Bubble in Asheville (Henderson, Hendersonville, Macon: sale, apartment, rent)

[Asheville Native]

Originally Posted by Flat2MT

The housing situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets better and Crazy G is obviously very passionate about this subject. We shouldn't interpret his postings as nothing more than that.

His opinion, like your opinion, is just that opinion, but I fear he is much closer to the reality of what is going on. The latest effort by Bush to freeze rates to keep people from loosing their homes is a band-aid, and will expire in 5 years. When the coach turns back into a pumpkin, hang on cause it is going to be a mess.

The root cause is that people were lied to and told they could afford homes that they didn't have a chance to qualify for without falsifying income on the loan applications. Well guess what, there is no fix to fix that, these people could not afford these homes to begin with, all you have to add to the formula for disaster is the impact the energy cost rise on these peoples bottom line.

[Flat2MT]

Originally Posted by Asheville Native

His opinion, like your opinion, is just that opinion, but I fear he is much closer to the reality of what is going on. The latest effort by Bush to freeze rates to keep people from loosing their homes is a band-aid, and will expire in 5 years. When the coach turns back into a pumpkin, hang on cause it is going to be a mess.

The root cause is that people were lied to and told they could afford homes that they didn't have a chance to qualify for without falsifying income on the loan applications. Well guess what, there is no fix to fix that, these people could not afford these homes to begin with, all you have to add to the formula for disaster is the impact the energy cost rise on these peoples bottom line.

Absolutely. A bit of a clarification is necessary. What I meant when I said...'we shouldn't interpret his postings as nothing more than that'...referred to the previous comment of.... 'the way end-timers talk...all doom and gloom.' Our current situation is terrible but it isn't "the end of the world as we know it."

[Crazy G]

I grew up during the 1950's....
There wasn't a week that went by, that my mother didn't remind me, of the ""DOOM & GLOOM"" of the depression era...

Some how, people have this feeling, that it can ""NEVER"" happen again, in America....

Well....Housing prices went down 17 years in a row, in Japan....
[Yes...that's consecutive]....So to say America is isolated from Economics is absurb....

The same forces are at work NOW, as back then.....READ YOUR HISTORY BOOKS...

>>>""""DEBT IS GOING TO BRING THIS COUNTRY TO IT'S KNEES""<<<<

It's called "debt" deflation.....it's starting to happen right before your eyes....
RIGHT NOW....and people are remiss to it's function....
According to A.Gary Shilling...Housing prices are to drop [on average]...""" 25% """

On any given house...that may/may not mean much.....but taken in totality...we're talking "" $ TRILLIONS """ of lost wealth....

Debt, is higher than it has ever been....people save less than they have since the last 'great depression', and incomes have NOT risen, appreciably to offset the debt....

This is going down for the count of a lost generation!!!!

[Investrman]

We tried to live 8 years in Asheville and saw so much change in that time in costs. I had a project development consulting busienss I started up working with VC but after 911 happened a lot of new regulations came in and things started to change and I was forced to close that business. To find anything else locally in Asheville to what I used to earn in Colorado was a joke. This is/was the problem we found related to the previous posters about "the end in housing".

I also believe Asheville is going to get its ass whipped but good. Because of the loss of former industrial basis, and the first wave of baby boomers who had pensions, retirements, savings from 40+ years ago, the real estate industry jumped on this. This meant appraisers, brokers, bankers, and anyone tied to real estate realized if they market Asheville (in this case) hard and as the greatest place to live & retire to, people will come here with those retirement dollars. Well, they did and developers started to slap more houses up faster to meet the demand and started to use substandard products and even illegal peoples to build these and make them sound good just to get them sold fast to many coming into the area.

That meant slick loan programs and even builder schemes were employed to get anyone at any cost into a home, and as long as they could get a lender to "qualify" a borrower, the builder was off the hook, got his money like the realtor, the appraiser and others in the scheme.

Now fast forward, and those living here having to get a job (after laying everyting they had in assets on a hyper inflated house price), realized too late, what the Chamber of Commerce and relators and others advertised about Asheville was not accurate, and now that low wage they are paid they find it hard to meet that new loan they were "qualified' to have, and soon, they start to sell off things they have collected over the years at Smileys Flea Market to make payments and meet bills, and as the costs keep escalating around Asheville in every manner, they find they are slipping deeper and deeper slowly down a hill they cannot financially make back up no matter how hard they work. Couple the fact a lot of slapped up "custom homes" were problematic, they now find they cannot find the buidler to fix the problems and are faced at getting home equity loans to repair problems in fairly new homes, and the debt piles on deeper but the wage does not go higher, and these people who work hard now face losing the home because they missed a payment or had a medical problem occur they do not have insurance for or hosts of other problems.. And with the $Hundreds of Billions already lost with major banks/lenders because of improperly priced real estate loans that were neatly bundled up by the greedy bankers to pawn off on an investment banking group to be securitzed and create a CDO which was sold as a security on the public markets to be invested into- NOW all those funds and loans are being devalued to find their true worth and all the way back to the homeowner in Asheville (and other regions) the true valuation of the homes will show, and people will find themselves upside down owing more for a mortgage product they were duped into buying than it was every truly worth to begin with!

