Buying and Selling: January 2020 Archives

On a forum I frequent, someone posted this advice for prospective property purchasers: At closing, at the title office or bank, when signing the title, contract for sale or any transfer instrument (use a single obliterating line) mark out the word "tenant" and write above it "landlord" or "buyer".

Better yet, require a free simple title to transfer ownership without the buyer identified as a "tenant".

I do not understand this "advice" and am turning to you for clarification. Thanks!

I only work in California, but the only times the word "tenant" should appear on a title transfer deed is if it's a leasehold, or to describe the manner in which two or more grantees hold title amongst themselves.

It is possible that someone might contend that a title granted as "tenant" was a leasehold or rental interest of some nature. I can't see it working in the face of a purchase contract, though, unless there's a whole lot of scamming going on, and everybody involved would basically lose their license and their livelihood, and be liable to the purchaser for what they should have gotten, and didn't. Be advised, however, that I'm not a lawyer, so consult one. With that said, however, such words shouldn't appear unless there's a reason for it.

Here in California, the deeds typically read "(A) grants (B) (type of title or interest) in (legal description of property). It doesn't say seller, buyer, or anything else along those lines. It simply transfers title from one group of holders holder to another. There can be commonality between the first group and the second - say a parent granting the property from themselves to themselves and their child. Spouses usually automatically join title by action of law, but it can be beneficial to have them officially on title of record in some cases. They can also be used to remove a particular party to the deed, by omitting them from the list of parties the property is being granted to, as in from W, X, Y and Z to W, X and Z.

There are two kinds of transfer deeds most people will see: A Grant Deed conveys any interest in the property, including interests that may accrue due to operation of law at a later time. A Quitclaim Deed conveys only what interests you many currently have. An actual purchase should use a Grant Deed, transfers within a given family most often use Quitclaims. There are others: Warranty Deeds and Special Warranty Deeds, the latter being mostly used in lender owned property. Both are insurable, marketable title, but there are differences and if you need to know, consult a licensed attorney. Sometimes people acquire title through court judgment, and the title being granted is as strong as anything else, if subject to appeal.

The holder or holders can be lots of different things. It can be a corporation, husband and wife, a single individual, a trust, an estate, a partnership, etcetera, or even a combination.

It also includes how the grantees are going to hold title: joint tenants, tenants in common, common property, etcetera. Each of these has legal implications, and those implications change from state to state. Consult a lawyer in your state for more. Joint tenants, also known as joint tenants with rights of survivorship (i.e. survivor gets the entire share of title), is the most common way for married couples to hold property, but there are many others. There can be layers of this - say a husband and wife hold their share of title as joint tenants, but they are only part owners in a tenancy in common. Any time there are two or more owners, the title deed has to say how they are going to hold title between them. Each of the possibilities has legal meanings and consequences. Single property owners can be and usually are described as "a single man/woman", "an unmarried man/woman" (not the same thing as single!), "a married man/woman as his/her sole and separate property" and many other things, but the word "tenant" does not appear in any of the possibilities I am aware of. Each of these implies things about the state of title as they hold it, but a full description is beyond the scope of this article and changes from state to state. Consult your attorney for details.

The interest being granted can be one of several things or a combination of interests. A "fee" is a piece of actual land. An "easement" is the right to use a particular piece of land in a particular way, but without the rights of ownership. The most common easement is access. The owner of parcel A gives the owner of parcel B the right to travel over a specified part of parcel A in order to get to their own parcel, or for other purposes. Utility easements are part and parcel of this, and the parcel owner granting an easement is giving up rights to do things with their property that conflict with that easement - for instance, building a garage or granny flat over the gas line. If conflict happens, the property owner is required to do what is necessary to give the easement owner their rights. Quite often, easements run with the ownership of a given property, in which case the title being granted is a fee and one or more easements. A leasehold is a time interest - for a specified period of time. Think of it as a rental interest to get the idea. Finally, there is a condominium interest, in which someone holds title to a share of an underlying property, which interest cannot be partitioned off, and usually comes with some rights of exclusive use to a portion of that property. In plain English, you own a defined share of the entire thing, and exclusive rights to your condominium unit, your assigned parking space, and anything else that may have gone with a particular unit under the Condominium Plan, but you have no rights to split yourself off from the common ownership interest. Just because you live in detached housing does not mean you don't live in property that is legally a Condominium. It irritates me no end to read "title being conveyed" in MLS being "fee simple" and then below read that are homeowners association dues on the property. These two things never go together. If there are association dues on the property, it isn't a fee simple.

