The New Money Pit

Walking through the gated community of Black Mountain Vista on a hill in Henderson, Nev., Thomas Blanchard offers a guided tour of real-estate woe. A row of stucco duplexes that recently sold for as much as $500,000 sit empty. “That’s a repo,” the real-estate agent says as he stands in front of 678 Solitude Point Avenue. Then he points to the adjacent houses, where yellow patches blot the spartan lawns and phone books lie on front porches, their covers bleached from weeks under the desert sun. “No. 680, repo; 684, repo. Those two at the end, repo.”

Three years ago, this Las Vegas suburb was teeming with modern-day prospectors armed with low-interest mortgages, all hoping to strike it rich in real estate. Now, what started with the subprime-mortgage mess and subsequent credit crunch are turning communities like Black Mountain Vista into luxury ghost towns. Buyers who got in over their heads are being forced to abandon their homes, leaving behind empty McMansions on the California coast and see-through condominium towers on Miami Beach. Real estate is turning into a money pit, sapping the fortunes of home buyers, hedge-fund managers and house painters alike. The really bad news? This is only the beginning.

No sooner did the housing market peak last summer than pundits and home builders assured the public the bottom had been reached. But with each passing month, the shoes continue to drop. First, dozens of subprime lenders were forced to close their doors. Then in July the nation’s largest mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, reported that mortgages held by borrowers with better credit were starting to curdle. Nearly 180,000 homes fell into foreclosure in July, up 93 percent from a year ago. Last week President George W. Bush offered a series of proposals designed to ward off a flood of foreclosures. Sales of new single-family homes were off 22.3 percent in June from a year earlier, and sales of existing homes—a much bigger market—were off 9 percent in July. The National Association of Realtors reports there’s enough housing inventory for sale to last 9.6 months, more than double the 2005 level. The Case-Shiller index, which tracks national housing prices, fell 3.2 percent between June 2006 and June 2007. While that’s a relatively small drop, “this is the largest sustained decline in year-over-year prices since 1991,” says Yale economist Robert Shiller.

The decline in housing construction and sales has had an immediate economic impact. From the perspective of job creation, real estate was the best sector in which to have a boom, providing jobs at every rung of the ladder: real-estate agents and mortgage brokers, architects and lawyers, investment bankers and decorators, movers and painters, contractors and landscapers. Between November 2001 and April 2005, housing and housing-related industries created 788,300 jobs, or 40 percent of the total created in the United States, according to Asha Bangalore, an economist at Northern Trust in Chicago. The demand for mortgage brokers in Las Vegas was so strong that “every stripper, waiter and bartender on the Strip had a broker’s license,” says Boyd Nyborg, a former mortgage broker who now tends bar at the Tao Las Vegas.

But since August 2006, employment in housing-related industries has declined 119,400, according to Bangalore. Last month brought a rash of job cuts: 1,600 at Accredited Home Lenders, a subprime-mortgage company based in San Diego; 1,900 at Capital One Financial’s GreenPoint Mortgage unit; 6,000 at Tucson, Ariz.-based subprime lender First Magnus. Many real-estate professionals who work on commission have seen their pay plummet. Mike McNamara, a broker at Windermere Coeur d’Alene Realty in the Idaho resort town, says sales in the area have fallen by half since the summer of 2005. “My sales are down 30 percent from last year,” he says. “There are about 1,500 agents in this market and approximately 300 are making a living.” Harry Heyward, who has been appraising homes in Tampa, Fla., for almost 20 years, says he’s doing about five appraisals per week—down from 10 to 15 at the height of the boom. “I keep thinking it’s going to get better, and it never does.”

The collateral damage is spreading. Because home sales and moves stimulate purchases of appliances, electronics and furniture, the giant chains that catered to house flippers and renovators have reported recessionlike results. In the second quarter, same-store sales were down 5.2 percent at Home Depot and 4.3 percent at Sears.