31 page PDF at http://www.areuea.org/conferences/papers/download.phtml?id=2133
A May, 2009, paper by Michael LaCour-Little, Eric Rosenblatt and Vincent Yao entitled "Follow the Money: A Close Look at Recent Southern California Foreclosures" provides some interesting data about single-family residential real estate in one part of the US.
Briefly, the paper looks at loans in five southern California counties which went into foreclosure in November in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It traces the collateral and loans from purchase to foreclosure, and provides some useful findings. Here's their abstract:
The conventional wisdom is that households unfortunate enough to have purchased at the top of the market during the recent housing bubble are those most at risk of default due to recent price declines, upward re-sets of adjustable rate mortgage instruments, the economic downturn, and other factors. Here we use public record data to study three cohorts of Southern California borrowers facing foreclosure in 2006, 2007, and 2008. We estimate property values as of the date of the scheduled foreclosure sale with the automated valuation model of a major financial institution and then track sales prices for those properties that actually sold, either at auction or later as REO. We find that borrowers did not, in general, buy at the top of the market and virtually all had taken large amounts of equity out of the property through refinancing and/or junior lien borrowing. Given sales prices of collateral thus far, aggregate losses to lenders will reach almost $1.0 billion dollars compared to almost $2.0 billion dollars of equity previously extracted by property owners.
They do for mortgage foreclosures what Elizabeth Warren (et al)'s, study did for understanding the role which uninsured medical expenses play in personal bankruptcy filings. California may be a more extreme case, for reasons which relate to the perverse incentives involved in the 1978 Proposition 13 property tax limitations. But my interest is not the same as what the authors were driving after.
I took their data and created a small spreadsheet to look at the data from a different point of view.
Their sample is composed of 4,258 properties which went into foreclosure in Novembers of 2006, 2007 and 2008. On average, the properties in each of the three cohorts had been purchased in 2002, and for an average price of $356,200. By November 2006, the properties which went into foreclosure that month had an average value of $519,000 (as calculated by a commercial proprietary Automatic Valuation Model). I made the assumption that the properties which were foreclosed on in November 2007 and November 2008 had the same AVM valuations in November 2006.
My calculations proceed as follows: I compare the average 2002 purchase price of $356,200 (a weighted average of the three cohorts) with the 2006 AVM valuation of $519,000, which provides a 4-year appreciation of $162,800 per property. Assuming that each homeowner's annual property taxes started at 1.25% of their 2002 purchase price, and rose by the Prop 13 maximum of 2% per year, they each paid, on average, $19,578 in property taxes over 4 years.
Houses don't appreciate. They depreciate at about 1.5% per year. They're never worth more than what it would take to reproduce them. Taking 65% as an estimate of the share of the value of single family homes in southern California which can be attributed to land (1998 was 64.9% and 2004 was 78.7% in Los Angeles, according to Davis & Palumbo, May, 2006), 65% of the 2002 purchase price of $356,200 is $231,535. Let's assume that the house doesn't depreciate at all, to account for owner-made improvements. Land value, then, rose from $231,535 on average in 2002 to $394,300 by 2006.
So what produced that rise in land prices?
- Some of it has to be attributed to the increase in population during that period of time -- due to fertility, improved public health, immigration from other countries and other states. New relationships and broken relationships both contribute to the demand for housing. Since the quantity of land is fixed, land prices tend to rise with population.
- Some of it has to be attributed to relaxed lending standards, which permitted more people to borrow more money
- Some of it has to be attributed to changes in interest rates, which permitted more borrowing for the same monthly payment.
- Some of it has to be attributed to Proposition 13, which limited property taxes to 1.0% (in practice, roughly 1.25%) of the original purchase price, with an annual increase capped at 2%. The annual rental value of land is generally 5% of the purchase value, so the 3.75% to 4% difference gets capitalized into the selling price of the land.
But let's think, too, of why people were willing to pay more to live in these five counties. It was due to the schools, to jobs, to the roads, the sewers, the water system, the police and other emergency services, buses and trains, airports, the courts, jails and prisons, the universities, the hospitals and libraries, and public health and a myriad of other publicly provided goods. The homeowners as homeowners paid only about $20,000 in taxes, and received, if the AVM is correct and they sold in 2006, $162,800 in appreciation on their land.
