A report from the Berkeley Newsroom. "Berkeley Haas Professors Nancy Wallace and Richard Stanton were…
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From the first 11 minute video:
78% OVERVALUED! Boise sees a CRASH in home prices. Buyers market is near. #redfin #housingbubble
Good News Real Estate-Idaho
Oct 14, 2022 78% OVERVALUED! Boise sees a 10% CRASH in home prices. Buyers market is near. Moody’s reports Boise as #1 overvalued market in the US.
Boise, Idaho Real Estate market updates. The Fed likely (98%) to deliver a big hike Mortgage interest rates by .75 percentage point again for November meeting We are approaching 8% mortgage interest rates. The federal reserve is attempting to curb inflation, but the consumer price index rose again to .4 % as of the latest reports. Moody analytics is reporting that Boise, Idaho has a 78% overvaluation. Many are calling for a economic collapse and a housing bubble to burst. What are you thoughts? Hopefully we were able to explain how the current market shift/economic collapse is effecting the market.
Numbers are local to us. We are located in Ada county Idaho (Boise) The 30% correction is here and growing. Redfin is calling reporting that 15-22% of all contracts have been cancelled.
The second 6 minute video:
Sacramento / Stockton Real Estate Report for 10/13/2022
Oct 13, 2022 The Sacramento / Stockton area real estate market has moved from a sellers’ market to a buyers’ market with over 2,100 price reductions this week. The inventory remains strong, which means plenty of competition for sellers and plenty of choices and room for negotiation for buyers. The big story once again is the climb in interest rates; but it could be much worse!
The third 5 minute video:
Bay Area Market Update | San Mateo – September
Gwen Realty
Oct 13, 2022
The fourth 3 minute video:
Las Vegas Housing Market Coming to a Slow Down, What to do Next? Oct 14, 2022 Jeff Miller
The fifth 10 minute video:
Media vampires celebrate a housing crash out of context
Brandon Mulrenin
Oct 13, 2022 Michigan
The sixth 7:29 video:
North Texas Housing Market Reset – DFW Home Prices Fall As Demand Gets Crushed
Aaron Layman
Oct 14, 2022 The North Texas housing market reset picks up steam. DFW home prices fall as demand gets crushed by higher mortgage rates and shrinking liquidity. The post-pandemic housing bubble in North Texas continues to deflate.
As the Federal Reserve works to tame embedded inflation, home prices see sharp declines in 2022. Home prices in Denton County and Collin County see big drops from the spring highs.
The seventh 7 minute video:
Home Prices Crash (largest price drop ever in Spokane)
Jimmy Deringer
Oct 13, 2022 Thinking about moving to the Spokane area? Or selling that home here? I want to earn your business!
Today we talk about how far Spokane home proces have crashed in the last 6 months. When other realtors and real estate agents are talking about a “shift” or a “slowdown” i’m putting myself out here and telling you what’s really going on. And its not good. The outlook for Spokane and other boomtown and zoomtown markets look like they’ll continue to have more price drops and more pain in the market. Maybe you’ll think twice about buying a home unless you can get a good deal and now might be a good time to think about selling that home you’ve been thinking about. It’s a crazy time in the real estate market for sure.
The last 13 minute video:
Unpredictable Home Price Trends In Vaughan, Richmond Hill & Markham Real Estate – October 5
Team Sessa Real Estate
Oct 13, 2022
Vaughan Home Prices, Richmond Hill Home Prices & Markham Home Prices for the week of Sept 29 – Oct 5, 2022.
BTW San Mateo is another area that has quietly gone from prices down since the spring cray cray to prices down year over year.
Breaking it down regionally, most of the recent monthly declines had been in markets across Ontario and, to a lesser extent, in B.C. The standout trend in August and September was that quite a few of those Ontario markets saw monthly price declines get stopped in their tracks, mainly in the Greater Golden Horseshoe. In a few markets prices even popped up a bit between August and September.
Looking across the Prairies, prices in Edmonton and Winnipeg are down a bit from their peaks, while prices are sliding sideways in Calgary, Regina, and Saskatoon. Similarly in Quebec, prices have dipped in Montreal but are mostly flat in Quebec City.
On the East Coast, price softness that had been confined to the Halifax-Dartmouth area appears to now be showing up in parts of New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador, while prices in Prince Edward Island have flattened out in recent months but have not yet moved any lower.
Charlotte housing market showing more signs of weakness this fall
The Business Journals|13 hours ago
Price reductions on listed properties across the Charlotte metro jumped 153% over the year in September — “a signal that sellers may be struggling to price homes in a shifting market,” Canopy Realtor Association notes in its latest report.
An average of 7.9% of homes for sale each week had a price cut, up from 4% a year earlier. Meanwhile, pending home sales plummeted 28% year over year, the biggest decline since May 2020, the report said.
“Prospective homebuyers and sellers barely had time to get used to 5.5% mortgage rates over the summer before they rose to nearly 7% this month,” Taylor Marr, deputy chief economist at Redfin, said in the report. “The second sharp rate increase this year, together with nerves about inflation and the direction of the economy, is dragging home-sale activity down further than it was over the summer and pushing homebuyer sentiment down near its all-time low. The combination is also unnerving for homeowners who don’t want to list their home when demand is weak or give up their own low mortgage rate.”
