South Bay Blogs

Disappointing home sales has caused Wall Street to suffer losses today, resulting in plummeting stock prices and closing the Dow industrials at more than 300 points down.

AP news snapped pictures of numerous traders rubbing their heads on the trading floor as a result of today’s catastrophe.

On the one hand, Countrywide Financial Corp. sees its second-quarter profit affected by mortgage delinquencies and defaults even among the borrowers with good credit, and the company prepares for even more people defaulting on their mortgage payments as time goes on. On the other hand, DataQuick Information Systems in La Jolla is reporting that lenders are filing over 50,000 notices of default during a 2 month period between April 2007 and June 2007 – staggering increase in 158% compared to the second quarter in 2006.

It looks like the current trend of increasing foreclosures and mortgage defaults is only going to continue – maybe even get worse.

Can Southern California learn from Miami’s “condo glut”? According to Bloomberg, Miami developers keep building condos and create an oversupply that will push housing prices more than 30 percent and risking the local economy into brink of recession. There is not enough demand to meet the oversupply even as developers keep on building new condos. What is happening right now in Florida is an example of housing industry problems. Florida’s governor even joked that the national state bird would be “the building crane”. This building boom in the middle of a housing bust is seeing new residents from foreign countries, including central America and even Russia.

While we won’t seen high rises in SoCal, we’re starting to see increasing development of multiunit condos. Population increases have contributed to worsening traffic conditions as residents migrate to affordable areas and commute to work.