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Property / Real Estate As An Investment

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bubs said:
Not sure where you live but the countryside where I live is mostly comprised of farmettes and multi-million dollar homesteads, that’s where the wealthy go to live to escape the city not retirees trying to be frugal unless they can find an old small home built 50+ years ago where a boomer or silent gen recently passed and no one in family to inherit the property. Taxes are very high to live rural as most of the $1M homestead neighbors property value will jack up your real estate taxes even if you by a modest older fixer upper home on an acre or so of land. And property repairs and maintenance are very expensive. Also for retirees, there is a lot of time involved to maintain a rural home and yard, and physically demanding that not a lot of retirees can continue to do for the long term.
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Yeah good point. I am just going by personal experience through family members. The ones that can do the physical work take to the countryside. Those that can't seem to choose a retirement village.

Both seem good options.

I hope my health sticks with me as I know some old fellas who do a decent little craft business where they can get their stuff into those wealthy homes. I like the idea of that. Grandkids, gardening and working away in the workshop.
 
It seems some small real estate agencies
magoo said:

One of St. Louis’ Tallest Office Towers, Empty for Years, Sells for Less Than 2% of Its Peak Price​

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Another one. It seems it’s becoming a trend.

Burnett Plaza, the tallest building in Fort Worth, has been sold at foreclosure auction for $12.3 million

Burnett Plaza, the tallest building in Fort Worth, has been sold at foreclosure auction for $12.3 million. The previous owner, an affiliate of Opal Holdings based in New York, failed to repay a $13 million loan from Pinnacle, leading to foreclosure proceedings. In 2021, the Opal affiliate...
unusualwhales.com unusualwhales.com

Burnett Plaza, the tallest building in Fort Worth, has been sold at foreclosure auction for $12.3 million
09/05/2024
Burnett Plaza, the tallest building in Fort Worth, has been sold at foreclosure auction for $12.3 million.

“The previous owner, an affiliate of Opal Holdings based in New York, failed to repay a $13 million loan from Pinnacle, leading to foreclosure proceedings. In 2021, the Opal affiliate acquired the 1 million-square-foot Burnett Plaza at 801 Cherry Street for $137.5 million.”
 
I look at Zillow a lot for future affordable places to buy a house. You can still find a lot of great houses in the South.

East Tennessee, some of the Carolinas, some of Georgia, North Florida, Alabama, the Mississippi coast, Northwest Arkansas. Mobile and the Alabama Gulf coast in particular have some incredible houses in the $200-300k range. I haven't been to Mobile, but it's supposed to be like a more laid back version of New Orleans. I have been over by Orange Beach and Gulf Shores in Baldwin County, and that whole area would be a great place to live. I also like how a lot of leftists and Californians avoid places like Alabama.

Pensacola/the Florida panhandle, the Jacksonville area and Savannah, GA also have great inventory.
 


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Anecdotal example:

The house right next door to the one I grew up in recently sold. My sister keeps in touch with a neighborhood busybody who asked a local realtor what the house sold for -$860,000. This house was listed a year ago for $1.2 million. To be fair, they put a legit second floor on and dug out the basement to make an in-law unit with ten foot ceilings and knocked down the one car garage and built a brick three car garage.

All Zillow says is that the house is off the market. It doesn't give any information about the price history or taxes either. It simply says "Price history is unavailable" and "Tax history is unavailable." What I find odd is that it gives a Zestimate of $528,000. I wonder if Zillow is doing that to protect themselves from potential lawsuits when this all crashes.
 
Caractacus Potts said:
Anecdotal example:

The house right next door to the one I grew up in recently sold. My sister keeps in touch with a neighborhood busybody who asked a local realtor what the house sold for -$860,000. This house was listed a year ago for $1.2 million. To be fair, they put a legit second floor on and dug out the basement to make an in-law unit with ten foot ceilings and knocked down the one car garage and built a brick three car garage.

All Zillow says is that the house is off the market. It doesn't give any information about the price history or taxes either. It simply says "Price history is unavailable" and "Tax history is unavailable." What I find odd is that it gives a Zestimate of $528,000. I wonder if Zillow is doing that to protect themselves from potential lawsuits when this all crashes.
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I have noticed that many houses have no Zillow info if you just zoom in on the map. Some houses have an estimated value shown, and a lot don't. I'm not sure what makes the difference. It might be people opting out of having their info shown, but I don't think that many people are logging onto Zillow to request this.

However, it does still have a choice to view houses for rent, for sale, or recently sold. If you select recently sold, you can filter how far back you want to view. I figure anything over 1 year back is outdated anyway.