Recent bankruptcies indicate further financial troubles for real estate investor Clippinger
The Business Journals|11 hours ago
The recent bankruptcies are the latest indicator of ongoing financial struggles for the commercial real estate investor, who has been involved in several disputes with area tenants over the last 13 months as well as another bankruptcy.
This is the Sacramento Business Journal.
Is The Multifamily Sunbelt Strategy In Danger Of Oversaturation?
GlobeSt.com|22 hours ago
The figures on multifamily success have been obvious. Apartment rents are above pre-pandemic levels in many cities. Walker & Dunlop documented nearly $290 billion in multifamily transactions in 2021,
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey has charged NRIA founder and former President Rey Grabato and former executive Thomas Nicholas Salzano with 18 counts, including securities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, the Department of Justice announced Thursday.
FBI agents arrested Salzano on Wednesday while Grabato, a native of the Philippines who is believed by NRIA attorneys to have fled there, remains at large, the release stated.
Salzano had already been arrested in March 2021 for identity theft for an attempt to solicit investors to the NRIA Partners Portfolio Fund, the investment vehicle at the center of the alleged fraud. No trial date has been set for those charges.
Also on Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it has filed civil charges against NRIA, Grabato, Salzano, former NRIA sales manager Arthur Scutaro and former NRIA executive Coley O’Brien for securities fraud. The SEC had also charged Salzano for the alleged identity theft last July, years after it had found he committed fraud while running a telecommunications company.
NRIA’s fund continued to solicit investors until January, even after a September report in the Philadelphia Inquirer publicized the FBI and SEC investigations and Salzano’s arrests, heightening scrutiny on the company and prompting organizational changes.
NRIA filed for bankruptcy on June 7, and the New Jersey Bureau of Securities issued a cease-and-desist order against the company and the four principals named by the SEC two weeks later.
“In classic Ponzi fashion, these defendants allegedly told investors that they would be paid distributions from profits of their fund when, in reality, payments were being made from the investors’ own funds,” SEC New York Regional Director of Enforcement Thomas Smith said in a statement.
“What makes this behavior even more callous is that they allegedly took advantage of 382 retirees who had contributed more than $94 million in savings.”
Red Flag Alert! Here’s a Red Flag from the article …
“NRIA is offering returns that appear to be unparalleled in the industry. Their cost of capital is, for lack of a better term, astronomical. They advertise on a national scale every day for new investors (see point 2) AND they are offering returns ranging from 10% per year paid monthly,” he wrote, noting that other commercials made the same claims with 16 and 21 percent.”
Interestingly convicted scammer Barry Minkow was the whistleblower who uncovered the scam.
Wells Fargo third-quarter profits were hurt by a decision to boost loan loss reserves. The bank set aside $784 million for credit losses after reducing its provisions by $1.4 billion a year ago.
As the most mortgage-dependent of the six biggest U.S. banks, Wells Fargo faced pressure as sales and refinancing activity has fallen steeply as the average rate for a 30-year mortgage has climbed to a 20-year high near 7%.
Wells Fargo said its home lending revenue fell 52% in the third quarter as the pace of mortgage originations slowed. Home lending originations were down 59% from the year-ago period to $21.5 billion.
Real estate data technology company Clear Capital announces 108 layoffs at Roseville office
The Business Journals|15 hours ago
Real estate data technology company Clear Capital has announced a permanent layoff of 108 employees at its Roseville offices at 1410 Rocky Ridge Drive. The company reported the layoff to the state’s Employment Development Department this week.
Wells Fargo warns home mortgage slump to continue
Des Moines Register|12 hours ago
The bank reported $324 million in home mortgage income last quarter, down 75% from last year; Wells Fargo has laid off about 400 central Iowa employees because of the downturn in
Nearly 20 minutes into the secretly recorded conversation that would cost Nury Martinez her L.A. City Council seat, she remarked to fellow Councilmember Kevin de León that it was recently his anniversary. Seven years before, he had been sworn in as the leader of the California Senate.
The ceremony at Walt Disney Concert Hall was a career landmark, celebrating the first time in more than a century that a Latino led the state’s upper chamber. It ushered in four years when De León was one of California’s most powerful politicians. But instead of nostalgia, De León spoke of the memory as a deep wound.
“That swearing-in ceremony, I got s— on all over for that,” De León said, recounting how his event was portrayed by the media as unnecessarily lavish while a white politician’s gala in the same venue got no negative coverage. His theory why? “Because we as Latinos — whether you’re labor or you’re in the political space — we’re not supposed to fill those positions.”
The anecdote has received little attention amid the furious reaction to the leaked audio of the conversation, rife with racism, homophobia and general divisiveness, that has left City Hall in shambles. But De León’s recollection of his swearing-in, much like other comments woven into the hour-plus recording, offers a window into his political ambition, personal grievance and decades-long project of solidifying Latino power. In short, it captures the mind-set of a onetime Democratic rising star whose career now risks near-total collapse.
the leaked audio of the conversation, rife with racism, homophobia and general divisiveness
I have bad news for the left: she isn’t the only Hispanic who harbors such thoughts and the left desperately needs them in Clownifornia.
And it won’t be long before they are the majority (50%+) of voters.
As usual it is his own family legacy of growing up without a father that instills most of his mental issues. In fact, De Leon is not even his real name, he made it up to have some sort of link to his father who he never met. It means ‘of Leon’ (his father’s name) and he is always looking for someone to blame. Just another example of the strength of diversity. Blah.
