Caveat Emptor for Watsonville Investors
May 24, 2009
I’ve got some clients, and they’ve got some money to invest in Real Estate. They are not looking to speculate on real estate – that’s how so many people ended up getting foreclosed on in Watsonville, and in California, and in many other places throughout our glorious but fading homeland. Rather than simply speculate, my clients want to make smart, long-term investments.
A Speculator is someone who is placing a bet – they put some money down, and their bet is that the value of whatever they buy will go up. They may have reasons to speculate that the price will rise, but it’s more of an anticipation, an educated guess. This is what so many people did wrong – they bought real estate they could not afford to hold on to, speculating that it would always be worth more than they paid for it, so they could get out, easy, and make a handsome profit for their trouble.
These clients of mine are probably not what you would call professional real estate investors – but they want to buy real estate as if they were – and after they do buy a few properties, and if they keep with it, hey, before you know it – they will be professional investors, after all, every professional has to start somewhere.
One of the primary things an investor wants is a good “cash on cash” return on investment . That is, they want to put up some cash, and have that cash investment return them money, put money back in their pocket, each and every year. So let’s say you put $100,000 down into a property, and you want to get a 10% return on your investment – that means, that after all expenses and costs, you get back $10,000 pear year on your $100,000 invested.
And that is where a lot of investors go astray, I think. They don’t have realistic numbers as to the income the property will generate and the costs that owning, financing, maintaining, and renting the property will incur. As it happens, my clients went on to my web site and found my handy Excel spreadsheet for income property analysis. It’s a really great tool (to be used for estimating purposes only, of course! Contact your legal, tax, and accounting professionals before making any investment decision!) to help you figure out what kind of a return you can expect on any given property.
There are some key numbers you need to know. The first, is the interest rate on the loan you will be getting. This is tricky – many times, your loan broker will quote you a figure, and then your actual interest rate turns out to be 1/4 or 1/2 or even a full percent higher than that. Make sure you ask for your Good Faith Estimate from the lender so you will know what your actual interest rate is going to be, and if you have to pay any points to get it.
You will also find out how much of a down payment is required. At first, my clients were figuring they’d only need 20% down for a non-owner-occupied real estate loan. Their lender informed them, when asking about their actual rate, it would be 25% down.
Another key bit of information you’ll need to know is, how much can you actually rent the property out for? The rental market in Watsonville has been extremely tight of late, and rental prices have been very high – or have they? I had recommended my clients look on Craigslist and also on Zilpy.com to see what the rental prices were looking like. The problem with that, though, is that these are asking prices for rent. It does not mean that they are the actual prices people are paying.
When you’re an investor, every month a unit sits vacant kills you. If you are asking too much for rent, you are not going to attract the kind of quality tenants you are looking for. You need to price the unit well for quick rental to attract quality, long-term tenants.
I talked to a property manager down in Watsonville about the rental situation. She said that the rental market had softened considerably, especially since the Housing Authority of Santa Cruz County had put a freeze on new housing vouchers. Ouch. According to the lady I spoke with, actual rents in Watsonville are now down about 20-25% from a year ago. D’oh.
What this means for my clients is that the amount of money they can afford to pay for a property, given their higher interest rate and lower rental rates means that they can offer less for a property than they had first thought – in order to make that 10% (or near 10%, anyway) cash-on-cash return on their investment. And there’s another important factor to consider for you number crunchers out there – closing costs and fix-up costs. It could be you need 25% down for your loan, and then another $10K for closing costs and another $15K on top of that to rehab the property so that its condition will make it desirable to rent quickly and for the highest rent possible. The $100K you thought you were investing could easily look like $125K before the first tenant moves in, and if you want to get 10% back, you’ll need to see $12,500 per year free-and-clear.
While we are on the subject, let me ask this: why are rental prices in Watsonville down 20-25% from a year ago? I don’t know for sure, but here’s what I think: it used to be there were a lot more owner-occupants in Watsonville than there are today. A year ago, there were less rental units available. All the people getting kicked out of their houses by foreclosure were competing for the scarce rental stock. Now, a lot of those formerly owner-occupied houses have turned into rental houses, thereby increasing supply. At the same time, not as many people are getting foreclosed on at the moment because of the various foreclosure moratoria which have been in place. And, of course, the unemployment rate in Watsonville is reported to be at 25% – that’s huge, and I think it means a lot of people are going to be sharing housing, families living with families, rather than each family having their own individual place as I’m sure they’d prefer in many cases but owing to the weak economy cannot afford to do so at the moment.
And, one other thing: what do you think these lower rental rates are going to do to home values? Will they have no effect? Bah, humbug. I dare say they will continue to drag down property values in Watsonville, and that we have not yet hit bottom. A lot of the buyers in Watsonville today are investors – and a real investor will only be able to pay so much for a property to get the return they need to justify the considerable risk. Also, as rental rates decrease, it blunts the incentive to for someone to buy – as the chasm between monthly rent and a full PITI payment widens, more fence-sitters are likely to stay there on that fence, and continue to wait out the market.
