Real Homes of Genius: $1 Million Discount for a 948 Square Foot Long Beach Condo!

01 06 2008

Real Homes of Genius: $1 Million Discount for a 948 Square Foot Long Beach Condo!

Posted by: admin in Real-estate news

If you think you’ve seen it all be prepared to see the most manic pricing action in the history of this housing bubble courtesy of a condo in Long Beach California. That’s right, the home of Snoop Dogg and the beautiful Queen Mary. The ability to access past sales history readily makes for […]
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If you think you’ve seen it all be prepared to see the most manic pricing action in the history of this housing bubble courtesy of a condo in Long Beach California. That’s right, the home of Snoop Dogg and the beautiful Queen Mary. The ability to access past sales history readily makes for some fascinating forensics on the incredible financial stupidity of this bubble. If this happened say 20 years ago, it would take some savvy journalist a lot of time to head down to the county clerk’s office, work with local realtors for MLS access, and finally be able to put all the pieces together to show the insanity of the housing orgy. Now all you need is an internet connection, some common sense, and the insanity of the housing market comes together like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.

For those of you thinking we are at a bottom, there are futures traders that would like to disagree. In fact, the futures markets are pricing in a 28.3% further drop for Los Angeles by November of 2010. The housing futures contracts are also pricing in 24.8% of that drop in the next year! You may want to take a look at some of the other housing futures over at housing derivatives that compiles a list periodically. Here’s a little rundown of the April 2008 published future prices:

November 2010

Las Vegas: -28.9%

Miami: -21.9%

New York: -15.2%

San Francisco: -25.6%

Chicago: -12.0%

Bottom line? More pain ahead at least from people that are putting their money where their mouth is. Think housing will go up? Go ahead and put some money down.

Let us now move on to one of our most absurd Real Homes of Genius on record (hat tip MC). Today we salute you Long Beach with our Real Homes of Genius Award.

From $1,325,000 to $200,000 in 3 Years?!

Long Beach

Today we are looking at a 948 square foot condo in Long Beach California. In housing bubbles, condos usually run up the quickest first but also correct the fastest as well. This place makes no exception to that rule. Yet the pricing action on this place makes you wonder if you aren’t living in some Twilight Zone. Instead of Ed McMahon stopping by your home with a $1 million check we get a reverse housing clearing house award; in this world you get a knock on your door and you have the potential of losing $1 million simply for turning the knob.

This place is located on Ransom Street which runs deep with Shakespearean irony. Let us look at some of the sales history on this place courtesy of the excellent website, Redfin:

Sales History

Oh sweet mother of Earth! This place is now half off of a price that was reached 20 years ago! Could it be that we’ve found a condo that went through the late 80s bubble but also the current mega housing bubble? This place sold for $622,000 in February of 1988 and then sold for a peak of $1,325,000 in July of 2005! It also sold for a ridiculous price of $730,000 in January of 2004. The real action is all the entries that occurred in 2007. There is something going on here and I’ll leave it up your imagination as to what exactly is playing out.

Let us now take a look at the pricing action on this place:

Price History

Bwahaha! Hey, if this place sold for $622,000 in 1988, sold for $1,325,000 in 2005 anything is possible so why not ask for 10 zillion dollars? I think the $3,500,000 was an input error but at this point nothing would surprise me. This place is now listed at $200,000; that is a $1,125,000 discount in three years! Bwahaha! Hold on a second and let me catch my breath…Bwahahaha! What the hell is going on here? Why would you even want to rob a bank were you are probably only going to get $50,000 and be put behind bars when you can be a shady broker, lender, appraiser (seriously who the heck appraised this place?), or agent and you have yourself a method of getting criminal amounts of money without facing prison time. I’m still waiting to see massive amounts of people being put behind bars because I equate this with flat out stealing money.

I love how these ads tell us that you have “great freeway access” when everyone in Southern California by default has great freeway access. You’ll be stuck on the freeway once you do get on and idling away that precious $4 a gallon fuel but yes, you do have great freeway access. We are also told that this place has “low maintenances living” whatever that means.

Digg this article, Reddit, Stumble it, and get these insane examples out to the larger public. Frankly, the best way to show how idiotic any bailout would be is to highlight financial irresponsibility through actual real world examples. I think most folks with common sense can see how pathetic any help would be to lenders that clearly manipulated the system and now need to eat their own imprudence. The lenders can go pound sand for all I care and their CEOs think the same way about borrowers. How is bailing out a place like this good for our economy?

Today we salute you Long Beach with our Real Homes of Genius Award.

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