No, according to Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan in an interview earlier today.  He told Reuters news that the credit was not something that was on the radar.

Apparently, the National Association of Realtors and  National Association of Homebuilders, two lobbying groups who consistently oppose government interference in the marketplace, had been lobbying fairly hard for its restoration.

A few days ago, I wrote about Merrill Lynch, among others, realizing as long ago as 2006 that the jig was up with mortgages.  The market for the bundled mortgages (Collateralized Debt Obligations, or CDOs) they were selling to investors began to diminish when the market began drying up for riskier CDOs.

So what did Merrill and others do? Simple.  They created their own demand by buying their own CDOs and compelling their networks to do likewise.  I heard it on NPR, who pulled it from Pro Publica.

Today, Pro Publica has a Q and A about their reporters’ investigation.  You can read it by clicking here.

The mortgage meltdown had profound consequences not just for home owners in Portland Metro, but the country and the world financial system.

Certain non-FHA-borrowers who are underwater but current on their loans may be eligible for new FHA loans written at current interest rates.  The catch: The current mortgage holder must agree to write off ten percent of the loan balance.

Read the details here from a post by my colleague, Fred Stewart. 

This is potentially huge–much more effective than the attempts at loan modifications.  The only possible flaw I see if that second trust deeds (HELOCs, etc.) are not in the discussion.  Unless holders of seconds can be dealt with in a meaningful way, I doubt they will participate and may indeed be sand in the Vaseline.

Still, it’s something underwater home owners in Portland Metro need to be aware of.

Kenny and Zuke’s (sandwiches) was a hit on the East Side.  Sometime, they managed to open up a West Side location on NW Thurman near 24th.  Do not miss it.

Okay, they make their own pastrami.

They sell mostly sliders, which is pretty much the size of a half sandwich, except maybe a teeny bit bigger.  Where sliders won’t do, such as for their Italian thingy (Italian dried meats on a chewy, crusty roll with pepperoncini and dressing). But these come in half sandwich sizes.

I picked the Reuben (available in one or two sliders)  because I wanted to try their pastrami.  Good choice.   I got the single, and was full.  Great deal for $5.50, huh?

Some real estate and mortgage people saw the lastest numbers on the Portland housing market coming.  Yeah, they’re awful, but don’t believe them, at least in total.  Here’s why:

Some of us had real misgivings about the federal tax credit for first time buyers.  My feeling was that it would inflate prices (I had many situations of multiple offers on decent properties) and accelerate sales.  Both of these happened.  A good number of sales failed because the homes would not appraise for the offering price.

The result?  NAR and others crowed about increased sales and stabilized pricing, even hinting, at times, that the housing crisis was ending.

Know what? Those numbers weren’t any good.  They were tax-credit-generated statistical outliers and really did not reflect reality.

The latest scary numbers are also tax-credit generated.  Of course sales are off. That’s because the ones that would have happened occurred before June 30, with people clawing to go under contract before April 30, which is what the tax credit rules required. 

The figures, good and bad, have to be annualized to be meaningful.  In my view, pricing started to stabilize on its own, but then foreclosure notices ramped up again.  Prices will probably drift down a bit the rest of this year.  That’s overall, by the way.  It really varies by micro-neighborhood.

After going through the post-S&L real estate market,  I never thought I’d experience that kind of market again.

I didn’t.  Or, I am not.  The one we’re in is worse, and it’s anyone’s guess where it’s going.

A bubble I can live with.  The pop is painful, but you do come back.  Bubbles happen.  A perfect storm of circumstances come together. 

But this thing we’re in now (I don’t know what else to call it) is starting to look as though the big banks–or big brokerages, as if there’s a real difference–conspired to make it happen.  Why? Because their profits and big bonuses were not looking secure.

I know that sounds like populist garbage, but if this story by the public interest newsgroup Pro Publica is right, the big brokerage houses saw this whole thing coming in 2006 when their CDO’s stopped being purchased.

CDOs are Collateralized Debt Obligations. Mortgages are packed together and sold off to investors looking for an interest rate return.  But it looks as though the big houses–Merril Lynch, Citigroup, to name two of many–discovered that the non-prime CDOs weren’t selling anymore.  Buyers didn’t want that crap.  So, what did they do?

They created false demand by buying their own CDOs.  In the last two years of the “boom,” nearly half of all Merrill Lynch’s CDOs were purchased by…Merrill Lynch. 

Read the article. You can’t make this stuff up.

