Posted by Jonathan J. Miller -Monday, February 28, 2011, 7:00 PM Comments Off
There is a thought provoking post over at BankThink, one of my favorite blogs on banking and credit, concerning the documentary “Inside Job” in which the director Charles Ferguson won an Academy Award and I dubbed the movie trailer the “best movie trailer ever.“
In his acceptance speech Ferguson…
When Ferguson took to the stage, he started off by declaring, “Forgive me, but I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”
Posted by Jonathan J. Miller -Monday, February 28, 2011, 3:00 PM Comments Off
[click to open report]
The Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy at NYU released their quarterly housing report on NYC which has a particular emphasis on the state of foreclosures. Here are a couple of report snippets.
Notices of foreclosure declined 32 percent citywide in the fourth quarter of 2010 compared to the same quarter of 2009, led by sharp declines in Queens and Staten Island. The Bronx, however, experienced a 78 percent increase in fore- closure notices between Q4 2009 and Q4 2010.
Morethanhalfofthesingle- family homes receiving a fore- closure notice in Q4 2010 were in Queens, while Brooklyn led the city in multi-family homes entering foreclosure.
Posted by Jonathan J. Miller -Monday, February 28, 2011, 1:00 PM Comments Off
Here’s the promo of our venture MillerQA and details of our next event.
My good friend Barry Ritholtz will be my guest in the second half of the event. He is a noted economist, author, media pundit and blogger. In his day job, Mr. Ritholtz is CEO and Director of Equity Research at Fusion IQ, an online quantitative research firm. The firm makes its institutional strength number crunching available to individual traders and investors.
He is the author of Bailout Nation and one of the highest, if not the highest trafficked economics related blogs, The Big Picture.
Posted by Jonathan J. Miller -Monday, February 28, 2011, 11:25 AM Comments Off
It’s that time again to update my favorite chart: NAR’s Pending Home Sale Index. Why? Because the seasonal adjustments were wacked out by the tax credit and the results reported are therefore confusing.
The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator, declined 2.8 percent to 88.9 based on contracts signed in January from a downwardly revised 91.5 in December. The index is 1.5 percent below the 90.3 level in January 2010 when a tax credit stimulus was in place. The data reflects contracts and not closings, which normally occur with a lag time of one or two months.
In reality, pending home sales were 16.2% higher in January than in December 2010 but 4.4% below January 2010. In the same period last year the month over month transition was up 17.6% but the newly expanded tax credit was ramping up and sales were taking off.
Now Mr. Roubini is trying to pull off his toughest feat yet. He is betting his business—Manhattan-based Roubini Global Economics—on the assumption that his clients will continue to pay him up to $100,000 a year for the intellectual rigor of his prognostications, not for his relentless negativity.
Note: My world is about to spin off its axis (and no, not because I bought a supercharged snow blower this weekend in 51 degree weather).
Posted by Jonathan J. Miller -Monday, February 28, 2011, 9:10 AM 2 Comments
Guest Columnist: Cecil Simon
Cecil has been a New York general state certified appraiser since 1992. He has contributed an article that is of great concern to many in the appraisal profession and parallels the matter that got me hopping mad a few months ago with the Appraisal Institute leadership though his issue is with AQB. Like me, Cecil was an appraiser before the licensing law in 1989 and in fact wrote Congress about this matter as early as 1986.
-Jonathan Miller
February 26, 2011
Dear Mr. Miller:
I recently had the opportunity to read the new Core Competency requirements for the Appraisal Institute’s MAI designation, and the education changes since 1990. Comparing the course requirements for the MAI with those for General Certification confirm my suspicions that the Appraisal Institute’s control of the Appraisal Qualifications Board, has been at the root of the lack of any serious attempt to meet the mandate set by FIRREA.
It was fascinating to watch the course requirements for the MAI metastasize from 267 hours in 1990 to 482 in 2010, an increase of 215 hours. This has occurred without any change in the theory and methodology of Real Property Valuation. Keep in mind that those 267 hours probably produced seventy percent of the current leadership of both the New York Chapter and the national leadership, and the 344 hours at the end of 2007 as much as ninety percent, all very competent practitioners.
It is clear that the Appraisal Institute did not think that it needed more time to better prepare its candidate members, since the Level II exams did not change, what did change was the creation of a series of courses from what was formerly Basic Income Capitalization (310) and General Applications (320) into a number of thirty hour courses to make up the three hundred hours for Certified General. Thus courses that were formerly taught in forty hours became equivalent to sixty and ninety hours.
Posted by Jonathan J. Miller -Thursday, February 17, 2011, 2:28 PM 9 Comments
[click to open article]
Matt Carter at Inman News wrote an interesting article on CoreLogic’s contention that NAR’s existing home sales numbers are inflated by as much as 20% and this has been going on for years. The article suggests since 2004, but it is more like since 2000…read on.
Territorial Pissing Match
This reminds me of the aggressive stance by FHFA on Case Shiller a few years ago. Aggressive because FHFA is a government entity (at that time they were known as OFHEO) and they were under fire for being asleep at the switch regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so for relevance, they implemented an unprecedented public assault on the S&P/Case Shiller Index.
Posted by Jonathan J. Miller -Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 7:10 PM 3 Comments
It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth on Curbed, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate.
…This week I took a look at metrics covering apartments that sold above list price. During the boom several years ago it was the rallying cry for the market. It’s come up as a topic in a number of conversations I’ve had with real estate agents recently so I thought I’d look further into it…
Posted by Jonathan J. Miller -Monday, February 14, 2011, 9:55 AM 1 Comment
This quarterly market report is provided by Dr. Kevin Gillen, an economist and Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Urban Research. He analyzes the Philadelphia and regional real estate markets through Econsult, an economics consulting firm based in Philadelphia PA that provides statistical & econometric analysis in support of litigation as well as business and public policy decision-makers. His results are published in a research paper called Philadelphia House Price Indices each quarter as a public service to the Philadelphia real estate community. Here’s his methodology.
Kevin does a great job parsing out the market and it is a pleasure to share his results on Matrix …Jonathan Miller
“House value changes uneven across region; average decline is 1.7 percent.”
However, the magnitude of this decline has been quite different from one locality to another. In Philadelphia county, the typical home declined in value by an average of 4.2% in Q4. But in the 10 suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia, the average decline was a much more modest 0.8%. However, in both cases, the decline in house prices slowed from the previous quarter.
40% drop in sales since the expiration of the tax credit
16% drop in region’s average sales price since peak
Posted by Jonathan J. Miller -Monday, February 14, 2011, 9:18 AM 1 Comment
Last week I was invited to co-anchor a press briefing for Trulia (I’m an original advisory board member) with Co-founder Pete Flint (one of the nicest, smartest people I’ve ever met). He covered the survey results and I provided an overview of the state of housing in the US.
I addressed the fear and self-loathing housing discussion largely brought about by the expiration of the federal home buyers tax credit last spring. Far from being an apologist on the state of housing (we clearly have more pain in front of us), its more about the unintentional misdirection caused by relying on housing metrics that lag the market by as much as 5 months.
What we found this time around is that despite the nightmarish housing market, 70% of Americans still view owning a home as part of their personal American Dream. Moreover, we’re seeing positive signals for recovery from Millennials (young adults aged 18-34) and in the South & West.
Had a fun interview with Tom and Sara this morning on the always MUST watch/listen Bloomberg Surveillance. We talked housing, rentals, vacancy and inventory. An added bonus was the addition of Adam Davidson – co-founder and co-host of Planet Money... Read More