I recently sold a property and bought a new one, so I have been on Zillow very heavily for the past year. When I view houses sold, I find there are a lot of sales that I never saw as listings, and these are often priced very low. I think these are bought by investors, the kind that post signs saying "We buy houses".

The houses that go cheap generally need remodeling, but a lot that are listed conventionally need a lot of work too. The people who are selling like this are probably getting a lot less than they could get by listing conventionally. However, then they would have much higher closing costs that offset the higher sales price. Also, I think when they sell to investors, they can close and get their money in a few days.

Anyway, I think only recent sales can provide useful information for appraising the likely value of other similar houses nearby. It doesn't matter if some properties are lacking this information. There are enough comparable sales to be able to value any other property within reason.
 
Just checked site and some listings and it shows info.

At this moment people are just buying less and cheaper. But the market hasn’t turned to a seller. The demand is still high. The prices need to be adjusted down. But a crash? no way. Not yet. Demand is still here.
People are not yet selling out of necessity. They are more careful with purchases.

Brokers dont care about the price of the house. They care about comissions.

2026.
 
Thomas More said:
I recently sold a property and bought a new one, so I have been on Zillow very heavily for the past year. When I view houses sold, I find there are a lot of sales that I never saw as listings, and these are often priced very low. I think these are bought by investors, the kind that post signs saying "We buy houses".
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A decent number of transactions occur within families; parents "selling" houses for cheap to their kids.

And as you said, some are investors buying dilapidated places. If you care about a particular house, you can check public records and find some clues, for example if the seller and buyer's last names are the same, or if the buyer is an LLC, and when they had loans approved. You won't ever see when loans are paid off though.

magoo said:
Just checked site and some listings and it shows info.

At this moment people are just buying less and cheaper. But the market hasn’t turned to a seller. The demand is still high. The prices need to be adjusted down. But a crash? no way. Not yet. Demand is still here.
People are not yet selling out of necessity. They are more careful with purchases.
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Terms besides price have begun favoring buyers in my area, or they are at least "neutral" now, instead of 2020 - spring 2022 when buyers were treated poorly/given awful terms.
magoo said:
Brokers dont care about the price of the house. They care about comissions.
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100%
 
Just out of curiosity (no interest in selling) and my property has gone up another 4% in last 2 months according to Zillow.
 
bubs said:
Just out of curiosity (no interest in selling) and my property has gone up another 4% in last 2 months according to Zillow.
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For a while during Covid, Zillow was showing my property being worth 15% more than I knew its true value was, based in sales of identical units next to me. Zillow's estimates are questionable, because their automated routine can't identify correct comparables, and can't offset the differences for things like square footage or recent remodels.

For a while, Zillow was offering to buy homes for the price their Zestimate calculated, but they lost a fortune doing so, and finally put a stop to that practice!

Edit: I would expect an AI based estimate system could produce far more accurate estimates than what Zillow have been making in recent years. Estimates are always based on comparables, meaning that a current house for sale must be worth the same as similar houses that sold recently.

Real estate appraisers look for the best comparables they can find. However, the comparable recent sales are usually not identical, so they try to adjust the estimated value of the current house based on whatever significant differences are present. The old Zillow system seems to have done this poorly, but I would expect this is exactly the kind of thing that AI can do well.
 
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Joost said:
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For each interest rate increase the price drops. Interest rates are like a fuel. Or air on a plane. There´s probably a mathematical model which states exactly how much an increase in interest rates affects pricing. Something like for every 1% increase. After 6 months a house price will drop 5%. Cause the loan effort calculation of the same salary only allows the purchase of a house 50k cheaper. Something like this. So the seller for the same buyer has to lower the price to what the salary income now allows to buy. The bank prices the house indirectly through the loans.

But prices are still too high. Does 10 or 20% make any difference? Houses need to fall more than 50%. Commercial will be the first to fall. Supposedly. And all this should happen until 2026.
 
Joost said:
I agree that prices are outrageously high. I want to buy a home but even a plot of land in Austin is +$80k!
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And building codes are now so onerous that you have to truly have a ton of money ready to go. It can and does bankrupt people so easily.

Unincorporated Montana is amazingly lax with building codes as long as you don't build huge. 1,500 sq ft or less and it's quite lax.
 
cosine said:
And building codes are now so onerous that you have to truly have a ton of money ready to go. It can and does bankrupt people so easily.

