Sunday, October 16, 2011
‘Shadow inventory’ of homes could topple real-estate recovery - Business
Officially, there are 3.5 million homes for sale nationwide. But there are millions more lurking in the shadows — hidden neatly away on banks’ balance sheets, stalled in foreclosure court proceedings, or simply occupied by nonpaying owners as lenders wait months or years before taking action.
The housing market’s ballooning shadow inventory — buoyed by a yearlong foreclosure slowdown — stands as its most menacing problem, threatening to stifle recovery for several years.
And South Florida, with some 200,000 homes either already owned by lenders or headed for foreclosure, has one of the nation’s largest collections of unseen inventory. The number of shadow homes dwarfs the 30,000 or so that are listed on the active market. Even as prices have shown signs of stability this year, an impending wave of foreclosures threatens to keep real estate values deflated in South Florida and across the country.
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“A lot of people don’t understand how much inventory is set to come online in the next 18 to 24 months,” said Jack McCabe, CEO of McCabe Research & Consulting in Deerfield Beach. “When you compare what the Realtors show is inventory to what’s out there, you realize we have a long way to go.”
A Miami Herald analysis of four years of foreclosure data and thousands of property records found record -high levels of shadow inventory in several housing markets across the nation.
Though these shadow properties are routinely left out of monthly reports by real estate trade groups, their influence on home values has grown sharply in recent years.
In the supply-and-demand reliant real estate market, the national supply of homes is officially listed at about 3.5 million, or nine months’ worth of homes (home sales are on track to reach about five million this year). But once shadow inventory is added, that supply more than doubles, to at least 7.5 million. A healthy housing market has about six months’ supply of properties, which would be about 2.4 million.
The wave of homes set to hit the market in the coming years consists of discounted distressed properties, which tend to drag down neighborhood values.
Economists insist that the housing industry will not normalize and recover until most of the foreclosures work their way through the system — a process that will likely last several more years.
Shadow inventory can be broken into three categories:
• Properties lenders have repossessed, but have not put up for sale. These homes are referred to as real-estate owned, or REOs.
• Properties caught up in the clogged foreclosure process.
• Properties that are severely delinquent in loan payments — almost certainly headed for foreclosure — but have not yet entered the process.
Calculating the size of the shadow market has proven difficult, and estimates range from 1.6 million to seven million homes. The Herald analysis, using data from several mortgage research firms, real estate trade group figures and public records, found the following shadow inventory in South Florida:
• 40,000 houses already owned by lenders but not yet for sale.
• 124,000 units whose owners have received an initial foreclosure notice, or notice of default, but have not yet been foreclosed upon.
Romney, Perry and Cain Open Wide Financial Lead Over Field
Mitt Romney has raised far more money than Mr. Obama this year from the firms that have been among Wall Street’s top sources of donations for the two candidates.
That gap underscores the growing alienation from Mr. Obama among many rank-and-file financial professionals and Mr. Romney’s aggressive and successful efforts to woo them.
The imbalance exists at large investment banks and hedge funds, private equity firms and commercial banks, according to a New York Times analysis of the firms that accounted for the most campaign contributions from the industry to Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama in 2008, based on data from the Federal Election Commission and the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
It could widen as Mr. Obama, seeking to harness anger over growing income inequality, escalates his criticism of the industry, after a year spent trying to smooth ties bruised by efforts to impose tougher regulations.
Since this spring, Mr. Romney has raised $1.5 million from employees of firms like Morgan Stanley; Highbridge Capital Management, a hedge fund; and Blackstone, a private equity firm. Mr. Obama has raised just over $270,000 from firms that were among his leading sources of campaign cash in 2008.
Employees of Goldman Sachs, who in the 2008 campaign gave Mr. Obama over $1 million — more than donors from any other private employer in the country — have given him about $45,000 this year. Mr. Romney has raised about $350,000 from the firm’s employees.
Those figures do not account for all Wall Street giving, nor for the full force of each candidate’s robust network of Wall Street “bundlers,” wealthy individuals who raise money from friends, family members and business associates. And Mr. Obama continues to dominate Mr. Romney — and the rest of the Republican field — in overall fund-raising. He has raised close to $100 million so far this year for his campaign, three times more than Mr. Romney, as well as $65 million for the Democratic National Committee.
The gap in Wall Street giving to Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney underscores disenchantment with Mr. Obama in the industry and the challenges both candidates will face in grappling with public anger about the financial world.
For much of the last year, aides to Mr. Obama have sought to mollify Wall Street executives still bristling over the president’s criticisms of their profits and bonuses, while defending the administration’s program of tougher oversight and regulation as both necessary and beneficial to the industry in the long term.
But with Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor who once ran the private equity firm Bain Capital, the most likely Republican nominee, Mr. Obama’s campaign appears to sense an opportunity to harness public resentment over an industry that has largely thrived while the rest of the economy has not.
“There’s no doubt that Governor Romney has raised money off of his belief that Wall Street should be allowed to write its own rules again by repealing Wall Street reform,” said Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman. “The president put in place protections to ensure that the financial crisis is not repeated and that unacceptable risks aren’t taken with Americans’ life savings.”
For his part, Mr. Romney is now pitching himself as the turnaround expert for an ailing national economy. He has personally wooed major Wall Street donors, successfully recruiting several senior financial executives poised to back Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey had he opted for a White House bid.
But anger at big banks — manifested by the growing Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City and elsewhere — is palpable enough that Mr. Romney must avoid being seen as a friend of an industry that many Americans blame for onerous bank fees and underwater mortgages.
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Richard A. Oppel Jr., Susan Saulny and Derek Willis contributed reporting.