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One seems to pay a big premium for a low water #. Good luck finding a two-digit water # and a five-digit lot price. ..and, of course, you wouldn't just be sitting on it - you would be paying property tax, I imagine. Unimproved Land is almost always a horrible investment, as far as I can...

I've researched a bit into Cambria, though it is a bit unusual in that one operation seems to control almost all of the vacation rentals, and these rentals are a pretty gigantic chunk of the inventory. It may be a bit too remote for the ideal oldster retirement crowd in terms of healthcare...

I don't know how this became a discussion of SLO county, but it is interesting. When this housing bear bottoms out - and I'm as inclined to believe 2022 as a better date for that than 2010, for a few reasons... won't there be a stampede of retirees to SLO and SB county? Carmel won't be...

Thanks for the microecon posts, graphrix. That is some scary stuff, though I guess that most of that commercial space is owned by huge companies that can weather the storm. Still, I wonder, will those numbers keep climbing into the 30s and 40s? Something to BEAR in mind...

So, what effect do we see in terms of this on the local real estate market? Doesn't Indymac have an absolutely gigantic inventory of mortgages in Irvine? And what happens if the equity in FRE and FNM totally evaporate?

"With that being said Bel Air is the only one considered as old money" I guess these things are relative - maybe it's the person attached to the money who tends to be old rather than the status of the 'hood itself! Ironic, in that Bel-Air was largely developed in the 50s, to my...

I'm sure many readers here scour the intertubes for the latest price and sales info. May I humbly nominate, as my favorite leading indicator, the regional bank etf 'KRE'. In my opinion, KRE will lead real estate medians down, and then, up.

In response to the original post, the CPI is 100% fraudulent, as are our unemployment statistics. The US has degraded the quality of both to total meaninglessness in the past 20 years thanks to a combination of politically-motivated redefinitions and general intellectual laziness. Not...

Back on topic - yes, it will be brutal. Wall Street is selling the banks HARD. That means that real estate is going to keep falling.

Obviously, this isn't the most original insight, but it seems like the 'new suburban premium' of 5 years ago has almost fully faded away in all parts of California. In much the same way that the prius has replaced the suv as a suburban status symbol, so is the attraction of remote, new...

is that mello-roos? almost a full point?

Personally, with income like that, I'd save for a few years and buy in cash. Everything will be at least 20% lower at that point, or at the very least, I'd rather have the money in energy stocks than a house in the meantime.

Riverside, to a significant degree, is an extension of the OC market. I would guess that much of the demand for those places as the bubble was inflating a few years ago was based on commuters to OC jobs who wanted their own backyard for under 600K. It's a hell of a triple whammy - if the...

The funny thing is that no one cries 'fraud' when policies systematically destroy almost half of the value of the dollar in just 6 years. Everyone can spot a scam when it involves a shiny new car and a business deal inside a family, most can spot it when banks make ridiculously dangerous...

where does indymac fit into this picture? their current value is incredibly dinky, yet they have a decent-sized chunk of the market. if it's all about getting market share, negative value and toxic portolio be damned, why aren't they belles of the ball?

no one knows. if you could have gone back in time and told someone in 2002 that crude would be over $120 in 2008, gold would trade over $1000 and the euro would hit 1.60, but that they could only play interest rates as a way of capitalizing on this knowledge, they would have bought the farm...

As long as this thread is derailed into speculation on macroeconomic influences, let me bog it down further: I saw this commodity/inflationary wave coming five years ago, though I also saw things that didn't come to pass, and no one's timing is perfect, so it didn't translate into the...