As the RBA Bubble 2.0 continues expanding, look for more overdone listing copy.  This has been Scientifically Proven.  Thanks very much to Burbed reader nomadic for passing along this AMAZING find from the BEST real estate section in the UNIVERSE.

The Most Gorgeous and Pristine of Them All

SPREAD SHEET December 27, 2012, 9:32 p.m. ET
By SANETTE TANAKA, The Wall Street Journal

What is a fabulously awesome way to sell an incredibly terrific home? Try a little hyperbole.

Spread Sheet asked real-estate listings company Zillow to analyze 14 enthusiastic adjectives like “amazing,” “beautiful” and “fabulous” in home listings going back to 2007. The findings: For homes priced at $1 million or higher, overall hype is up more than 58% from five years ago.

“Agents are always looking to give something a little pop, anything to catch people’s attention,” says appraiser Donald Boucher, president of Washington, D.C.-based Boucher and Boucher Inc.

What are the most commonly used adjectives? “Beautiful” ranks first in the select list, appearing in more than a quarter of luxury home listings. “Great” comes next at 21.6%, followed by “gorgeous” at 9% and “fabulous” at 6.9%. The word that saw the biggest uptick since 2007 is “pristine,” which has seen a nearly 140% increase in use.

The words we keep noticing are “Regular sale” and “Not a short sale” and “Honest, we swear, no foreclosure here” and “Ignore those rude letters from the bank!”  But we’ve seen “pristine” as well.

This also reminds us of an observation from Freakonomics, where realtards let each other know which houses are utterly skippable by using the most overblown adjectives possible.  A house worth seeing will have specifics instead.  So you’d want to check out a “Vintage bungalow with hardwood flrs, cherry cabinets, granite & SS appliances inc Sub-Zero fridge” but maybe pass on the “Stunning house, great neighborhood, beautiful find, WOW!” that sounds very excited but describes nothing.

Some Special RBA house marketing terms:

• state-of-the-art
• dedicated server closet
• Excellent cellular signal
• Close to Google
• Walk to 3 coffee shops
• Eco-friendly landscaping
• 8888888

Can there be any question that The Bubble is Back? Buyers are returning to that delightful 2005 method: the Begging Letter. It must be true, because it’s in a newspaper.

Can I Buy Your House, Pretty Please?

By JOANN S. LUBLIN, The Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2013

Rob and Julia Israch won a fierce bidding war for a three-bedroom townhouse in Mountain View, Calif., late last year even though their $750,000 offer—while $92,000 above the asking price—was topped by 11 rivals and was several thousand dollars below the highest bid.

A key reason: The seller, software engineer Lev Stesin, was moved by a letter in which the Israchs said they worked in the technology industry and explained how the home’s spacious layout would be perfect given the imminent arrival of their first child. Among other things, the townhouse has three bathrooms, a wood-burning fireplace and a roomy backyard.

The only problem with this real estate story is the author’s contention that it isn’t just happening where it’s Special, namely Mountain View. Pitch letters are also going to sellers in Seattle, San Diego, suburban Chicago, and Washington D.C. Hah, and you thought we were going to say Belmont or something. No, we really meant places where it isn’t Special at all (e.g. where you can make an offer and be the only one! Redfin’s CEO said 95% of the offers their agents made in Silicon Valley had competing offers.)

The WSJ piece included two examples of House Begging Letters that worked. Both were from Silicon Valley buyers. Here’s one.