Whether the person signing a title transfer deed had a right to grant the ownership interest conveyed (or all of the ownership interest conveyed) is a different story. I can grant my interest in a property on the moon to anyone else, but if I don't have any interest in the property granted it is meaningless - a wasted piece of paper. This is the strongest of many reasons for title insurance. People granting interests that they may not own or control happens all the time. Usually, it is to clear up a cloud on title, but fraud is a real and significant factor, and sometimes people legitimately may believe that they are (or were) the owner, but it turns out they weren't due to some unforeseeable or unknown factor. If someone sells you a property they don't own, and you don't have title insurance, you are out the money, still owe the money on any mortgage you may have taken out, and you don't own the property. Here is a not too untypical example: Owner A dies, and sibling apparently inherits. Sibling sells property to someone, who eventually sells it to you. But Owner A had a long forgotten marriage that was never dissolved, and that spouse had a child. Child discovers undissolved marriage, checks to see what property may have been left by Owner A, finds your property. Child sues for title and wins, as they've got the law on their side. It can happen to you, no matter your current situation. Back in the late nineties, an heir of Alonzo Horton (who laid out what is now downtown San Diego well over a century ago) got several million dollars out of an interest in land it turned out he had inherited but lots of people had been using the entire intervening time.

Words in title grants can be important. Unless I was buying a leasehold, I probably wouldn't accept a title deed granted to a "tenant" (unless it was "joint tenants" or "tenants in common" with any co-purchasers in the property), and I'd decline to pay the money until the seller furnished a correct deed. Why should I, when they haven't lived up to their end of the bargain? Why allow them to create a potential can of worms when you don't have to? Lenders, for their part, have also wisely instituted requirements to make the title deeds they are lending money upon conform to certain requirements before they will consummate the loan. They are in the business of making loans that are going to be repaid, not of repossessing property where the owners didn't, but they're not going to tolerate needless clouds on their title if they do need to take over the property. Bottom line: Be careful about wording on the title deed. Word order and even the presence or absence of commas can be important. If at all in doubt, consult your own lawyer.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

The most common mistake in real estate (and every other aspect of financial planning, for that matter) is to assume the situation now is going to continue indefinitely. In the stock market, people chase last year's returns. They "wait for the market to bottom out". When things are going well, they assume that real estate is going to continue to gain twenty percent per year every year.

This is pernicious. Otherwise rational people just assume that whatever is going on right now is going to continue, and it can be extremely difficult to talk them out of it, as I can tell you from personal experience, having lost an awful lot of income trying unsuccessfully to persuade people to limit themselves to what they could actually afford, and missed out on just as much by trying to move people off the sidelines once things are primed for a recovery. But "Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results" is not just a legal disclaimer. It amounts to natural law, just as strong as gravity or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

People get caught up in mass psychology, doing things because everybody else is doing them. Mass psychology can move the market. In fact, the history of real estate is mass psychology moving the market. Masses of people believing that a property is worth $600,000, and therefore it is. They believe it's worth $600,000 today in part because they think it's going to be worth $650,000 tomorrow. Or $700,000, $800,000 do I hear $1,000,000? You get the idea.

This works even more strongly on the downslide. People are afraid that if they invest $400,000 in the property today, it'll only be worth $350,000 tomorrow. They don't want to lose money, even if it's only a temporary theoretical loss on paper. They want to wait until the market "bottoms out". Newsflash: Real Estate isn't liquid like stocks and bonds, and should not be purchased (or sold) as if it were, with all of the false conclusions that one assumption leads you to.

I'm now going to invoke one of the great and dirty non-secrets of investing: There is no predicting the top or the bottom. Why? Because it turns so strongly on mass psychology. Nobody can tell when mass psychology is going to change. Nobody can tell what it's going to grab onto, or completely ignore. Not Hollywood, not Madison Avenue, and certainly not your friendly neighborhood agent or loan officer. Mass psychology is the "noise" that disguises the true economic signal.

There is a real economic signal. Most things really do have some kind of intrinsic value to them. This value is determined by function, by supply and demand, and by ability to pay, as well as lesser factors. Real estate is no different than most other stuff in this regard. Shares of corporations have a value strictly determined by the value of future earnings per share. $1 per year of future earnings may be more valuable in a low inflation environment than it is in a high inflation environment. Longer potential earnings streams are more valuable than short term ones - $1 per year per share from a well-run insurance company is more valuable than the same earnings from a company with one technological trick that currently leads the market.