To all ye would-be investors, in Watsonville and everywhere else in our Golden State, I say: rock on, but play it safe, and always use your green eyeshades when analyzing any real estate investment. I’d hate to see you end up like thousands of well-intentioned but mis-guided “investors” before, with your investment dollars flushed down the drain and a bitter taste in your mouth.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 1:00pm
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Santa Cruz Realtor and Devil’s Advocate
March 10, 2009
I find myself doing it all too much, but I feel compelled to do it again…I must apologize for not keeping my blog updated. There’s a few reasons for that – no excuses, of course, just unvarnished reasons. One biggie is that I am completely and utterly swamped with work, and while my blog is actually very important to me, it falls into the “important but not urgent” quadrant of McCovey’s “first things first.”
Another reason I haven’t written anything is that I don’t know quite what to say! Every day, I read the newspapers and the blogs and e-zines and and I watch TV and listen to podcasts, absorbing all the real estate news that there is, and I try to make sense of it all, I try to wrap my head around it and come to some kind of conclusion that I feel certain enough about to write up a blog entry, sharing my thoughts with you all…
I guess I just keep looking for that ray of sunshine. I think you can read lots of sunny Realtor blogs, about how great a market it is for buyers right now. That may be true, but I’m not buyin’ it. I don’t think it’s that great of a market out there for buyers, because there simply isn’t that much to chose from. Not here in Santa Cruz, anyway. Just check out my Santa Cruz Real Estate Sales Data page and you’ll see.
If you’ve read my newsletter, you know the facts – that the sales volume has risen in Santa Cruz for the eighth month in a row. No if, ands, or buts about it – that’s good. However, that goes along with, I believe, eight months of declining home prices. The Santa Cruz county median in February 2009 was down to $429,000 for a single-family residence. I believe that at the height of the market a couple-few years back, the median was around $834,000.
The optimists in the crowd will also point to months of falling inventory – this time last year, there were 989 single-family residences for sale in the county, and now we’re down to 803. With a monthly sales rate of 87 units in February, we’re looking at a 9.22 month supply, and a year ago, we were looking at a13.36 month supply of homes for sale. The theory is that as the supply tightens and demand increases, prices will stabilize.
Except, of course, that hasn’t been happening these past eight months. Sales have been rising (the “demand”) and the inventory has been shrinking (the “supply”) – but prices have continued to drop, steadily.
I think an important thing to consider in all of this is that the inventory is not shrinking so much because of the high sales volume, but rather it is shrinking also because many sellers are letting their listings expire, or just outright canceling them, taking their homes off the market. Sellers are giving up in frustration, and this is a big reason why the inventory continues to shrink.
I feel this contributes to a false impression of the real estate of the market. I think there are a lot of sellers who want to sell, but right now they are sitting pat. Many of them will not be able to sit pat forever, and will eventually bring their properties back on to the market – at still lower prices. I think there is a huuuuge shadow inventory out there of would-be sellers who, one day, will be pushed by circumstances back onto the market.
Perhaps they’ll lose their jobs – after all, California unemployment now tops 10.1%. In Santa Cruz, I believe unemployment is now 12.6% and in Santa Clara county (the Silicon Valley, the fountain from which much of our wealth flows) is now at 9.4%. Perhaps they’ll just fear they’ll lose their jobs, and want to sell their property and get out of their crushing mortgage payments before they are forced into the unemployment lines.
Where am I going with all of this? Nowhere in particular – that’s why I haven’t written a blog entry in a while! I hardly know what to make of it all. I will say this, though: don’t buy into the idea that this is a great time to buy. It’s a great time to buy over-priced real estate. It’s quite a bit more challenging to buy real estate today that you won’t regret having paid so much for a year from now. After all, when Warren Buffet says the US Economy has fallen off a cliff, it may perhaps be taken as a harbinger for our local real estate values as well.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 11:14pm
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Is 2009 The Year to Buy Santa Cruz Real Estate?
January 17, 2009
This is a question that I get asked, and find myself asking, quite a bit these past couple of weeks. I am working with a number of buyers who are skittish and waiting for prices to hit just the right point. After all, what’s the sense in buying a depreciating asset? Who wants to buy something that they know is going to lose them money – maybe a lot of money – within a few months after buying it?
One of my clients sent me a link to a great web site – Housing Crash Continues, Bubble Pops. It lists 14 great reasons why this is a terrible time to buy real estate. It’s pretty strong stuff, with lots of inflammatory statements like, “Realtors just lie outright about…”. Well, I always say, never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. I don’t think that Realtors are habitual liars, but it’s true that many of us are not as perhaps informed as we might be.
