This one is serious, folks, so pay attention. As we noted in this blog from time to time, the California housing market has been goosed upward recently by big-buck folks buying up distressed homes cheaply en masse in order to rent them out, and make a buck that way, as well as score some capital gains as the California housing market recovers.
According to today’s L.A. Times — front page, no less — it looks like that gravy train is slowing to a halt. Tim Logan, Investors Curb Home Buying, L.A. Times, March 29, 2014, at p. A1. “Companies are dialing back their purchases of houses to rent out, a signal prices hit a ceiling in SoCal.” The peak in the numbers of such sales was reached in 2013, when it hit 613 homes being bought by the 20 largest single-family home buyers. This year it came down to 96. Sounds like a peak in numbers has indeed been reached.
But this isn’t all. Markets have this habit whereby they rarely stand still — they either move up or down. And given these figures and the economy generally, we don’t see how home prices can keep going up. Other than the big-boy cash home buyers, we don’t see how Mom-and-Pop homebuyers — the kind of folks who want a nice roof over their heads — can pay more than the current median prices of $385,000. And the other thing about big-buck professional homebuyers, is that they are not likely to sit there and watch the market value of their investments go down — they’ll bail when the market turns hinky and do their best to sell and collect whatever gain they managed to accumulate — and move on to other investments.
Still, some of big-time buyers are still at it. The L.A. Times reports that Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust is still buying homes in Southern California, and just popped $144 million on “a portfolio of 707 homes, ” which according to our calculator comes to $203,000 per home. We should also note that should you be able to find a $200-grand home around here, you wouldn’t want to live in it. So those $200-grand bargains must be in highly disfavored parts of the state.
So stay tuned, and see how it turns out. Being a congenital pessimist we have a hunch that this isn’t going to end well.