If you want to sell a home in Portland Metro, the news on market conditions and pricing has got to be depressing.  Here’s a fact, though: You can’t do much about the market.  But you can do something about how much equity you keep.

When I worked as a department store buyer, the ruling ethic was that you had to offer the things people wanted most at the price they wanted to pay.  It’s true with a house, too.  It will sell, as long as the price is what people want to pay.  Unfortunately, that price may not be what a seller hopes for.

But sellers CAN control how much equity they keep by keeping their selling costs down.  The most glaring cost is the 5% or 6% real estate commission.  Right now, you can significantly cut this cost by using a brokerage that will allow you to do so.  Help-U-Sell has been around forever, and there may be others.  At Terradigm, we are working to offer a listing and marketing service that makes sense.

Right now, we already do (check out the Fees and Pricing tab).  In the coming days, though, look for more.  We’re creating a menu of services home sellers can choose from so they can keep more of the equity in their homes.

Home appraisers have been taking shots all around. They take it from the lenders who employ them because the values are too high. They take it from home sellers because the values are too low. They take it from real esate agents and mortgage brokers because the values coming in with the appraisal don’t support the purchase offer/mortgage app.

You had to have been asleep or dead to have missed the latest housing report–off by more than 25%, prices about to drop because of excess inventory, foreclosures on the rise again, etc.  If you’re an appraiser, chances are you already knew before the reports came out.

It’s tough to assign values right now, and that’s true whether you’re a broker trying to price a house, an appraiser or a seller.  The ratio between sales price and the original list price is lower than it’s been for some time.  Some areas don’t have any dat to use because there are so few sales to use as comps. Overall, comps are hard to find. Low sales activity means not many houses comparable to yours are out there.

And if your house is over, say, $400,000, watch out.  Comps are rarer than cats at a dog park.

The tax credit ramped up sales, and it was never as billed.  Unsaid (except in this space) was that it ramped up prices, too. There was so little out there for sale that anything decent was getting multiple offers.

Now, we’re back to reality. Stay tuned.

But for today, gice appraisers a pass, please.

Every once in a while, I get my comeuppance on topics I thought I knew at least a little about.

Do people know how to save energy in their home? Are those actions they believe are helpful really helpful?  Well, no, actually.  Hint: It’s not keeping the lights turned off. 

This short article from Techcrunch on that topic is illuminating.

Tax that fellow under the tree, Huey Long reportedly said.

What brings this up is the Oregon Association of Realtor’s hyperventilating screech opposing a statewide real estate transfer tax.  A recent email to all Realtors says, “A new tax on the sale of real estate would be extremely damaging — not just to our industry, but to Oregon’s overall economy as well. A real estate transfer tax would place an unfair burden on families trying to buy or sell homes, reduce homeowner equity and increase the cost of residential and commercial real estate resulting in even more Oregon jobs lost in this recession.”

Oh? Is anyone besides me sick of corporate leadership groups doing nothing but shouting a collective “no” to anything by confusing declarative statements with facts?

A transfer tax would levy a modest charge on the transfer of real estate, including the sale of homes.  How much of a levy we don’t know, since nothing’s been formally proposed.

This state is in a world of hurt, for many, many complex reasons, and it isn’t going to go away.  If  we don’t fix the structural problems, we’re going down the tubes and no one will move here anyway.  See what a few years of zero in-migration will do to house values.

To a degree, we are all responsible for getting here, and we are all responsible for getting back out.  That means shared sacrifices, shared pains.

We don’t hear the OAR offering up solutions.  No tax reform ideas.   No nothing.  Instead, it’s trying to get every Realtor to gather ten signatures for a ballot measure to permanently prohibit a statewide real estate transfer tax, using the disingenuous moniker, “Protect Oregon Homes.”

Meanwhile, the state faces a $1 billion shortfall.  Fewer school days and larger classes (does anyone else  correlate the decline in the quality of political discussion with the decline in public education?), shuttered public health and safety facilities, crappier highways and so on and so on–real, not imagined or theoretical consequences that lead to the deterioration of neighborhoods and–dare I say it–home values.

The OAR does not want to help initiate a conversation on what services citizens want and what they’re willing to pay for.  Instead, it gins up the choir to warble the litany of no.

I hope my fellow Realtors and will join me in telling the OAR to quit being part of the problem and instead, try to be part of the solution.  Say No to just saying no.

Otherwise, we’ll just have to tax that fellow under the tree, I guess.