market. Pretty soon it became obvious what was happening. Insider types and “smart money” was simply buying up every property they could find in order to turn around and rent them to the average citizen who had just been priced out of the market due their all cash bids. Add to this tens of billions of dollars in foreign laundered money and voilà, a new housing bubble was born.

However, as more and more lemmings began to chase the trade, initial investors have started to get nervous. First it was Och Ziff, then OakTree, then Carrington and finally now perhaps the most infamous of all insider private equity firms, the Carlyle Group. So now we have four well known and respected investors actively and publicly trying to exit the trade. As usual, they are selling to suckers such as life-insurance companies and real estate investment trusts.

From Bloomberg:

Carlyle Group LP (CG), the private-equity firm with more than a third of its $2.3 billion U.S. real estate fund in apartments, is reducing holdings of multifamily housing as rent growth slows from a post-recession surge.

Apartment-rent growth is slowing as the U.S. homebuying market rebounds and a wave of multifamily building adds to supply. In the third quarter, tenants on average paid 3 percent more than a year earlier after landlord concessions, down from 3.9 percent annual growth in effective rents in 2012, research firm Reis Inc. (REIS) said in a report today.

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Las Vegas Housing: 8% of Single Family Homes Vacant, Yet New Construction Permits Up 50%

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If there is any market that demonstrates the complete and total misallocation of capital that results from Banana Ben Bernanke’s money printing and artificially low interest rate policy, it the latest phony American housing bubble. With a record numbers of citizens on the food stamp electronic breadline, with unemployment stubbornly high no matter what data you use, billionaire financial oligarchs are running around bidding up “homes for rent” and pricing out the random average person that actually has the capacity or desire to bid. I just read an excellent article that demonstrates the degree of insanity that has now been unleashed upon the streets of Las Vegas.

As the title of the post mentions, a study from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas show some 40,000 homes are vacant, or 8% of the metropolitan area’s single-family housing stock.  So it would seem that this would provide plenty of good deals for investors right?  Certainly there doesn’t seem to be a need for new home construction.  Well think again!  In their QE-forever induced delirium, homebuilders have gone Chinese and in Las Vegas “permits for new home construction are up 50 percent, twice the national average.”

My favorite line in the entire article comes at the end when a prospective buyer explains what happens when an actual citizen attempts to purchase a home to actually live in:

“We know there is a minute chance we get anything,” she says. “The most frustrating part of all this is how home prices keep going up and up, yet you have so many empty homes.”

Oh and it seems Oaktree has followed Och Ziff’s lead and pulled back from the “buy to rent” insanity.  Soon all that will be left are the dumb money and homebuilders, who should start thinking about what kind of bailout they will lobby for when this entire thing unravels.  From Reuters:

These big investors and a handful of others have bought at least 55,000 single-family homes across the U.S. in the past year. In the Vegas area alone, they have accounted for at least 10 percent of the homes sold since January 2012, according to a Reuters analysis of housing transactions.

That added firepower helps explain why home prices in this metropolitan area of 2 million people are up 30 percent over a year ago, far more than the national average of 10 percent. Permits for new home construction are up 50 percent, twice the national average.

Las Vegas would seem a highly unlikely locale for a new housing bubble. There are at least 20,000 homes in some stage of foreclosure, and the jobless rate hovers near 10 percent, some two points above the U.S. average. A healthy housing market depends on people having good-paying jobs so they can accumulate down payments and finance their mortgages.

Healthy markets?  That’s so last century!

Cracks are showing in Vegas and beyond. Here, rents on single-family homes were down an average of 1.9 percent in March from a year ago. In other regions targeted by institutional buyers, such as Phoenix, Southern California, Atlanta and Florida, rents are either falling or flat, according to online real estate service Trulia.

Industry insiders estimate that roughly half of the more than 55,000 homes acquired by institutions over the past year in the U.S. have yet to be rented.

In Oceania, that is a market signal for build more homes.

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