The noise often obscures the signal. A little history that leads to some useful concepts: Back in the first half of the second millennium, the assumption was that Earth was the center of the universe, and that planets (and the sun) traveled in circular orbits about Earth. This didn't fit the observed data (planets sometimes moved backwards against the celestial background), so astronomers postulated that planets moved in "epicycles", smaller circles about what was presumed to be the center path of their orbits, called the deferent. Before Copernicus and Keplerfinally brought the whole house of cards down, astronomers were postulating epicycles within epicycles within epicycles in an attempt to fit the observed data.

Unlike planets, economic variables are moved by more than just one force. The fact that planets and artificial satellites are moved by precisely one known force is why we can plot their orbits so precisely. But economics is a lot more complicated, and so the astronomical concepts of epicycles and deferents have some value in understanding them. Let's even use those terms. It's far more complicated than this, but if you think of mass psychology as the epicycle moving about the deferent of the underlying real value, you may begin to get a useful picture of what's going on. The epicycles can be very large and last for years, but markets always move about the deferent in the end. That's where the restorative economic forces trend - and the further away from the deferent things get carried by epicycles, the stronger those restorative economic forces are. Right near the deferent they're not very strong, but the further from the deferent that mass psychology and other epicycle creators move perception of value, the stronger the restorative forces get. Think of a large massive ball the size of the US economy rolling down a broad shallow valley where the sides get progressively steeper. Things can happen to the ball to move it out of the exact bottom of the valley quite easily, but at the moment it moves off the deferent, forces start acting upon it to move it back to the deferent. Small, almost unnoticed forces that build up, and build up more the further you get from the deferent.

Now what does all of this have to do with the price of tea in China, or more precisely, the price of real estate in your area? Everything. For over a decade, we had been pushing that ball up one side of the curve, as I detailed in Fear and Greed, or How Did The Housing Bubble Get So Big? (first published February 2006). We had mass psychology and political direction and the lenders competing for market share and profit with ever more aggressive loan products, and they all pushed the ball about as far off the deferent as it was possible to go. We had hundreds of millions of people pushing that ball just a little more uphill, assisted and wedged and leveraged and braced by all the machinery we could bring to bring to bear. We had it firmly in our minds that this was the "good" side of the valley, where we wanted the ball to be, and we wanted it as far up the "good" side of the valley as possible. We even started thinking of this so-called "good" side of the valley as the deferent, but the deferent pays no attention to what we think.

Now let me ask you: When that 17 trillion dollars per year ball finally breaks loose and starts rolling down the hillside, building up momentum all the while as the restorative forces add more and more to that momentum all the way down, and keep adding more and more momentum (although the amounts being added get smaller) all the way to the center, do you think it's going to suddenly and magically stop right on the deferent?

Not in this world or any other. It's got all the momentum that a 17 trillion dollar ball powered by 320 million people can build up, and guess what? It crosses right over that deferent like it wasn't even there and keeps on going. By this time it's got mass psychology behind it just as much as it ever did on the way up, pushing it ever harder as well. In an economic analog to the gravity assist (aka slingshot effect), it is very easy to push it much further to the "bad" side of the deferent than ever we had it to the "good" side, particularly as the government meddling intending to slow the ball's rolling is in fact making it worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, because the government is not paying attention to the Law of Unintended Consequences. However, none of this changes the fact that the restorative forces pushing the market back towards equilibrium are always in effect, and never quit.

What's the practical upshot? Well, other than the fact that any disturbance from the deferent distorts the markets and makes for future oscillations, and that anything we can do to the market generates just as many losers as winners, what is the practical upshot for individuals? Nobody can directly control the market actions of others, so how can we as individuals best deal with all of this?

The way we deal with all of this is quite simple. First we have to get as true a picture of where the deferent really is as we possibly can, or at least where we are in relation to the deferent. What is the supply of housing like in your market, and how easy is it to add more? What is the demand for housing like in your market? Do people want to live there? Are we talking San Diego and Honolulu, or are we talking Detroit and Cleveland? Next, we have to ask "what is the ability to pay?" How much do people make relative to the basic necessities of living? How strong and how varied is the area economy? Is it a hub for multiple industries like San Diego and Boston, where if one industry tanks the market is likely to be supported by others, or is it a one industry (like Silicon Valley was twenty years ago) or one company town (like Seattle used to be)?