Note the use of photos. Don’t beg without them. Also don’t house beg with form letters. You’re going to have to write an individual letter for each seller, calling attention to their home’s marvelous features. Comments such as “Of all the 1954 era crapboxes we looked at today, yours had the fewest pet odors and the least offensive paint scheme” will probably not be effective. Some tips:

• Remind the seller how attractive your offer is. You could write this note on the back of a hundred dollar bill to show how many more you have waiting.
• Mention all the things you have in common with the seller, so they identify with you and not any of those other Less Special buyers. If you can’t find the sellers on social media, a good private detective can ferret that info out. Or spend some of those C-notes on the gabbiest neighbors.
• Gush about their house and neighborhood without overdoing it. Otherwise they’ll figure you’re using irony. After all, it is one of several hundred 1954 era crapboxes in the tract. But — close to Google! (Don’t mention this if they tried and failed to get jobs there.)
• Describe your difficult house hunt without sounding whiny. If you can fake sincerity here, you’ll have it made:

A few years ago, the owners of an older Los Altos home got more than 21 offers and picked the one from a woman who also submitted a love letter from her dog, said Kathy Bridgman, an Alain Pinel Realtors agent who represented the sellers. “She won’t touch a thing,” promised the letter, signed with a paw print. “I will be able to play in the yard.”

After closing, the buyer immediately tore down the home and built a bigger one.

Note: In case you’re noticing that we’ve repeatedly reformatted this piece, you’re correct. Our blogging tools aren’t as compatible with each other as we wish they were.  In this particular case, one tool supports photo captions but won’t strip styles out properly, the other is the reverse.  Don’t even get us started on what WordPress is doing to both of them.

Let’s say you built a super expensive, fancy-schmancy custom one-of-a-kind house on a spectacular view lot and had a bunch of designers each decorate a different room in the place to make it Extra Super Mega Special. Then you ran a charity fundraiser by calling it a Designer Showcase and listed the place for $45 million.  And of course you list it with Sotheby’s.

And yet, let’s say this drop-dead-gorgeous spec palace did not find a buyer for $45 million (or, we assume, anywhere near that vicinity) when it was first listed this February.  What do you do?

You could cut the price ten million or so.  And it looks like that was tried as well, as the most recent price last week is $35.88M.  And yet, the house is still sitting there, all lonely on its double lot and intense blue skies obtained with the finest Photoshop filters.  What’s the next step to avoiding serious financial fail?

In this case, the solution (or at least the next attempt at avoiding a catastrophe) is to put the house up for auction.  The starting price will be $25 million.  At least one website actually states this is going to result in the home selling for last February’s price.

Alas, we missed the preview yesterday afternoon.  But the auction will be on December 30th, giving you plenty of time to contact the right people and get yourself in on the fun.

Redfin won’t disclose the address, but we sure will: 425 Belvedere Ave, Belvedere.  You’re welcome.

Click the image at right to see the home’s brochure and many more pictures in tones of sapphire and sunset.  You can also drool all over the home’s website if the brochure isn’t enough house porn for you.

So, is the market bubble over already, or did the home builders simply overreach with a $45 million ask?  What do you expect the place to fetch at auction?  Is the opening $25 million minimum sufficient to move this mess?

It’s been an emotional week, so let’s end on an upbeat, high note!

Home Prices Near Highs in Some Cities

By AMIR EFRATI

As housing prices nationwide start to recover from their depths, home prices in Silicon Valley are close to an all-time high.

Many Silicon Valley cities have come nearly all the way back from the real-estate bust of just a few years ago, in terms of how much buyers are willing to pay per square foot for existing single-family homes.

Driven by technology employees looking to buy and a constrained housing supply, Los Altos, Palo Alto and Burlingame have registered the strongest comebacks. During the third quarter of this year, home prices in those cities were just several percentage points away from peak levels in 2008, according to new data from research firm DataQuick

[snip]

WOOT!

Congratulations Bay Area. We are officially back and on track.

This weekend, go out and put a bid on every house. I predict that 2013 will be the year that the starting price of every home will be $1,000,888!

If we all pull together, I know we can do it.

Nothing can stop us now!

Yes, another article about Palo Alto.  It seems nobody can have too much of that place.  Thanks very much to Burbed reader PKamp3 for spotting this article in the Fox News Journal.

Vehicle-Dwellers Call Palo Alto Home

By DEBORAH GAGE, The Wall Street Journal
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA Updated July 11, 2012, 6:17 p.m. ET

PALO ALTO—Kurt Varner moved to Palo Alto from Los Angeles in March to start an Internet company. But instead of renting an apartment, the 25-year-old has been residing in a different kind of abode: his car.

