Ratings agency Standard & Poors has more bad news for homebuilders. The firm expects their results to keep deteriorating and has 18 of the 22 companies it follows on watch for possible downgrades. Three others are in default. Only one, NVR, has a stable outlook.

New home deliveries for the group fell 33% in November. The average sale price fell 9% to $273,000.

“We believe that new housing starts may bottom out this quarter at their lowest levels since the end of World War II, but that excess supply and weaker demand will continue to push prices down through the middle of next year,” analyst James Fielding says.

If you want to brighten somebody’s holiday, visit a new home showroom.

Weakening economic conditions in Manhattan’s office sector have begun impacting average asking rents for the city’s trophy-quality office buildings.

An article from the January edition of Reason Magazine caught my eye the other day. It shows just how far out of whack home prices had gotten. Editor Tim Cavanaugh writes that “Comparing data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Association of Realtors, a house today costs four times your annual salary. Ten years ago it cost only three times as much. In 1988 it cost twice as much; in 1978, less than twice as much."

The day before I read that I had got an email from Rob Jenson, a Realtor in Las Vegas whom I've found is very honest about the crummy state of the market. His email was titled "The moment we've all been waiting for," and it went on to say "You can finally buy investment properties and get a Positive Return on Invesment!"

He didn't elaborate on the math but I'm sure he's right. Prices in Vegas have finally fallen to the point we're buying actually makes financial sense.

Next Century Associates has unveiled a proposal to build a $2 billion mixed-use property in Los Angeles' Century Plaza, on the current site of the Century Plaza Hotel. The redevelopment proposal entails razing the 19-story hotel and replacing it with a pair of towers.

I went to a bank-owned home auction run by ValueHomeAuctions.com on Saturday. The event, in downtown Los Angeles, started at 9:30 and it was only half-way done when I got there two and half hours later. They were auctioning off over 140 homes.

Compared to an auction I went to earlier in the year, this one had probably half as many people. And there was no free coffee! This event had cheerleaders though--well they were auction house employees clapping on the sidelines during the bidding to get folks fired up.

Just to make it clear, these are not sheriff's auctions where people lose their homes to the bank. These are homes that have already been foreclosed on. Typically the bank has tried to sell the property through local Realtors and unable to do that now just wants to get rid of it.

Another thing I noticed about this event was much lower prices. Six months ago homes at the auction I went to were selling for about 60% of the "previous value" which is typically what the bank had last listed it when it was trying to sell it through a real estate agent.

Here are some of the prices I saw:

A five bedroom home in Norco, Calif., way out east of L.A., had a starting bid of $136,000 and sold for $390,000. It was previously valued at $990,000.

A three bedroom, three bath in Menifee, again one of the those far out but still nice Los Angeles suburbs, went for $130,000, twice the starting bid of $58,000 but about one third of the previous value of $431,000.

A four bedroom house in Hemet, again one of those far east suburbs, went for $125,000, twice the starting price of $54,000 but one-third the previous value. You see a pattern here?

Although I didn't inspect any of the above mentioned properties they all looked like fairly decent houses, built during the boom and bought by people who for one reason or another, couldn't keep them. That's the house in Hemet in the photo above.

By the way, today's Los Angeles Times has an article about how the state is--for the fourth year in a row--seeing more people leaving than moving in. A trend entirely related to what I saw on the auction floor.

The Income Approach is one of three approaches to evaluating of property. The income approach refers to an appraisal technique called off the megascopic rent multiplier (GRM). GRM is a technique which is applyed to guess market value of property.

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Mortgage rates fell this week, with the 30-year fixed mortgage sinking to its lowest rate in 37 years as the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to historic lows.

Construction has begun on a $210 million development in Jersey City, N.J., that will feature two 47-story towers with a total of 524 rental apartments and 11,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space. Monaco Towers, developed jointly by Roseland Properties of Short Hills, N.J., and Garden State Developers of Jersey City, had originally been planned as a condominium property but will now offer rental apartments.

Housing permits and starts fell to record lows in November, the government said Tuesday, in the latest sign that the housing market is continuing its decline.

Ah, remember when Southern California stood for sunshine, the Beach Boys and eternally rising housing prices? No more.

According to research firm MDA DataQuick, the median home price fell a record breaking 35% in November versus the same month in 2007. The median price paid for all homes combined last month was $285,000, down 5% from October. Last month’s median was the lowest since it was $298,000 in April 2003, which was the last time the median was below $300,000. November’s median stood 43.6 percent below the peak $505,000 median reached in spring and summer of last year.

The median price has eroded consistently over the past 16 months as price depreciation swept the region, discounted foreclosures ballooned in inland markets and sales stagnated in higher-end neighborhoods. The latter have suffered from, among other things, a difficult financing environment for large mortgages.

“Bargains and bargain hunters have kept this market alive through some of the bleakest financial news in memory. There’s this renewed sense that you can score a ‘deal’ – something that had been missing for many years. Last month’s Southland sales weren’t great, given they were the second-lowest for any November in 16 years. But they could have been a lot worse,” said John Walsh, DataQuick president.

Foreclosures have accounted for about half of all Southland resales during the past three months. In November, they reached 55%.