Nikola Corp. founder Trevor Milton was convicted of fraud for misleading investors in the electric truck company, a stunning downfall for the door-to-door salesman turned billionaire who promised to revolutionize the auto industry.
Milton, 40, was found guilty Friday of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud by a federal jury in Manhattan, in a boost to the U.S. Justice Department’s efforts to crack down on corporate crime. He faces the possibility of years in prison.
It’s been a wild ride for the charismatic entrepreneur, whose fortune has declined to the hundreds of millions since the surge in Nikola shares when the company listed its stock in June 2020. Milton, who remains the company’s biggest individual shareholder, founded Nikola in 2014 and built it into a company valued at $34 billion when it went public, more than Ford Motor Co. at one point.
The meteoric rise of the startup, which had no revenue at the time, came amid a wave of electric vehicle companies going public through special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, starting two years ago as investors scoured the landscape for the next Tesla. Going the SPAC route allowed them to market their companies based on projections of future performance rather than actual financial results. Some of the biggest names on Wall Street poured money into the sector.
While Nikola’s initial focus was on heavy commercial trucks, it branched out to power sport and consumer EVs. It was all supercharged by celebrity endorsements from the likes of the Diesel Brothers’ Heavy D, who promoted the Badger pickup, a product that never made it beyond the renderings stage.
Prosecutors argued that Milton enticed retail investors to buy Nikola shares by making false statements about the company’s products and capabilities in numerous interviews on podcasts and TV, sharply exaggerating Nikola’s capacity to manufacture trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells as well as its ability to produce the fuel itself.
It was “lie after lie after lie,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Jordan Estes told the jury in her closing argument on Thursday. “His lies may have been on social media, but make no mistake: This was an old-fashioned fraud.”
Today, we reveal why we believe Nikola is an intricate fraud built on dozens of lies over the course of its Founder and Executive Chairman Trevor Milton’s career.
We have gathered extensive evidence—including recorded phone calls, text messages, private emails and behind-the-scenes photographs—detailing dozens of false statements by Nikola Founder Trevor Milton. We have never seen this level of deception at a public company, especially of this size.
Trevor has managed to parlay these false statements made over the course of a decade into a ~$20 billion public company. He has inked partnerships with some of the top auto companies in the world, all desperate to catch up to Tesla and to harness the EV wave.
We examine how Nikola got its early start and show how Trevor misled partners into signing agreements by falsely claiming to have extensive proprietary technology.
We reveal how, in the face of growing skepticism over the functionality of its truck, Nikola staged a video called “Nikola One in Motion” which showed the semi-truck cruising on a road at a high rate of speed. Our investigation of the site and text messages from a former employee reveal that the video was an elaborate ruse—Nikola had the truck towed to the top of a hill on a remote stretch of road and simply filmed it rolling down the hill.
In October 2019, Nikola announced it would revolutionize the battery industry. This was to be done through a pending acquisition, but the deal fell through when Nikola realized (a) the technology was vaporware and (b) the President of the battery company had been indicted months earlier over allegations that he conned NASA by using his expense account to procure numerous prostitutes.
Nikola has never walked back claims relating to its battery technology. Instead, Trevor continued to publicly hype the technology even after becoming aware of the above issues. The revolutionary battery technology never existed – now, Nikola plans to use GM’s battery technology instead.
A spokesman for Volvo spin-off Powercell AB, a hydrogen fuel cell technology company that formerly partnered with Nikola, called Nikola’s battery and hydrogen fuel cell claims “hot air”.
In addition to now using GM’s battery technology, Nikola seeks to use the automaker’s production and fuel cell capabilities. Nikola seems to be bringing nothing to the partnership but concept designs, their brand name and up to $700 million they will be paying GM for costs related to production.
Inexpensive hydrogen is fundamental to the success of Nikola’s business model. Trevor has claimed in a presentation to hundreds of people and in multiple interviews to have succeeded at cutting the cost of hydrogen by ~81% compared to peers and to already be producing hydrogen. Nikola has not produced hydrogen at this price or at any price as he later admitted when pressed by media.
Trevor has appointed his brother, Travis, as “Director of Hydrogen Production/Infrastructure” to oversee this critical part of the business. Travis’s prior experience looks to have largely consisted of pouring concrete driveways and doing subcontractor work on home renovations in Hawaii.
Claims of owning energy producing assets is not new for Nikola. Trevor claimed that Nikola’s headquarters has 3.5 megawatts of solar panels on its roof producing energy. Aerial photos of the roof and later media reports show that the supposed panels don’t exist.
At one point Nikola claimed to own its own natural gas wells. There is no evidence in company filings to support this. The claims were eventually quietly removed from Nikola’s website.
Trevor claims Nikola designs all key components in house, but they appear to simply be buying or licensing them from third-parties. One example: we found that Nikola actually buys inverters from a company called Cascadia. In a video showing off its “in-house” inverters, Nikola concealed the Cascadia label with a piece of masking tape.
In a July 2020 podcast, Trevor said of Nikola’s “Tre” truck: “We have five of them coming off the assembly line right now in Ulm Germany.” A spokesperson for Bosch, the manufacturing partner building the trucks, confirmed this month that they haven’t made any trucks yet.
The company’s Nikola One “reveal” was a total farce. We corroborate Bloomberg’s earlier work debunking Trevor’s claims regarding its semi-truck that “this thing fully functions and works…this is a real truck” and provide new evidence.
We present behind-the-scenes photos showing that Nikola had an electricity cable snaked up from underneath the stage into the truck in order to falsely claim the Nikola One’s electrical systems fully functioned.