Every 72 hours, Mr. Varner moves his car around Palo Alto to avoid violating the city’s parking rules, and he tries to be as inconspicuous as possible to local residents and other car-dwellers. Mr. Varner sometimes does some rudimentary cooking at a co-working space in Mountain View, where he codes during the day. And he showers at a local 24 Hour Fitness gym. His total cost for the gym and co-working space is $139 a month.

Living in his car is the only way he can afford to be in Silicon Valley right now, says Mr. Varner, whose wife, a teacher, lives in Los Angeles. Mr. Varner, who has been effectively homeless for the past few months, says he can’t afford to pay rent on two places but will move into an apartment in the area this month when his wife moves up.

He says he is excited about working on something he is passionate about, but being homeless is “a little scary.”

So it’s not enough to find out that some people love Palo Alto so much they’ll live at the office.  Every single night.  Because they don’t live anywhere else.  Now we’ve got people living in their cars because it’s completely legal to live in your car in Palo Alto.

No wonder there’s only one mobile home park in Palo Alto.  There’s too much lowball competition!  How can Buena Vista possibly compete with BMW?

This is also your Weekend Open Thread, so have at it.  Did you see anyone living in their cars when you toured Open Houses this weekend?  Where are the best places to park?

While the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, News Corporation, is getting a proper punching across the pond, let’s see how Rupert Murdoch’s business-as-usual cheerleader reports on the causes of The Second Great Depression.

Twelve Facts That May Surprise You About the Housing Bust

By Nick Timiraos, The Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2012

What if the conventional wisdom about the mortgage crisis is all wrong?

That’s the implication of a new paper from economists at the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Boston that’s bound to spark debate because, if their premises are correct, it sharply undercuts the justification for much of the new regulation that’s been erected over the past two years.

Three economists, Christopher Foote,Kristopher Gerardi, and Paul Willen, present two narratives of the financial crisis in trying to answer why so many people made so many dumb decisions.

The first view is that the financial crisis was an “inside job” where various industry players, from the mortgage lenders to mortgage traders, took advantage of unsophisticated rubes, from homeowners to mortgage investors.

They largely discard that view for a second one—the “bubble theory” where delusional attitudes about home prices, not distorted incentives, fueled poor decision making.

This is the Wall Street Journal.  Does anyone think for a New York minute that they’d get behind the Inside Job view of the housing debacle?  Of course not.  It was obviously the fault of strawberry pickers, the Community Redevelopment Act of 1977, Barney Frank, and undeserving minorities who never should have been allowed to own property ever ever ever.  (Uppity rabble might then expect the vote, too.)

And as for the origin of this paper?  The Boston Federal Reserve?  Everyone working there is hoping to get hired by one of those market manipulators, so don’t look for their facts to bear much relation to what really happened.

Here’s the authors’ abstract of the excuse for wrecking the whole economy report:

This paper presents 12 facts about the mortgage market. The authors argue that the facts refute the popular story that the crisis resulted from financial industry insiders deceiving uninformed mortgage borrowers and investors. Instead, they argue that borrowers and investors made decisions that were rational and logical given their ex post overly optimistic beliefs about house prices. The authors then show that neither institutional features of the mortgage market nor financial innovations are any more likely to explain those distorted beliefs than they are to explain the Dutch tulip bubble 400 years ago. Economists should acknowledge the limits of our understanding of asset price bubbles and design policies accordingly.

Translation: if we blame the meltdown on irrational exuberance, then none of our friends will have to give up their bonuses. Or their freedom.

The above diagram is from the research paper, and it neatly blames the victims for believing housing prices only go up.  Notice who’s missing from the picture?  Realtards.  You know, the people who tell you that housing prices only go up.

Fact 1: Resets of adjustable-rate mortgages did not cause the foreclosure crisis.