I won’t address all 14 points that the The Housing Crash guy brings up, but I would like to make a few comments. The Housing Crash guy says:
A landlords’ rule of thumb is that a house price should be a maximum of 15 times the annual rent for that place, yet in coastal areas, houses are still selling for 30 times annual rent
I think he’s got a good point there – which goes to underscore my belief that prices in Watsonville are actually very reasonable at the moment. Looking at Craig’s List rentals for Watsonville, I see you can rent a 3-bedroom condo in Apple HIll for $1,875 a month. Those condos are now selling for around $190,000. So at $1,875 a month, that’s $22,500 a year, or $337,500 over 15 years. Hmm…so does that mean according to the Crash Guy, we should all be moving to Watsonville?
Put another way, how much does it cost to own that same condo which rents for $1,875 a month? Let’s say you put down the minimum 3.5% as required for an FHA loan, and that you are paying 5.75% interest per month, which includes the allowance for the FHA insurance. You’d need a down payment, then, of just $6,650, and you’d have a loan of $183,350. Your fully-ammortized 30-year loan payment would be about $1,070 per month. Then you’d have property tax of about $175/month, and then of course your HOA fee for that unit of about $290/month. That comes to $1,535 per month. Hmm. It costs less to buy in Watsonville than to rent.
I know, I know – you don’t want to live in Watsonville. You’d rather pay a premium and live near the beach, or closer to your job in Silicon Valley, or closer to your friends who all live near downtown, or maybe you don’t want to live in Watsonville because you’re spooked by los pandilleros, or you want your kids in a better-performing school district. Whatever your reason, I can accept that you might be interested in buying somewhere other than Watsonville (even though I think real estate there is a an exceptionally good value at the moment).
We all know that prices in Santa Cruz are a lot higher than in Watsonville, but let’s see some examples. Let’s start by looking at Craig’s List rentals in Santa Cruz. Wow, they’re a lot higher than in Watsonville! Thank Goodness for UC Santa Cruz, drivin’ that rental market right through the roof, eh landlords? Looking over the ads on Craig’s List, it’s safe to say that a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house would rent for about $2,400 a month in Santa Cruz, assuming it was in a not-so-great location. That’s a pretty conservative assessment, having looked at what’s available.
At $2,400 a month, that’s $28,800 a year – times 15, that’s $432,000, which is the maximum that The Crash Guy says you should pay for a house if it rents for $2,400 a month. Are there any 3/2 houses in Santa Cruz for $432,000? No, of course not! Don’t be silly. But there are presently six 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom houses in the city of Santa Cruz under $500,000.
Does that mean that housing prices are still too high in Santa Cruz? According to the Crash Guy – yes. According to me – yes. I do think that prices in Santa Cruz (and Capitola, and Soquel, and Aptos, etc.) are higher than they will be towards the end of the year. Does that mean you shouldn’t buy a house in Santa Cruz in 2009?
Good question. Let’s look at the payment for a $500,000 house – but let’s assume you’re putting down a reasonable 10% instead of the FHA minimum of 3.5% – so you’d have a $450,000 loan, again at about 5.75% because with only 10% down, you’d still need to pay mortgage insurance. A 30 year fixed loan at 5.75% would run you $2,626 a month – plus $458/month in property tax, plus about $75/month for insurance, leaving you with a monthly payment of about $3,159.
However, you mustn’t forget about your mortgage interest tax deduction – of that $2,626 per month, about $2,100 is interest (gulp) – plus the $458 in property tax (which is also deductible), means you have a monthly tax deduction of $2,558. Let’s say you’re in a tax bracket of 25%, and you can figure you’d save about $640/month in federal and state taxes, bringing your effective monthly after-tax payment to about $2,519 per month, or just about $120 more than renting.
Is $120/month too high a price to pay for the benefits of ownership vs. renting? You tell me.
Here’s what I will tell you: it seems clear to me that there are many properties in Santa Cruz county which now make economic sense to buy, and that number is increasing, and will continue to increase throughout the year. There is no shortage of blogs to read (try here, and here, for example) suggesting prices will continue dropping beyond 2009. I admit – quite possibly, this is true.
However, I would argue that if you want to live in Santa Cruz, and you have the option of either renting or buying, that for many people, the numbers will soon pencil out to where buying may, in fact, be the right choice for you in 2009. There. I’ve said it. But I won’t be offended if you want to take that with some salt on the side.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 11:47am
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Santa Cruz Conforming Loan Limit 2009
November 07, 2008
One thing that really affects the price of real estate is the affordability of real estate. For example, if there was no such thing as a home loan – that is, if everyone had to pay in cash – what effect would that have on real estate prices? I’m not much of a soothsayer, but I reckon prices would drop, dramatically.
