Monday, October 22, 2007

The Daily 2¢ - Housing On the Block!

I wanted to make sure that everyone was aware of a number of truly huge home actions occurring around the country in the next few weeks.

These auctions will be carried out by The Real Estate Disposition Corporation (REDC) and will include four days of auctioning in southern California, two days in Massachusetts, one day in Huston, and one day in Phoenix.

All together, over 1100 single family, multi family, condo and townhomes will be auctioned likely at significantly reduced prices.

Before you get the idea that all these properties are junk, browse the (ever growing in number) listings.

With only a cursory glance, I was able to find one single family on Nantucket, a bunch, even new construction, in some reasonable locations on Cape Cod, and even a few located in the within the first tier of towns directly bordering Boston.

The starting bid on many of the homes range between $1000 to low $100K and all homes will be open for inspection walkthroughs on dates specified on the REDC website.

Keep in mind that just a few weeks ago a similar auction in Michigan took place with many bidders walking away with homes for a mere $2000.

The current owners (banks, Countrywide Financial (NYSE:CFC), Wall Street, whomever) have struck out selling these homes on the normal markets and are now simply attempting the cut them loose and take their losses.

I think this is not only an obvious symptom of how bad things really are in the nation’s housing markets but I believe it is also a real harbinger of things to come and may simply be an opening salvo in the much larger production as the economy likely drifts ever closer to recession.