Banks weren’t wrong for issuing adjustable rate loans, borrowers are the problem for having crap credit.  Bad credit meant those borrowers could have an adjustable loan or remain renters. 

Hey, what do you expect when you loan to a bunch of deadbeats?

We’ve got 11 more of these delightful “facts” waiting for you after the break.

(more…)

A Contractor Spills His Secrets

A builder of luxury homes reveals how he created his weekend retreat on a budget

By NANCY KEATES, The Wall Street Journal, January 27th 2012

Photos: Drew Kelly for WSJ

Meadow Vista, Calif: As a top contractor in Silicon Valley, Dick Breaux is in a rare position: Amid a national housing slump, he continues to build big and elaborate houses. Projects have included a renovation of a 65,000-square-foot mansion and a 22,300-square-foot redo that required a crew of artisans from England, and he’s currently working on a 14,000-square-foot compound with an amphitheater on 12 acres in Hillsborough.

Dick Breaux, a top Silicon Valley builder of luxury homes, uses his experience to create his weekend retreat for less. Nancy Keates has details on Lunch Break.

Yet for most of his 35 years in the area, Mr. Breaux and his wife remained in their 3,000-square-foot ranch house in the less-pricey town of San Mateo. It was like the cobbler who never has time to make his own kids’ shoes, said his wife, Kate.

The couple still live in San Mateo, but they have built a new house for themselves: a 6,000-square-foot, four-bedroom weekend home, in a golf community just outside Sacramento. Finished in late 2010, the house includes many of the techniques Mr. Breaux gleaned from the Bay Area’s better-known architects and designers. It also cost him $340 a square foot to build, compared with the $600-and-up cost of the houses he usually builds for others. Though some of the savings came from lower labor costs, more came from choices Mr. Breaux made to maximize a luxurious look for less, from selecting standard window sizes and less-pricey patio materials to deciding to use off-the-shelf closets instead of a custom made alternative.

I have a feeling that Dick Breaux’s ideas on how to save money are still a mite rich for some of our readers.  Here are some Burbed Secrets to really saving money when building your own home:

Secret #1: Don’t build it in the RBA.  Remember, they’re not making any more land here, but there’s oodles of it in Sacramento.  Why do you think Dick Breaux saved so much? 

Secret #2: Off the shelf everything.  That slate roof with copper flashing?  Puh-leeze!  Those are colors, not materials.

Secret #3: Be an in-demand contractor that charges $600 a foot and charge yourself less than your customers.  You’ll save hundreds per foot!  Save even more by building a 6,000 square foot house instead of the more typical 8,000 foot getaway.

Secret #4: Your suppliers can charge you less too, if they ever hope to work on another one of your megaprojects.  Remember, somebody has to pay retail, as long as it isn’t you.

Secret #5: Architect, shmarchitect.  High-priced professionals like architects and interior designers simply make things cost too much.  Get yourself a copy of Turbo FLOORPLAN and save, save, save!  Save even more with MS Paint!

Secret #6: Breaux says don’t cut corners on the cabinets.  Why not cut out the cabinets entirely, including the corners? Grab some two by fours from one of the other construction sites down the road, along with a few cinderblocks.  Your shelving is done at less than one percent of what the pros would charge you!

Secret #7: Breaux saved money by using sheetrock that looks like much more expensive plaster.  You can save even more by using sheetrock that looks like marble.  Roll some up in a cylinder and you’ve got yourself some mawbul cawlums, just like rich people want.

Secret #8: Convey a sense of luxury without a Cayman Islands bank account.  Breaux says avoid having your rooms look like boxes, and he did it with slanted corners.  If you don’t care what’s plumb, you can make the whole house slant, and everyone will think you’re a postmodern genius.

Secret #9: If you make a mistake, bury it.

Secret #10: Instead of renovating your kitchen four times, build a new house with four kitchens.  That will give you more resale value for the money invested.

Question for discussion: Should someone named Dick Breaux be a football coach or a custom home contractor?