We learned through emails and interviews with former partners that Trevor had an artist stencil “H2” and “Zero Emission Hydrogen Electric” on the side of the Nikola One despite it having no hydrogen capabilities whatsoever; it was built with natural gas components.
We also present evidence that subsequent “reveals” were fictitious. In 2019, Nikola revealed a “next generation” version of its off-road vehicle. We learned that it was scrapped within weeks of the unveiling due to manufacturing challenges. The redesign work was then quietly outsourced.
Nikola’s much-touted multi-billion dollar order book is filled with fluff. U.S. Xpress reportedly accounts for a third of its reservations, representing ~$3.5 billion in orders. U.S. Xpress had only $1.3 million in cash on hand last quarter.
Nikola’s key partners and backers have been cashing out aggressively. Worthington, Bosch and ValueAct have all sold shares. Worthington sold $237 million shares over a 2-day span in July and another $250 million in August. We think they know exactly what type of company Nikola is, and we expect that as Nikola’s GM “partnership” boosts the stock price, key holders will continue to exit.
We think Trevor Milton, through dozens of outright lies, was able to form partnerships with some of the largest legacy auto companies in the world in their desperation to catch up to Tesla’s EV leadership status.
Trevor has ensured he is not going down with the ship. He cashed out $70 million around the IPO and amended his share lock-up from 1-year to 180 days. If he is fired, his equity awards immediately vest and he is entitled to collect $20 million over two years. Milton has laid the groundwork to extract hundreds of millions from Nikola years before ever delivering on his promises.
Every now and then a story comes around that exposes how little the “experts” really know. Theranos inked partnerships with Walgreens, Safeway, and Cleveland Clinic and staffed its board with luminaries. We think Nikola’s partners did not do their homework.
Now do Elon. Trevor used Elon’s playbook but apparently didn’t have his protection.
Bahahahahahahahahahahaha … if the Fed isn’t going to bail out the banks then Janet Yellen at the Treasury will do it.
You go girl!
“‘This is not QE or QT. This is none of those.’ Why the U.S. Treasury is exploring debt buybacks”
Treasury is considering buying back its older debt, a bit like recycling
The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday said it plans to start talking with primary dealers in late October about the potential for it to begin buying back some of its older debt to help stave off market dysfunction.
The plan, if adopted, would mark a milestone in the roughly $22.6 trillion U.S. government debt market, the world’s largest, by providing a new tool for the Treasury to help aid market liquidity, a source of growing concern.
See: Treasury’s Yellen worried about ‘loss of adequate liquidity’ in U.S. government bond market
The proposal comes after the Bank of England was forced to step in with an emergency program to temporarily buy its government debt and to give U.K. pension funds more time to unwind soured bets. The volatility erupted as global central banks have worked to fight soaring inflation by ending easy-monetary policies that prevailed for much of the past decade.
Importantly, unlike in the U.K., the new Treasury proposal is separate from the Federal Reserve’s plans to sharply cut the size of its balance sheet by letting its holdings of Treasury and mortgage bonds roll off at maturity, a process known as “quantitative tightening,” (QT), after it hit a record size of nearly $9 trillion under two years of “quantitative easing,” (QE).
“This is not QE or QT. This is none of those,” said Thomas Simons, money market economist at Jefferies, in a phone interview. “This is the first, real serious beginning round of exploring if they might do something. This is quite far from an announcement. It is more like fact finding.”
Still, Simons said if the plan takes shape, it could help improve liquidity “where it isn’t very good.”
How Treasury buybacks might work
The Treasury asked dealers for feedback by Monday, Oct. 24, about a new tool to buyback its off-the-run securities each year and if it would “meaningfully improve liquidity,” reduce volatility in T-bill issuance and help address other market concerns.
The idea would be to sop up “unwanted supply” of off-the-run securities that can become harder to trade once they are replaced with newer Treasury issuance, or on-the-run securities.
“It’s a supply management program, really, over the course of the year,” Simons said of the Treasury proposal. “It looks like a tool they could use over the long run and aim liquidity where it’s impaired.”
The Treasury has been meeting quarterly with the dealer community to solicit feedback on market functioning for years. Buybacks have been discussed at previous meetings in August 2022 and February 2015.
Sounds like taking out new loans to pay off the old ones.
Borrowers have been doing that for 10 years now…. Draw on a HELOC to pay the mortgage.
San Luis Obispo, CA Housing Prices Crater 21% YOY As Appraisal Fraud Overruns Central Coast California Housing Market
From the first 11 minute video:
78% OVERVALUED! Boise sees a CRASH in home prices. Buyers market is near. #redfin #housingbubble
Good News Real Estate-Idaho
Oct 14, 2022 78% OVERVALUED! Boise sees a 10% CRASH in home prices. Buyers market is near. Moody’s reports Boise as #1 overvalued market in the US.
Boise, Idaho Real Estate market updates. The Fed likely (98%) to deliver a big hike Mortgage interest rates by .75 percentage point again for November meeting We are approaching 8% mortgage interest rates. The federal reserve is attempting to curb inflation, but the consumer price index rose again to .4 % as of the latest reports. Moody analytics is reporting that Boise, Idaho has a 78% overvaluation. Many are calling for a economic collapse and a housing bubble to burst. What are you thoughts? Hopefully we were able to explain how the current market shift/economic collapse is effecting the market.
