Mitt the Shit

Can Mitt stand his own stupidity?

Happy Daze in Sunshine State

Have I Got the Candidate for You!

How the real-estate market could turn Florida for Obama.

"The mood in Florida is very different from 2000 and 2004," he says. "Then we were a confident, wealthy state. Now we're broke. I've been here 30 years, and I haven't seen Floridians this anxious in a long time." He says older people are worried about their pensions and 401(k)s, and his students are wondering if there will be jobs for them when they graduate.

there goes the industry...

the four-member Florida Cabinet, acting as the Financial Services Commission, unanimously approved a stricter set of emergency rules that ban people from obtaining mortgage broker licenses if they've been convicted or plead no contest to felony financial crimes such as fraud, money laundering, dishonesty or breach of trust, including extortion, grand theft and embezzlement. Business Week

Guess where?

From 2000 to 2007, regulators allowed at least 10,529 people with criminal records to work in the mortgage profession. via

No blog was never more aptly named than this...

Want more?

• More than half the people who wrote mortgages in Florida during that period were not subject to any criminal background check. Despite repeated pleas from industry leaders to screen them, Florida regulators have refused.

• Confronted with a growing epidemic of mortgage fraud -- Florida now has the highest rate in the nation -- the number of license revocations declined over the last five years, leaving borrowers at the mercy of predatory brokers.

• During the peak of the housing boom, the Office of Financial Regulation ignored a state law enacted in 2006 that compelled it to perform nationwide criminal background checks on applicants. That failure allowed people convicted in other states -- and in federal court -- to peddle loans in Florida without any scrutiny.

• Regulators allowed at least 20 brokers to keep their licenses even after committing the one crime that seemed sure to get them banned from the industry: mortgage fraud.

''I knew we had a problem. I had no idea how bad,'' U.S. Sen. Doofus Mel Martinez, Ripyouoffagain-Fla., said when told of The Miami Herald's findings.

Recovered from Hurricane "Charley," Punta Gorda Walloped by Hurricane "Republican Deregulated Business"

Pain Street USA:

One such place is Punta Gorda, Fla. In Moody's outlook, prices there will undergo the steepest correction of any U.S. market. From their peak during the first three months of 2006, to their bottom, forecast for the second quarter of 2009, prices will decline 35.3 percent. That's in nominal dollars; adjusted for inflation, the loss will be even greater.

Yakuza into mortgage fraud?

This is strong stuff -- have we proof?

Mortgage fraud has turned entire city neighborhoods and suburban developments into vagrant-riddled ghost towns. Block after block in many cities are vacant, due to real estate crime, sub-prime foreclosure and abandonment. As banks foreclose on many of these over-priced homes, the homes remain vacant because the phony appraisal don’t reflect their actual value and no one is going to buy a house encumbered with a loan, which exceeds its worth.



The government has active investigations on several high profile banking, mortgage and real estate organizations, and has set hundreds of crooked insiders to prison. According to a compilation of press releases from the United States Department of Justice and industry sources, the cases involve everything from phony title insurance to assigning phony ratings to shaky investment bonds, including an Indiana couple’s charge that a bank failed to follow specific Truth in Lending regulations.



Mortgage fraud is big business, especially for organized crime. Analysts claim that in Japan, the Yakuza is responsible for at least ten per cent of the nation’s mortgage fraud. Drug rings and organized crime have become so involved in mortgage fraud, that police officers in many metro areas are now concentrating on mortgage fraud and money laundering.

External Costs

A 2006 study called “The External Costs of Foreclosure” by Dan Immergluck of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Geoff Smith of the Woodstock Institute showed that “each conventional foreclosure within an eighth of a mile of a single-family home results in a 0.9 percent decline in value.” Stephen Frater, SH_T

Incredible shrinking home equity

Money talks:

Many of the worst hit cities are in Sun Belt areas that experienced outsized home-price growth during the real estate bubble, according to Arnold Slesers, an associate economist at Moody's. The home price correction in many of these cities will be severe as unsold new homes and leaps in foreclosures add to already big inventories.

The Stockton, Calif., metro area, where Moody's predicts a 25 percent price drop, will be the hardest hit among the 100 most populated cities surveyed.

. . .

Just a tick or two behind Stockton in the Moody's survey were two Florida metro areas, Palm Bay/Melbourne (down 24.9 percent) and Sarasota/Bradenton (down 24.8 percent). All three markets are on almost the same peak-to-trough schedule, with Moody's forecasting that Sarasota will bottom out in the third quarter of 2008, a quarter sooner than the other two.