Feel free to share your money-saving tips in comments!

Average Silicon Valley Tech Salary Passes $100,000

Average annual salaries for Silicon Valley technology workers surpassed the $100,000 mark last year, according to a new survey, pushed higher by the strength of the region’s latest boom.

Tech-jobs website operator Dice Holdings Inc. said salaries for software and other engineering professionals in California’s Silicon Valley rose 5.2% to an average $104,195 last year, outstripping the average 2% increase, to $81,327, in tech-workers’ salaries nationwide. It was the first time since Dice began the salary survey in 2001 that the wage barometer broke the $100,000 barrier, said Tom Silver, a Dice senior vice president.

…

Silicon Valley’s job-market strength has also had a halo effect on bonuses. Silicon Valley tech-worker bonuses jumped 13% last year to an average $12,450, versus an 8% increase to $8,769 nationwide, according to Dice. Meanwhile, hourly contractor rates in Silicon Valley rose 11% last year to an average $74 an hour, compared with $63 an hour nationally, said Dice.

Between this, and the impending Facebook IPO, I think I’m being conservative when I forecast that house prices in the Real Bay Area will go up 49.5% by the end of the year.

This is going to be intense!

And that’s for people who are here already! It’s simply amazing how much money is pouring into the Bay Area. I hear that many bags at SFO’s international baggage claim are overweight because they are stuffed with bales of RMB!

How much has your salary gone up this year so far? Are you getting weekly raises? Or just monthly ones?

Salary check!

Here’s a great place for an Open Thread: right on top of a Can You Top This letter from the President of NAR (the National Association of Realtards). 

This is Ron Phipps’ letter to The Wall Street Journal in its entirety, because you won’t want to miss one single stupefying word of it.

Thanks very much to Burbed reader PKamp3 for mentioning this exchange in comments.

The Wall Street Journal would have people believe that hard-working, middle-class families are not affected by lower conforming loan limits, when nothing could be further from the truth ("More McMansion Subsidies," Review & Outlook, Nov. 1). The representatives in Congress who support higher loan limits understand that this is not a partisan issue, as you are trying to make it out to be.

The majority of markets impacted by the loan-limit decline are not high-cost areas. For example, more than 100 counties throughout the Midwest and more than 200 counties in the South have seen loan limits decline by more than $64,000.

And despite how your editorial tries to position the issue, the loan limits are not the same as reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Allowing the mortgage loan limits to expire in October was an arbitrary decision. Creating more market disruptions before reforming mortgage markets will only hurt our recovery.

The Senate measure to reinstate the limits is temporary—restoring the higher limits while the housing and mortgage markets stabilize. Recently, economist Mark Zandi said policy makers could shore up the housing market by "extending the current higher conforming loan limits that are set to decline in a few weeks." Borrowers, not taxpayers, will bear the entire cost of the higher loan-limits provision.

As people across the country are trying to gain a foothold in these trying times, we need to give them the resources to do so. The National Association of Realtors applauds the members of Congress who are standing up for America’s families rather than turning their backs on them.

Ron Phipps

President
National Assn. of Realtors
Washington

Of course this is 100% Grade AAA horseapples and every one of us should feel stupider for having wasted three minutes in reading it.  In fact, this is such toxic waste even the WSJ editorial page couldn’t leave it without a response as an unsigned opinion piece.  (It’s behind the paywall, but the best way to find it for free, should this link not work, is to search for its title with teh Google.)

The Realtor Subsidy

Crony capitalism on parade.

To understand why 90% of U.S. mortgages are still underwritten by taxpayers, look no further than the nearby letter from Ron Phipps of the Realtors lobby. He makes clear that the Realtors, like the rest of the housing-subsidy crowd, are working hard to get Congress to reinstate a $729,750 loan-limit for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantees.