Numbers are local to us. We are located in Ada county Idaho (Boise) The 30% correction is here and growing. Redfin is calling reporting that 15-22% of all contracts have been cancelled.
The second 6 minute video:
Sacramento / Stockton Real Estate Report for 10/13/2022
Oct 13, 2022 The Sacramento / Stockton area real estate market has moved from a sellers’ market to a buyers’ market with over 2,100 price reductions this week. The inventory remains strong, which means plenty of competition for sellers and plenty of choices and room for negotiation for buyers. The big story once again is the climb in interest rates; but it could be much worse!
The third 5 minute video:
Bay Area Market Update | San Mateo – September
Gwen Realty
Oct 13, 2022
The fourth 3 minute video:
Las Vegas Housing Market Coming to a Slow Down, What to do Next? Oct 14, 2022 Jeff Miller
The fifth 10 minute video:
Media vampires celebrate a housing crash out of context
Brandon Mulrenin
Oct 13, 2022 Michigan
The sixth 7:29 video:
North Texas Housing Market Reset – DFW Home Prices Fall As Demand Gets Crushed
Aaron Layman
Oct 14, 2022 The North Texas housing market reset picks up steam. DFW home prices fall as demand gets crushed by higher mortgage rates and shrinking liquidity. The post-pandemic housing bubble in North Texas continues to deflate.
As the Federal Reserve works to tame embedded inflation, home prices see sharp declines in 2022. Home prices in Denton County and Collin County see big drops from the spring highs.
The seventh 7 minute video:
Home Prices Crash (largest price drop ever in Spokane)
Jimmy Deringer
Oct 13, 2022 Thinking about moving to the Spokane area? Or selling that home here? I want to earn your business!
Today we talk about how far Spokane home proces have crashed in the last 6 months. When other realtors and real estate agents are talking about a “shift” or a “slowdown” i’m putting myself out here and telling you what’s really going on. And its not good. The outlook for Spokane and other boomtown and zoomtown markets look like they’ll continue to have more price drops and more pain in the market. Maybe you’ll think twice about buying a home unless you can get a good deal and now might be a good time to think about selling that home you’ve been thinking about. It’s a crazy time in the real estate market for sure.
The last 13 minute video:
Unpredictable Home Price Trends In Vaughan, Richmond Hill & Markham Real Estate – October 5
Team Sessa Real Estate
Oct 13, 2022
Vaughan Home Prices, Richmond Hill Home Prices & Markham Home Prices for the week of Sept 29 – Oct 5, 2022.
BTW San Mateo is another area that has quietly gone from prices down since the spring cray cray to prices down year over year.
Breaking it down regionally, most of the recent monthly declines had been in markets across Ontario and, to a lesser extent, in B.C. The standout trend in August and September was that quite a few of those Ontario markets saw monthly price declines get stopped in their tracks, mainly in the Greater Golden Horseshoe. In a few markets prices even popped up a bit between August and September.
Looking across the Prairies, prices in Edmonton and Winnipeg are down a bit from their peaks, while prices are sliding sideways in Calgary, Regina, and Saskatoon. Similarly in Quebec, prices have dipped in Montreal but are mostly flat in Quebec City.
On the East Coast, price softness that had been confined to the Halifax-Dartmouth area appears to now be showing up in parts of New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador, while prices in Prince Edward Island have flattened out in recent months but have not yet moved any lower.
https://www.crea.ca/media-hub/news/canadian-home-sales-soften-again-from-august-to-september/
Charlotte housing market showing more signs of weakness this fall
The Business Journals|13 hours ago
Price reductions on listed properties across the Charlotte metro jumped 153% over the year in September — “a signal that sellers may be struggling to price homes in a shifting market,” Canopy Realtor Association notes in its latest report.
An average of 7.9% of homes for sale each week had a price cut, up from 4% a year earlier. Meanwhile, pending home sales plummeted 28% year over year, the biggest decline since May 2020, the report said.
“Prospective homebuyers and sellers barely had time to get used to 5.5% mortgage rates over the summer before they rose to nearly 7% this month,” Taylor Marr, deputy chief economist at Redfin, said in the report. “The second sharp rate increase this year, together with nerves about inflation and the direction of the economy, is dragging home-sale activity down further than it was over the summer and pushing homebuyer sentiment down near its all-time low. The combination is also unnerving for homeowners who don’t want to list their home when demand is weak or give up their own low mortgage rate.”
https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/rising-interest-rates-and-economic-woes-continue-to-slow-u-s-housing-market-01665770863
Recent bankruptcies indicate further financial troubles for real estate investor Clippinger
The Business Journals|11 hours ago
The recent bankruptcies are the latest indicator of ongoing financial struggles for the commercial real estate investor, who has been involved in several disputes with area tenants over the last 13 months as well as another bankruptcy.
This is the Sacramento Business Journal.
Is The Multifamily Sunbelt Strategy In Danger Of Oversaturation?
GlobeSt.com|22 hours ago
The figures on multifamily success have been obvious. Apartment rents are above pre-pandemic levels in many cities. Walker & Dunlop documented nearly $290 billion in multifamily transactions in 2021,
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey has charged NRIA founder and former President Rey Grabato and former executive Thomas Nicholas Salzano with 18 counts, including securities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, the Department of Justice announced Thursday.
FBI agents arrested Salzano on Wednesday while Grabato, a native of the Philippines who is believed by NRIA attorneys to have fled there, remains at large, the release stated.