Florida will continue to experience Hurricane Bush for some time

Two Florida tales from NPR (click to get full stories):

Morning Edition, September 19, 2007 · Florida Democrat Bill Nelson, who chairs a subcommittee overseeing U.N. activities, wants to know why Florida's Everglades National Park was taken off a U.N. list of World Heritage sites considered "in danger." Environmental groups say the decision reflects not progress, but politics. [Buuuuuusssshhh administration fuckup, of course]

Morning Edition, September 19, 2007 · The real estate market around Miami is one of many areas where housing prices have plummeted. Realtor John Paul Rosser sells plots of land to condo developers. But even he doesn't understand why some builders are still in the Miami market.

Movin' on up

Just another day in the sinkhole economy:

ORLANDO, Fla. -- New information just released about home foreclosures shows Florida is near the top of the list. More than 30,000 homeowners faced foreclosure in August.

That number moved the state from number seven to number three in the country when it comes to foreclosures. WFTV

Sucko

Recent Florida Association of Realtors News

• 2Q home sales, prices fall [Jacksonville]
• 2Q housing outlook: Still depressed [Tampa Bay]
• Sales, home values continue to drop [Orlando]
• Home prices slide in most of South Florida [South Florida]
• Home sales continue steep drop [Jacksonville]

#

Fort Myers rockets to top of housing pyramid

There was a nearly 27-month supply of existing single-family homes on the Fort Myers market last month compared to a three-month supply at the height of the local boom in housing in August 2005, according to Denny Grimes, a top real estate agent in Fort Myers.

At the same time, more than 40 percent of single-family homes were listed at prices below $250,000 versus just 18 percent at the market peak.

"There's a lot of blood in the water and there's a lot more to come," Grimes said.

Fort Myers "is by far the worst housing market that we're in," J. Larry Sorsby, executive vice president and chief financial officer of home builder Hovnanian Enterprises Inc., told Reuters.

This just in:

a task force working with the Drug Enforcement Administration has raided 25 grow houses in Lee County so far this year.

Here's looking at you, Epicenter

The Financial Times pinpoints the center of the worldwide housing bubble, and finds, mirabile dictu, it can be pinpointed in Sarasota:

'Canary in the cage' tells of housing woes

By Eoin Callan in Sarasota County, Florida

Published: August 10 2007 03:00 | Last updated: August 10 2007 03:00

The seizure that gripped European financial markets yesterday can be partly traced to an unlikely place. Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings and sets off a tidal wave on the other side of the world, Sarasota, Florida is at the centre of the US housing bust that sent shockwaves through global markets.

Mr. Callan goes on to make clear that Sarasota is by no means atypical of the 16-year threshing turbine known as Florida real estate:

The Sarasota district has experienced the biggest drop in house prices in the country, with foreclosures spiking after a drop of almost 15 per cent in the year to March.

Florida is the "canary in the cage", according to Jan Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs.

The precedent has alarmed Wall Street economists tracking the worst US housing slump in 16 years, as price falls in Sarasota have spread across the state and threaten to drag Florida into recession.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune hastily rushes to correct the FT:

The Financial Times was wrong to single out Sarasota as the epicenter of the global financial crisis . . . said Jack McCabe, a Deerfield Beach-based real estate analyst.

"Naples, Fort Myers, the Cape Coral market has experienced the largest price drop in the U.S.,"

before acknowledging that it's a minor blemish in a bang-on portrait of a market:

"Florida is where the boom started and ended, and where the bust started," McCabe said. "Previous boom-and-bust cycles have started in California. This time, Florida is the state that experienced the height of speculative activity that drove the boom."

There were obviously other areas of the country that also experienced high levels of speculation -- Southern California, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Washington, D.C. -- but Florida was undoubtedly the epicenter, McCabe maintains.

After some lipflapping from experts, the FT finds the standard Florida apologist for shite business sighting the mandatory lining of silver:

But Joe Hembree, president of the Sarasota Realtors Association, says the local market will recover as flippers cut their losses. "There are great bargains to be had throughout the community as asking prices have dropped," he says.

And is soon outdone by the SH-T:

Kerry Kirschner, executive director of the Argus Foundation, agreed.

"I think this is positive for Sarasota," Kirschner said. "This will impress on people that they ought to look in Sarasota if they want waterfront property."

Lenders to your posts: a whole new round of sub-prime lending awaits.