Notice how Mr. Phipps doesn’t mention that dollar figure, perhaps because it makes a howler of his claim that the loan-limit reduction in October to $625,500 is somehow a blow to the "middle class." As House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus and several colleagues note in a November 7 letter to GOP appropriations conferees, "the lower loan limits only affect a very small slice of wealthier homeowners in high cost areas." Only 1.3% of all loans done by Fannie, Freddie and the Federal Housing Administration would be affected by the change.

And it goes on from there.  I’m sure you could write your own takedown of Phipps’ inane, self-serving, logic-free effluvia, and in fact I bet you could have a lot of fun with it.  I am chucking a bit noting the Wall Street Journal use the terms “crony capitalism” and “lobby” as if they’re bad things.  Should we look forward to them setting up a tent (mink-lined, probably) in Zucotti Park?

Here’s a few more things the WSJ neglected to mention but I’ll bring up.

• The “non-high-cost areas” affected purportedly include more than 100 flyover counties in the Midwest and 200 in the South.  Phipps neglected to tell you how many total counties are worth flying over, but I suspect it’s more than 300.
• A free clue: Georgia has 159 counties.
• Borrowers will bear the entire cost?  Oh, now borrowers fund their own tax deductions?  Then why is the deficit so high?  Do corporations fund their own R&D credits too?
• And remember, this is your Weekend Open Thread!

Simple.  The income divide between haves and have-nots have been obvious for years in the Bay Area.  Haves live in Atherton, Have-nots live in West Atherton.  But Procter & Gamble, makers of some of America’s most known household products, are just beginning to notice.

As Middle Class Shrinks, P&G Aims High and Low

By ELLEN BYRON, The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2011

For generations, Procter & Gamble Co.’s growth strategy was focused on developing household staples for the vast American middle class.

A shrinking middle class has forced Procter and Gamble to adjust the way it markets its household products — to higher and lower income levels than the traditional middle-class levels, WSJ’s Ellen Byron reports on the AM Hub. AP Photo/Steve Helber

Now, P&G executives say many of its former middle-market shoppers are trading down to lower-priced goods—widening the pools of have and have-not consumers at the expense of the middle.

That’s forced P&G, which estimates it has at least one product in 98% of American households, to fundamentally change the way it develops and sells its goods. For the first time in 38 years, for example, the company launched a new dish soap in the U.S. at a bargain price.

P&G’s roll out of Gain dish soap says a lot about the health of the American middle class: The world’s largest maker of consumer products is now betting that the squeeze on middle America will be long lasting.

"It’s required us to think differently about our product portfolio and how to please the high-end and lower-end markets," says Melanie Healey, group president of P&G’s North America business. "That’s frankly where a lot of the growth is happening."

In the wake of the worst recession in 50 years, there’s little doubt that the American middle class—the 40% of households with annual incomes between $50,000 and $140,000 a year—is in distress. Even before the recession, incomes of American middle-class families weren’t keeping up with inflation, especially with the rising costs of what are considered the essential ingredients of middle-class life—college education, health care and housing. In 2009, the income of the median family, the one smack in the middle of the middle, was lower, adjusted for inflation, than in 1998, the Census Bureau says.

Proctor & Gamble sells to 98 percent of the households in the United States.  If you use Tide Detergent, or their budget brand Gain, you’re a P&G customer.  P&G owns Gillette razors.  They have both Pampers and Luvs disposable diapers.  The first is the premium brand, the other, the bargain.  Now they’re going all in on Consumer Hourglass Theory because the numbers show the middle class just doesn’t have much around the middle anymore.

Consumer Hourglass Theory, a term invented by Citibank, says since the middle is getting pinched, market to the high-income spenders and the budget-brand penny pinchers.  This approach says luxury brands will be profitable, as will low-end brands, but stores that aim to the middle will find more difficulty. 

Look what’s happening right here in our real estate market.  Old Palo Alto?  Pending, pending, pending, gone!  East San Jose?  Bargains are snapped up too.  But that in-between $600-900K tier?  Not so good.  Federal loan guarantees being reduced doesn’t help, either.

This is an Open Thread.  Which tier of houses are you looking at this weekend?