Prices are low, mortgages are cheap, and buyers are finally starting to emerge from their hiding places, even if they are doing so ever so tentatively. If you’ve never purchased real estate in the United States before, it’s a good idea to take stock of what such a venture might cost, even at bargain basement prices.
A lot of changes are happening in the investment property world at the moment. The most alarming thing seems to be the introduction of yet more rules and regulations that will ultimately be applied only to the smaller investor and the increasingly apparent need of the governments to raise enough money to pay for bailing out the various industries and corporations deemed “too big to fail.”
Although Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke was out in front of new cameras today declaring the severe recession impacting the U.S. will ease by the end of this year (it will? seriously?), a May 5th Reuters news release noted that losses of up to 12% on commercial real estate loans over the last two years are expected to be revealed at major banks undergoing recent government ’stress tests.’ Regulators expect to cite these commercial real estate losses as the main reason that some of the largest banks in the world now need even more capital.
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Lately, even the mainstream media in the United States are overdosing on apocalyptic reporting.
Once you’ve covered a global financial meltdown, a global swine flu pandemic, the bursting of the largest residential real estate bubble in memory, the prospect of bankruptcy at two of the Big Three auto manufacturers, U.S. policies on torture (and its salient drawbacks and rewards), and the spectre of thermonuclear war waged by any of a handful of rogue nations currently run (or about to be run) by insane persons, you do start to get a little jaded.
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Cities all across the midwestern U.S. are grappling with too many foreclosures. Many cities are witnessing the kind of urban blight in which entire blocks are swallowed by vandalized vacant properties, squatters, and meth labs. In some very large cities like Cleveland, entire neighborhoods are rapidly falling into decay.
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California, Arizona, Florida, and Nevada continue to lead the U.S. in foreclosures, but California is showing preliminary signs of a turnaround.
The cities with the greatest number of foreclosures include Las Vegas NV, Merced, Calif., the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area in Florida, and the California metro areas of Stockton, Riverside, Modesto, Bakersfield and Vallejo-Fairfield. Phoenix AZ, Port St. Lucie FL, Greeley CO, and Boise City ID also had extremely high foreclosure rates.
Kwame Kenyatta, Detroit Councilman and mayoral hopeful for the next election, has mailed the keys to his home in an upscale Detroit suburb back to the mortgage company and moved out.
Recently, a post here at the International Property Investment web site about the small midwestern town of Elkhart, Indiana ruffled a few local feathers. Elkhart, Indiana is a place with many pleasant features and the lovely Saint Joseph river running through it, and apparently some people who grew up there have happy memories of the place and don’t really want to hear anything negative regarding it.
Today’s economic headlines make $104 million sound like chump change, but if you are one of thousands of people living in South Florida who would like to buy a foreclosed property but can’t quite get over the down payment hump, federal assistance is available if you qualify and move fast.
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As the housing crisis in the United States drags on and on, and as the banking crisis in the United States gets worse and worse, ordinary people are beginning to float some fairly obvious ideas that nevertheless get no uptake because…Well, because it’s complicated.
More on Vacant Houses, Homeless People, and Jedi Mind Tricks