Unincorporated Montana is amazingly lax with building codes as long as you don't build huge. 1,500 sq ft or less and it's quite lax.
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If you notice around the country most all new houses that are built as single family are now very large and expensive. If you can only afford a modest home, your stuck with either a townhouse or condo, you don’t get land, unless you buy a 50+ year old home that needs $50k or more work done to it. Many jurisdictions have “impact fees” on new homes. Those fees are a set amount (like $10k or $20k). So that is another method they try to price out the middle class from buying a plot of land and building a 1500 sq Ft home on it. Only someone in upper middle class or upper class can afford that flat impact fee on top of the other expenses. It’s like a random person with a $200k inheritance that buys a Ferrari with every penny. After 1 year of insurance and maintenance costs, they realize they can’t afford it.
 
Thomas More said:
I have noticed that many houses have no Zillow info if you just zoom in on the map. Some houses have an estimated value shown, and a lot don't. I'm not sure what makes the difference. It might be people opting out of having their info shown, but I don't think that many people are logging onto Zillow to request this.

However, it does still have a choice to view houses for rent, for sale, or recently sold. If you select recently sold, you can filter how far back you want to view. I f
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Home ownership and sales data are public record.
There is nothing an individual person can do about that. Land records are physically recorded in plat books in courthouses, and today most of them are digitized and online. You cannot erase or cover your name in these books.

/rant (Off Topic: I have seen where a photograph was removed or blurred, but always remember none of these laws are done for your protection--they are woke laws that apply to certain protected groups. The ability to request a blurred a photograph is to prevent homebuyers from seeing whether a neighborhood is white or minority occupied (there are laws which prohibit real estate workers from even talking about racial composition of a neighborhood)--NOT because you have a right to privacy of the image of your home, just as we have a law called HIPAA which was passed specifically to prevent gays from having their gay shenanigans revealed when they went in for AIDS treatment at a medical clinic; it does NOT give Americans any sort of privacy protections and in fact generally makes medical procedures more bureaucratic and difficult).
/rant off

California is an exception (possibly some other states), but due to the large number of paranoid celebrities and elites living in California, they passed a law to obfuscate ownership records, but property ownership is generally a matter of public record.

I would expect the Zillow Zestimate formula has a range of acceptable certainty (known in statistics as a confidence interval) and it will only show an estimated value if that interval is below a certain threshold. Both low sales volume and rapidly changing prices would cause such an interval to be exceeded. We are seeing both of those phenomenon now.
 
bubs said:
If you notice around the country most all new houses that are built as single family are now very large and expensive. If you can only afford a modest home, your stuck with either a townhouse or condo, you don’t get land, unless you buy a 50+ year old home that needs $50k or more work done to it. Many jurisdictions have “impact fees” on new homes. Those fees are a set amount (like $10k or $20k). So that is another method they try to price out the middle class from buying a plot of land and building a 1500 sq Ft home on it. Only someone in upper middle class or upper class can afford that flat impact fee on top of the other expenses. It’s like a random person with a $200k inheritance that buys a Ferrari with every penny. After 1 year of insurance and maintenance costs, they realize they can’t afford it.
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White flight and vanity changed expectations. Every generation needs a bigger house than their parents, or they haven't "made it." Plus, as others have said, the American middle class housing experience is about avoiding diversity at great cost whilst "embracing diversity" on the public face. Such a transparent system-wide shakedown.
 
Rax Moscow said:
Home ownership and sales data are public record.
There is nothing an individual person can do about that. Land records are physically recorded in plat books in courthouses, and today most of them are digitized and online. You cannot erase or cover your name in these books.

/rant (Off Topic: I have seen where a photograph was removed or blurred, but always remember none of these laws are done for your protection--they are woke laws that apply to certain protected groups. The ability to request a blurred a photograph is to prevent homebuyers from seeing whether a neighborhood is white or minority occupied (there are laws which prohibit real estate workers from even talking about racial composition of a neighborhood)--NOT because you have a right to privacy of the image of your home, just as we have a law called HIPAA which was passed specifically to prevent gays from having their gay shenanigans revealed when they went in for AIDS treatment at a medical clinic; it does NOT give Americans any sort of privacy protections and in fact generally makes medical procedures more bureaucratic and difficult).
/rant off

California is an exception (possibly some other states), but due to the large number of paranoid celebrities and elites living in California, they passed a law to obfuscate ownership records, but property ownership is generally a matter of public record.

I would expect the Zillow Zestimate formula has a range of acceptable certainty (known in statistics as a confidence interval) and it will only show an estimated value if that interval is below a certain threshold. Both low sales volume and rapidly changing prices would cause such an interval to be exceeded. We are seeing both of those phenomenon now.
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This is a big reason why celebrities and rich people commonly buy homes as an LLC. It obfuscates who's buying that $30 million mansion.
 
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