The study shows that those who were in the 2006 foreclosure cohort had total average housing-related debt by November, 2006, of $469,000, up from the original loans of about $334,400. So they'd taken out an average of $134,600 by borrowing against their home equity.
Did the services which contributed to raising that land value by over $160,000 over 4 years really only cost $20,000 per property? No. Sales taxes, and wage taxes and other taxes also financed those services. And they were paid not just by landholders -- the roughly half of southern California residents who own their own homes -- but also by the other half, who rent their homes from others.
So homeowners reaped a huge windfall, and those who were not homeowners ended up financing it. And as we attempted to increase the homeownership rate by a few percent by relaxed lending standards, they got to pay another time.
Most people think there is no viable alternative. They're so used to the current structure -- and in California, Proposition 13 is sometimes referred to as the "Third Rail" of California politics" (touch it, and you die!) that few stop to consider that our taxes are at the root of our most serious problems.
So what's the alternative? Sanity would be for all those public goods whose effect is to support and increase property values to be financed by a tax on land value. Justice -- ditto. Efficiency -- ditto.
California is floundering because it can't fund its spending. And yet these 4,258 households stood to collect from buyers, if they sold in 2006 after buying in 2002, an aggregate windfall of $693 million: I've aggregated the data for these November foreclosures and here's the story.
| Total Households: | 4,258 |
| Aggregate purchase price, approx 2002: | $1,516,735,000 |
| Aggregate down payment: | $263,551,350 |
| Aggregate value in 2006: | $2,209,902,000 |
| Aggregate appreciation 2002 to 2006: |
$693,167,000 |
| Aggregate 4-year appreciation as percent of down payment |
263% |
| Aggregate real estate taxes paid (@1.25% of purchase price, rising by 2% annually) |
$78,142,339 |
| Aggregate appreciation as percent of property taxes paid |
887% |
Folks who think they and people like them stand to reap a gain of $700 million on an investment of $264 million in 4 years, while paying just $78 million in property taxes may not consider it to be in their best interests to shift taxes off wages, off buildings, off sales.
Had Proposition 13 not been in place, and property owners paid just 1.25% of their properties' market value each year, aggregate property tax would have been $97,500,000, or about 25% more (assuming straight-line increase from 2002 purchase to 2006 average value of $519,000). Still a tiny fraction of the appreciation.
The study's sample was only the November foreclosures. To approximate the figures for all the foreclosed properties in the five counties in those 3 years, one might multiply by 12. And recall that foreclosures are still a tiny fraction of all single-family residential properties in these five counties, and that these are relatively newly purchased properties. Think of how much could be collected in the form of a tax on land value if everyone, no matter what year they bought their property, paid at the same millage rate on their true market value, instead of some paying on values based in the 1970s.
We-the-people created that appreciation. Should homeowners and other landholders get to keep it as if they created it? Does the answer to that question hinge on whether the homeownership rate is 30%, or 50%, or 65%, or 75% in that particular place, or in our country as a whole? Or is the homeownership statistic irrelevant to the justice or logic of this privatization? (Remember that residential real estate is frequently NOT the biggest piece of this: the urban real estate owned by corporations, REITs, foreign investors including airlines and sovereign funds, pension funds, philanthropies, 150-year trusts, private equity funds and other private entities, appreciates far faster. (Remember Leona Helmsley's description: we don't pay taxes; the little people pay taxes.)
On the other hand, when one takes into account the fact that the run-up in prices this situation has led to a situation in which all these people have been foreclosed on, a large and rising proportion of mortgages are "under water" and observers are saying that the "bust" portion of this boom-bust cycle is going to leave something like 50% of mortgage holders "under water" by 2011, perhaps one might reach the conclusion that even if one is not convinced of the justice of revising our system, one might choose it strictly on the basis of avoiding boom-bust cycles being wise.
Things have come to light in the Little Neck situation.I have been told to keep quiet, and "let the lawyer, Johann Soris, 617 963 2117 in the Attorney General's office take care of this. She "is aware of every lawyer involved and everything that goes on with the Feoffees." She thinks that within a year, it will be peacefully resolved, most likely thru a sale of the property. "That will put a lump sum into the hands of the school or at least the school committee." She thinks that a number of lawyer have been working earnestly, for half price on this. I wonder if the threatening lawyer, William Sheehan, has been takeing the $250,000 plus each year out of the Little Neck Budget?VTSolarFarm
Posted by: llitllematchstickgirl | December 13, 2009 at 07:39 PM