Thankfully, of course, we do have home loans. The residential mortgage market has an enormous effect on the price of real estate. While the housing market was already softening considerably in 2007, there was one event in particular which really threw it for a spin, the sub-prime mortgage crisis. So-called “sub-prime” borrowers suddenly had no access to credit, and prices for lower-end homes took an immediate nosedive as their affordability evaporated.
Of course, the reverse was true on the way up – ridiculously easy credit, liar loans, lax underwriting standards, and mortgage fraud – all of this played a part in the enormous run-up in prices that we in Santa Cruz enjoyed for most of the early years of this decade.
Wether you are a prospective home buyer or a home owner, the role of credit is very important to you – it strongly shapes your ability to buy a home, or the price for which you will be able to sell your home. That’s why this morning’s news about the 2009 loan limits is so important.
I received a nice e-mail this morning from one of the lenders I regularly work with, breaking it down for Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. The good news is, the conforming loan limits for 2009 will stay the same as in 2008:
For Santa Cruz County, the new “high-balance” limits are:
1 unit $625,500
2 units $800,775
3 units $967,950
4 units 1,202,925
For Monterey County, we weren’t as fortunate. Here are the new limits:
1 unit $483,000
2 units $618,300
3 units $747,400
4 units $928,850
I asked the lender if a house with a legal accessory dwelling unit (aka “granny unit”) that could be rented would count as a “2 unit” property. The answer is no, the property must apparently be zoned as a duplex in order to qualify for the two-unit loan limit. If you are interested in borrowing more than the limit, you’ll need to hurry – the current limits of $729,750 expire on 12/15/08.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 11:47pm
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Billions, Trillions and a House in Santa Cruz
September 30, 2008
These sure are interesting times. Washington Mutual (my bank) – gone. Wachovia (which just bought up World Savings a while go) is now part of Citibank. The much-touted $700 billion bailout plan gets shot down in the house of representatives, and Wall Street falls 777 points to erase $1.2 trillion dollars in market value. Glad I sold all my stocks 2-3 weeks ago.
I know, I’m part of the problem. I should have just sat there and watched as my hard-earned dollars evaporated, sucked it up, been a man, and lost all that cash, the price to pay for participating in our capitalist system.
Except that I, like many of you, can’t help but feel that the system is, perhaps, a bit rigged in favor of the big guys. Like Washington Mutual, for example – my understanding is, the Feds took it over, wiped out the shares of everyone who owned it, and sold it to JP Morgan Chase for a couple of billion dollars. And the WAMU shareholders got nothing.
So what does all this have to do with Santa Cruz Real Estate? Pffft. Wish I could tell you. One thing that’s very interesting to me is this claim that the credit markets are “frozen” and that’s why we need this $700 billion bailout. From where I sit, the credit markets do not appear frozen. At worst, they appear congealed.
I’ve actually been selling a lot of real estate this year, and almost everyone who is buying is getting a loan. It is true that in order to get a loan these days, you must meet a much stricter standard. Last I checked, though – that’s a good thing. Easy credit, liar loans, all that – isn’t that how we got in this mess to begin with?
So let me assure you – if you want to buy a house in Santa Cruz, and you have decent credit (at least a 580 FICO Score to qualify for an FHA loan, I believe) and you have the debt-to-income ratios required by the guidelines. But if you have that, a pulse, and a paltry 3.5% down payment – you’re in.
Let’s say you want to buy a starter house or condo for $500,000. Mind you, the median price these days in the county is $585,000 (as of August), so it’s getting to the point where you can actually buy a habitable structure in a somewhat central location for that kind of bread. You’re looking at a down payment of $17,500. That would leave you with a whopping loan of $482,500 and payments (all-in, including principal, interest, property tax, and insurance) of about $3,500 a month (roughly, approximately – and that’s before your considerable mortgage interest tax deduction).
What’s that, you say? $3,500 is a lot to pay every month? Yeah, it is. So perhaps you would want to – gasp – have a bigger down payment, like 10 or 20%. Or buy a smaller house, or live somewhere less central. Or, wait another six months or a year before buying. Because prices are going down further. Except in Watsonville and north Monterey county, I think they can’t possibly go down much further there.
Let’s say, though, that you have $20K for a down payment, and you’re fine with a $3,500 monthly payment. You might be wondering about your closing costs – those can be considerable, especially if you are in fact going with FHA financing.
No worries, mate! Put a shrimp on the barbie and let the seller pay your closing costs. Most sellers, if you write them a high-enough offer, will be happy to pay your closing costs. Even in a short sale, and especially if you’re buying a bank-owned REO property. You might even be able to lower your rate by paying a point or two, which is not a bad idea if you’re planning to stay in the home longer than 3-4 years.
It hardly needs to be said, of course – but if you’re planning to buy a house, you’d better plan on being there at least 3-4 years. At least. Real estate is a long-term investment. Not like that crazy silly stock market. 
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 8:29am
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