This GREED in Asheville's real estate market is what will become her demise soon I feel. All the former baby boomer monies have been reallocated nationally or re-invested and NOBODY coming up behind them will have those incomes or assets to work with again, or support an artificially inflated rel estate market anymore, and all this hyper inflated real estate will tank like a rock and it will have a catastrophic effect on Asheville as it already is on many regions around the country.

Many of the corporate executives who sold out the former middle class US worker for offshoring and outsourcing our jobs, are the very ones who own a 2nd or 3rd or 4th home in the Asheville region on their huge salaries and perks they recive yet have no care or concern about the workers they destroyed who infused those middle class incomes into economies for years, and have created a 2 party system now. Remember, a recent interview in Washington D.C. stated, the federal government looks at middle class as earning an income of $80,000.00 annually today- How many people you know who make that sort of income today or even live in Asheville making that sort of income? Very few.

[NCBND]

The "WNC as the new Jerusalem" thing for retirees and 2nd/3rd/4th homers was based upon some sound thinking. The old industrial base was dying and needed to be replaced with [i]something[i] or the entire area would turn into Buffalo, NY or Camden, NJ. Asheville and the area really do have some wonderful attributes to sell. The effectiveness of the resulting hype can be seen to this day as people even now drink the "no housing recession here" Kool-Aid.

My favorite WNC market barometer is a certain development east of Asheville where the FLers were calling up and buying 1/4 acre lots for $350,000 sight unseen. Although sales there have slowed to a trickle, there are still a few deed transfers going through every week. It's notable, though, that despite the presence of many of these postage stamp dream lots for resale on the local MLS, all sales in the paper are still from the original developer to the lucky new owners - not one secondary market resale yet.

[Fitz]

Originally Posted by NCBND

The effectiveness of the resulting hype can be seen to this day as people even now drink the "no housing recession here" Kool-Aid.

Figures for October and November pretty much say it all.

October

November

I went to a RE investors meeting here last year and the speaker commented that residential property hadn't "cash-flowed" in Asheville for years. I asked him if he thought it would in the future. "I doubt it" he said, taken somewhat aback by my impertinent question.

[Crazy G]

Well, we've seen where people could buy homes with NO MONEY down, and have a "PAY OPTION MORTGAGE", and make monthly payments for whatever their little hearts desired....
Most of those people are probably upside down on their mortgages NOW!!!!

So, NOW, they focused on improving their life, with credit cards....and falling into arrears on that also!!!

Moderator cut: off topic


The title of this thread was.....Bubbles in Asheville!!!

It really doesn't make any difference if there was/wasn't a bubble in Asheville...THERE WERE BUBBLE IN OTHER AREAS, AND THE EFFECTS >>""" WILL BE ""<<<< felt in Asheville no matter....

They may even be felt around the world....

[Crazy G]

On the Bloomberg news this morning, Michelle Meyers of [Wall Streets] Lehman Bros, said she anticipated real estate to decline all the way into 2009....
Yes!!! I know, as former house speaker Tip O'Neal, once said....
""ALL politics are local""....And Former Fed. Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan once said;
""ALL Real Estate is local''
But it's hard to envision a Bubble in Asheville, not being influenced by politics or real estate somewhere else....
And it's hard to envision "IF" Real Estate goes down in other areas that Asheville will NOT be affected

[Asheville Native]

Hmmmm, I would have thought that the abuse of credit, whether it be taking out a mortgage that there is no real chance of ever paying outside of the short term, and staggering credit card debt are very closely related Both represent reckless behavior of both borrower and lender that are going to have a significant negative impact on the economy in general and devastating impact on these individuals.

As a side note of the economy in general, the wife was out at the stores today, and said it was great, the stores were deserted, no crowds at the Mall, Best Buy, and many other stores they went to. Combined with housing, credit card debt, and no one shopping, can you say recession. It doesn't matter what the administration in Washington call it, it is sure looking like the recession is here, just not acknowledged yet.

[wooaway]

Wow. Went to asheville this past weekend. I'm not sure how the market is holding on. A vanilla nothing special house in Biltmore Park is going for $200 a sq ft. Looked at a basic 2300 sq. ft. house and asking price is $470k. Ouch.