Salzano had already been arrested in March 2021 for identity theft for an attempt to solicit investors to the NRIA Partners Portfolio Fund, the investment vehicle at the center of the alleged fraud. No trial date has been set for those charges.
Also on Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it has filed civil charges against NRIA, Grabato, Salzano, former NRIA sales manager Arthur Scutaro and former NRIA executive Coley O’Brien for securities fraud. The SEC had also charged Salzano for the alleged identity theft last July, years after it had found he committed fraud while running a telecommunications company.
NRIA’s fund continued to solicit investors until January, even after a September report in the Philadelphia Inquirer publicized the FBI and SEC investigations and Salzano’s arrests, heightening scrutiny on the company and prompting organizational changes.
NRIA filed for bankruptcy on June 7, and the New Jersey Bureau of Securities issued a cease-and-desist order against the company and the four principals named by the SEC two weeks later.
“In classic Ponzi fashion, these defendants allegedly told investors that they would be paid distributions from profits of their fund when, in reality, payments were being made from the investors’ own funds,” SEC New York Regional Director of Enforcement Thomas Smith said in a statement.
“What makes this behavior even more callous is that they allegedly took advantage of 382 retirees who had contributed more than $94 million in savings.”
https://www.bisnow.com/national/news/commercial-real-estate/nria-real-estate-fund-federal-charges-arrested-ponzi-scheme-115851
It’s not as if investors haven’t been warned. This article is from April of last year …
“With SEC probe underway, whistleblower alleges fraud at Secaucus-based real estate fund”
https://hudsoncountyview.com/with-sec-probe-underway-whistleblower-alleges-fraud-at-secaucus-based-real-estate-fund/
Red Flag Alert! Here’s a Red Flag from the article …
“NRIA is offering returns that appear to be unparalleled in the industry. Their cost of capital is, for lack of a better term, astronomical. They advertise on a national scale every day for new investors (see point 2) AND they are offering returns ranging from 10% per year paid monthly,” he wrote, noting that other commercials made the same claims with 16 and 21 percent.”
Interestingly convicted scammer Barry Minkow was the whistleblower who uncovered the scam.
Wells Fargo third-quarter profits were hurt by a decision to boost loan loss reserves. The bank set aside $784 million for credit losses after reducing its provisions by $1.4 billion a year ago.
As the most mortgage-dependent of the six biggest U.S. banks, Wells Fargo faced pressure as sales and refinancing activity has fallen steeply as the average rate for a 30-year mortgage has climbed to a 20-year high near 7%.
Wells Fargo said its home lending revenue fell 52% in the third quarter as the pace of mortgage originations slowed. Home lending originations were down 59% from the year-ago period to $21.5 billion.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/wells-fargo-shares-jump-3-25-as-bank-tops-expectations-despite-boosting-loan-loss-reserves/ar-AA12Xr0z
😬
Real estate data technology company Clear Capital announces 108 layoffs at Roseville office
The Business Journals|15 hours ago
Real estate data technology company Clear Capital has announced a permanent layoff of 108 employees at its Roseville offices at 1410 Rocky Ridge Drive. The company reported the layoff to the state’s Employment Development Department this week.
Wells Fargo warns home mortgage slump to continue
Des Moines Register|12 hours ago
The bank reported $324 million in home mortgage income last quarter, down 75% from last year; Wells Fargo has laid off about 400 central Iowa employees because of the downturn in
Nearly 20 minutes into the secretly recorded conversation that would cost Nury Martinez her L.A. City Council seat, she remarked to fellow Councilmember Kevin de León that it was recently his anniversary. Seven years before, he had been sworn in as the leader of the California Senate.
The ceremony at Walt Disney Concert Hall was a career landmark, celebrating the first time in more than a century that a Latino led the state’s upper chamber. It ushered in four years when De León was one of California’s most powerful politicians. But instead of nostalgia, De León spoke of the memory as a deep wound.
“That swearing-in ceremony, I got s— on all over for that,” De León said, recounting how his event was portrayed by the media as unnecessarily lavish while a white politician’s gala in the same venue got no negative coverage. His theory why? “Because we as Latinos — whether you’re labor or you’re in the political space — we’re not supposed to fill those positions.”
The anecdote has received little attention amid the furious reaction to the leaked audio of the conversation, rife with racism, homophobia and general divisiveness, that has left City Hall in shambles. But De León’s recollection of his swearing-in, much like other comments woven into the hour-plus recording, offers a window into his political ambition, personal grievance and decades-long project of solidifying Latino power. In short, it captures the mind-set of a onetime Democratic rising star whose career now risks near-total collapse.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-10-14/kevin-de-leon-city-council-racist-recording
the leaked audio of the conversation, rife with racism, homophobia and general divisiveness
I have bad news for the left: she isn’t the only Hispanic who harbors such thoughts and the left desperately needs them in Clownifornia.
And it won’t be long before they are the majority (50%+) of voters.
As usual it is his own family legacy of growing up without a father that instills most of his mental issues. In fact, De Leon is not even his real name, he made it up to have some sort of link to his father who he never met. It means ‘of Leon’ (his father’s name) and he is always looking for someone to blame. Just another example of the strength of diversity. Blah.
Nikola Corp. founder Trevor Milton was convicted of fraud for misleading investors in the electric truck company, a stunning downfall for the door-to-door salesman turned billionaire who promised to revolutionize the auto industry.
