Real Estate Investing

About a year ago I said the recovery was already starting.   Business was improving.  I had closings again.  I was wrong.  I said in March or April of this year that it felt like things were picking up again.  Business was improving.  Well I don’t want to say I was wrong yet - no jinxing myself here - but to date this year has been even slower than last year.  But as an eternal optimist, I’m holding on to the dream that we are turning the corner in the housing market.

It’s not just me being optimistic, though. In a detailed article on MSNBC.com written for Business Week magazine, the year 2012 is being looked at as the year that things return to normal in the housing market.  There is hope again for a “boring” housing market - one in which there are just as many buyers as sellers and home prices aren’t plunging and home loans area affordably available.

By 2012 we may finally get back to blissful boredom. With any luck, three years should be long enough for the U.S. economy to recover and for the nation’s housing inventory to shrink to more normal levels. At that point, housing will return to its old ways, with prices governed not by national mood swings and global credit crises but by local issues ranging from zoning to immigration to job growth. Prices? While they’re likely to keep falling a while longer under the weight of foreclosures, the market is definitely closer to the bottom than the top.

This whole foreclosure mess is just craziness.  I continue to hear about people who haven’t made their mortgage payments for six to eight months and haven’t received even the first warning from their lender.  Others get two months behind and the foreclosure process begins immediately.  I guess each lender truly is different.

Meanwhile, there is help for people who have lost their homes to foreclosure … the latest is coming from church groups according to Maranda Marquit over at the Loan Shak.  She links to US REO Properties which says,

The Valley Presbyterian Church on McDonald Drive in Paradise Valley has seen a sudden jump in the number of people asking for help. There are families where both husband and wife have lost their jobs or retired personnel subsidizing the income of their grown up children. Woody Garvin described the need as staggering. He said, “We’re not doing this alone. All churches are doing this right now. Congregations everywhere are quietly stepping up to the plate and helping people.”

I am relieved there is help for people.  I’m thinking my bedroom that will be empty this August when my oldest daughter goes off to college, it may just end up going to one of my foreclosed friends.  Scary times.