Friday, July 03, 2009

Tally: 1 for 5



I've now looked at the debt history for 5 houses, and it's only been the first one that I looked at that showed evidence of mortgage abuse.

XXX Westbury Drive $119/sqft. Asking $400,000

Today's property was purchased in 1992 by its current owners for $235K. At the time it was $70/sqft. It looks like they put 65K down and had a mortgage of ~$175. In 1999, they refinanced to a ~$185K. In 2004, they refinanced again to ~$213K -- and it appears to have been into a fixed-rate mortgage at that! This refinancing does not qualify as serial or abuse.

If these owners have to drop their price by $50K, then they still walk away with an additional $122K in profit (well, $98 after the realtors take their 6% cut) -- that's beyond the $38K they already extracted from their two refinancings. What's funny is that, in spite of having so much of an equity cushion, these owners have not dropped their price to move the house (I don't know how many times they dropped the price, they likely have, all I'm claiming is that they haven't dropped it sufficiently to move it); the house has been on the market for 233 days. Besides that previous bit of snark, all I can say about these owners is that I wish I were in their situation.

...

One thing that's confused the hell out of me as I've been looking at properties around Chapel Hill: there's no clear price per square foot that sellers list for, and there's no clear price per square foot that buyers are willing to pay. Sometimes, it seems like $160/sqft is the average, but then you have places like Sothern Village and Meadomont that are nowhere near the same price. It vaguely looks like many sales are occurring at the $140/sqft range. Today's property is cheaper than that, though. Why hasn't it moved? Certainly it is a big house and I hear it's now in vogue to buy a smaller house, but at it's current price, it's a much better deal than a lot of other properties I've seen on the market. I can't figure out why it would have remained unsold for so long.


Mortgage abuse tally: 1 for 5. 20%.

4 comments:

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Anonymous said...

Hello. My wife and I bought our house about 6 months ago. It was a foreclosure and we were able to get a great deal on it. We also took advantage of the 8K tax credit so that definitely helped. We did an extensive remodeling job and now I want to refinance to cut the term to a 20 or 15 year loan. Does anyone know any good sites for mortgage information? Thanks!

Mike

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