Milton, 40, was found guilty Friday of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud by a federal jury in Manhattan, in a boost to the U.S. Justice Department’s efforts to crack down on corporate crime. He faces the possibility of years in prison.
It’s been a wild ride for the charismatic entrepreneur, whose fortune has declined to the hundreds of millions since the surge in Nikola shares when the company listed its stock in June 2020. Milton, who remains the company’s biggest individual shareholder, founded Nikola in 2014 and built it into a company valued at $34 billion when it went public, more than Ford Motor Co. at one point.
The meteoric rise of the startup, which had no revenue at the time, came amid a wave of electric vehicle companies going public through special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, starting two years ago as investors scoured the landscape for the next Tesla. Going the SPAC route allowed them to market their companies based on projections of future performance rather than actual financial results. Some of the biggest names on Wall Street poured money into the sector.
While Nikola’s initial focus was on heavy commercial trucks, it branched out to power sport and consumer EVs. It was all supercharged by celebrity endorsements from the likes of the Diesel Brothers’ Heavy D, who promoted the Badger pickup, a product that never made it beyond the renderings stage.
Prosecutors argued that Milton enticed retail investors to buy Nikola shares by making false statements about the company’s products and capabilities in numerous interviews on podcasts and TV, sharply exaggerating Nikola’s capacity to manufacture trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells as well as its ability to produce the fuel itself.
It was “lie after lie after lie,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Jordan Estes told the jury in her closing argument on Thursday. “His lies may have been on social media, but make no mistake: This was an old-fashioned fraud.”
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-10-14/head-of-zero-emission-truck-venture-found-guilty-of-fraud
Red Flag Alert! This Red Flag is from two years ago …
“Nikola admits prototype was rolling downhill in promotional video
‘This thing fully functions,’ Trevor Milton said in 2016. It didn’t.”
TIMOTHY B. LEE – 9/14/2020, 10:58 AM
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype-was-rolling-downhill-in-promotional-video/
Nikola’s stock price …
https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=NKLA&p=w&tas=0
Another Red Flag. This article is from two years ago …
“Nikola: How to Parlay An Ocean of Lies Into a Partnership With the Largest Auto OEM in America”
Published on September 10, 2020
https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/
(snip)
Today, we reveal why we believe Nikola is an intricate fraud built on dozens of lies over the course of its Founder and Executive Chairman Trevor Milton’s career.
We have gathered extensive evidence—including recorded phone calls, text messages, private emails and behind-the-scenes photographs—detailing dozens of false statements by Nikola Founder Trevor Milton. We have never seen this level of deception at a public company, especially of this size.
Trevor has managed to parlay these false statements made over the course of a decade into a ~$20 billion public company. He has inked partnerships with some of the top auto companies in the world, all desperate to catch up to Tesla and to harness the EV wave.
We examine how Nikola got its early start and show how Trevor misled partners into signing agreements by falsely claiming to have extensive proprietary technology.
We reveal how, in the face of growing skepticism over the functionality of its truck, Nikola staged a video called “Nikola One in Motion” which showed the semi-truck cruising on a road at a high rate of speed. Our investigation of the site and text messages from a former employee reveal that the video was an elaborate ruse—Nikola had the truck towed to the top of a hill on a remote stretch of road and simply filmed it rolling down the hill.
In October 2019, Nikola announced it would revolutionize the battery industry. This was to be done through a pending acquisition, but the deal fell through when Nikola realized (a) the technology was vaporware and (b) the President of the battery company had been indicted months earlier over allegations that he conned NASA by using his expense account to procure numerous prostitutes.
Nikola has never walked back claims relating to its battery technology. Instead, Trevor continued to publicly hype the technology even after becoming aware of the above issues. The revolutionary battery technology never existed – now, Nikola plans to use GM’s battery technology instead.
A spokesman for Volvo spin-off Powercell AB, a hydrogen fuel cell technology company that formerly partnered with Nikola, called Nikola’s battery and hydrogen fuel cell claims “hot air”.
In addition to now using GM’s battery technology, Nikola seeks to use the automaker’s production and fuel cell capabilities. Nikola seems to be bringing nothing to the partnership but concept designs, their brand name and up to $700 million they will be paying GM for costs related to production.
Inexpensive hydrogen is fundamental to the success of Nikola’s business model. Trevor has claimed in a presentation to hundreds of people and in multiple interviews to have succeeded at cutting the cost of hydrogen by ~81% compared to peers and to already be producing hydrogen. Nikola has not produced hydrogen at this price or at any price as he later admitted when pressed by media.
Trevor has appointed his brother, Travis, as “Director of Hydrogen Production/Infrastructure” to oversee this critical part of the business. Travis’s prior experience looks to have largely consisted of pouring concrete driveways and doing subcontractor work on home renovations in Hawaii.
Claims of owning energy producing assets is not new for Nikola. Trevor claimed that Nikola’s headquarters has 3.5 megawatts of solar panels on its roof producing energy. Aerial photos of the roof and later media reports show that the supposed panels don’t exist.
At one point Nikola claimed to own its own natural gas wells. There is no evidence in company filings to support this. The claims were eventually quietly removed from Nikola’s website.
Trevor claims Nikola designs all key components in house, but they appear to simply be buying or licensing them from third-parties. One example: we found that Nikola actually buys inverters from a company called Cascadia. In a video showing off its “in-house” inverters, Nikola concealed the Cascadia label with a piece of masking tape.
In a July 2020 podcast, Trevor said of Nikola’s “Tre” truck: “We have five of them coming off the assembly line right now in Ulm Germany.” A spokesperson for Bosch, the manufacturing partner building the trucks, confirmed this month that they haven’t made any trucks yet.
The company’s Nikola One “reveal” was a total farce. We corroborate Bloomberg’s earlier work debunking Trevor’s claims regarding its semi-truck that “this thing fully functions and works…this is a real truck” and provide new evidence.
We present behind-the-scenes photos showing that Nikola had an electricity cable snaked up from underneath the stage into the truck in order to falsely claim the Nikola One’s electrical systems fully functioned.
We learned through emails and interviews with former partners that Trevor had an artist stencil “H2” and “Zero Emission Hydrogen Electric” on the side of the Nikola One despite it having no hydrogen capabilities whatsoever; it was built with natural gas components.
We also present evidence that subsequent “reveals” were fictitious. In 2019, Nikola revealed a “next generation” version of its off-road vehicle. We learned that it was scrapped within weeks of the unveiling due to manufacturing challenges. The redesign work was then quietly outsourced.
Nikola’s much-touted multi-billion dollar order book is filled with fluff. U.S. Xpress reportedly accounts for a third of its reservations, representing ~$3.5 billion in orders. U.S. Xpress had only $1.3 million in cash on hand last quarter.
Nikola’s key partners and backers have been cashing out aggressively. Worthington, Bosch and ValueAct have all sold shares. Worthington sold $237 million shares over a 2-day span in July and another $250 million in August. We think they know exactly what type of company Nikola is, and we expect that as Nikola’s GM “partnership” boosts the stock price, key holders will continue to exit.
We think Trevor Milton, through dozens of outright lies, was able to form partnerships with some of the largest legacy auto companies in the world in their desperation to catch up to Tesla’s EV leadership status.
Trevor has ensured he is not going down with the ship. He cashed out $70 million around the IPO and amended his share lock-up from 1-year to 180 days. If he is fired, his equity awards immediately vest and he is entitled to collect $20 million over two years. Milton has laid the groundwork to extract hundreds of millions from Nikola years before ever delivering on his promises.
Every now and then a story comes around that exposes how little the “experts” really know. Theranos inked partnerships with Walgreens, Safeway, and Cleveland Clinic and staffed its board with luminaries. We think Nikola’s partners did not do their homework.
Now do Elon. Trevor used Elon’s playbook but apparently didn’t have his protection.
Bahahahahahahahahahahaha … if the Fed isn’t going to bail out the banks then Janet Yellen at the Treasury will do it.
You go girl!
“‘This is not QE or QT. This is none of those.’ Why the U.S. Treasury is exploring debt buybacks”
https://glossary.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/2022101512/this-is-not-qe-or-qt-this-is-none-of-those-why-the-us-treasury-is-exploring-debt-buybacks
(snip)
Treasury is considering buying back its older debt, a bit like recycling
The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday said it plans to start talking with primary dealers in late October about the potential for it to begin buying back some of its older debt to help stave off market dysfunction.
The plan, if adopted, would mark a milestone in the roughly $22.6 trillion U.S. government debt market, the world’s largest, by providing a new tool for the Treasury to help aid market liquidity, a source of growing concern.
See: Treasury’s Yellen worried about ‘loss of adequate liquidity’ in U.S. government bond market
The proposal comes after the Bank of England was forced to step in with an emergency program to temporarily buy its government debt and to give U.K. pension funds more time to unwind soured bets. The volatility erupted as global central banks have worked to fight soaring inflation by ending easy-monetary policies that prevailed for much of the past decade.
Importantly, unlike in the U.K., the new Treasury proposal is separate from the Federal Reserve’s plans to sharply cut the size of its balance sheet by letting its holdings of Treasury and mortgage bonds roll off at maturity, a process known as “quantitative tightening,” (QT), after it hit a record size of nearly $9 trillion under two years of “quantitative easing,” (QE).
“This is not QE or QT. This is none of those,” said Thomas Simons, money market economist at Jefferies, in a phone interview. “This is the first, real serious beginning round of exploring if they might do something. This is quite far from an announcement. It is more like fact finding.”
Still, Simons said if the plan takes shape, it could help improve liquidity “where it isn’t very good.”
How Treasury buybacks might work
The Treasury asked dealers for feedback by Monday, Oct. 24, about a new tool to buyback its off-the-run securities each year and if it would “meaningfully improve liquidity,” reduce volatility in T-bill issuance and help address other market concerns.
The idea would be to sop up “unwanted supply” of off-the-run securities that can become harder to trade once they are replaced with newer Treasury issuance, or on-the-run securities.
“It’s a supply management program, really, over the course of the year,” Simons said of the Treasury proposal. “It looks like a tool they could use over the long run and aim liquidity where it’s impaired.”
The Treasury has been meeting quarterly with the dealer community to solicit feedback on market functioning for years. Buybacks have been discussed at previous meetings in August 2022 and February 2015.
Sounds like taking out new loans to pay off the old ones.
Borrowers have been doing that for 10 years now…. Draw on a HELOC to pay the mortgage.
San Luis Obispo, CA Housing Prices Crater 21% YOY As Appraisal Fraud Overruns Central Coast California Housing Market
https://www.movoto.com/san-luis-obispo-ca/market-trends/
As one California broker conceded, “The only way prices go higher is mortgage and appraisal fraud.”