At any one point in time, the value of a particular property is a function of the value of comparable properties around it. If model matches in the neighborhood are selling for $300,000 right now, the property is likely to be worth about $300,000 right now. The only way to tell for sure, of course, is to put it on the market and see if anyone buys it for that. The trend is a function of supply and demand - how many properties are for sale right now and how many people want to buy them - as well as mass psychology. Finding the deferent precisely is incredibly tough, but finding which side of it we're on is usually much easier, if you will ignore mass psychology and what is happening right now and look at the underlying economic factors of a particular housing market.

I performed such a study a while ago; a study I stand by the results of (if anything, more strongly today than then). The study assumed an underlying interest rate of six and a half percent as that was what was available for about one point then; rates are much lower than that today. Mass psychology - a temporary phenomenon of millions of Chicken Littles screaming that the sky is falling - obscured the underlying basics just as much on the way down as it ever did on the way up. Add in that the party in power in the government is doing its dead level best to kill the loan market and the economy, and things get depressing. But governments change and mass psychology does too.

Obviously, the way to profit is different now than it was back when the market was going full gangbusters the other direction. Then, you could buy any damned property you like, pretend to fix it up a bit, and the rising tidal bore of the market and mass psychology would ensure you could make a profit. But the economics of relying upon flipping a property for quick profit are chancy; market sentiment can turn any time.

Longer term investing gives less spectacular results but more certain ones. The deferent for real estate values does rise over time, with population and economic prosperity and the fact that the amount of land available in an area is fixed, and the trend seems to be tying up more and more of that land in reserves of one sort or another: Open space, limited development zones, historical landmarks, etcetera, not to mention legal terrorism relating to property that may not be within a given reserve but that someone wants to prevent the development of. All of this makes property more valuable as time goes by, population rises, and that same population becomes more affluent. If there are 100,000 properties in your area and 150,000 families, the price will be whatever the top 100,000 bidders are willing and able to pay. If the 100,000th buyer is willing and able to pay $200,000 for a property, that becomes the price. Now suppose there are suddenly twice as many prospective buyers. Does the price go up or down? For the mentally challenged, the answer is "up". It's still the top 100,000 bidders who get the properties - but there are now 300,000 competitors. Bidders are going to have to do more in order to be successful buyers - and the ones who aren't willing or able to do more will go without, just like any other good. But housing isn't like concierge service or spa visits - The alternative is not to do without, but rather to do with a lesser substitute for what we really want. Even if it's underneath a bridge or in their car, people have got to have a place to live. This tends to make for more inelasticity rather than less in the demand curve, or to put it in everyday English, if the price of housing goes up, people tend more strongly to do without other things instead of cutting back on housing. Most people don't have a need for a six bedroom 3000 square foot home no matter how badly they want it - but most people would agree that the minimum acceptable substitute for a family is somewhere between a 2 bedroom rented apartment and a three bedroom1200 square foot PUD, rather than the inside of a drainage culvert. The strongly supported conclusion of all of this is that there is a level that housing values will trend back towards, and that deferent (at least in San Diego) is well above current values.

(Note to renters: The demand for rentals is increasing even more because of all the people who lost property and can't get a loan right now. The vacancy factor in San Diego is already a microscopic 2%. Nor can landlords skate on make-believe loans like so many of them were doing, planning to make money off a rising market. What do you think this is going to do to the rental price, particularly of non-apartment units? If you haven't shopped for a new rental lately, be prepared for a some sticker shock when you or your landlord terminate your current tenancy, and in the meantime be prepared for significantly increased rents as landlords discover they can get more)

So how to you make a profit in this sort of situation? First, put any thought of a quick flip out of your mind. The odds against it are so long as to equate to "Not gonna happen", at least not profitably. This is an investor's market. You buy with the idea that you're going to hold the property a minimum number of years. I would advise three at a minimum, and plan for at least five. Make sure you've got a loan that you're going to be happy with that entire time. It's a lot more expensive to refinance investment property than it is your primary residence, and the constraints on doing so are far more telling. If you're putting enough down, a commercial loan becomes a real possibility, simply because the qualifications are easier right now and the rates are competitive. You need a positive cash flow out of the property - which means most likely you're looking a larger down payment rather than a smaller.

Planning to rent the property out is always a winner. If you can get a positive cash flow out of renting it, the only viable economic model of ownership does not depend upon the location of your job in relation to the property. If you need to move hundreds of miles away and renting it out is not an option, you are at the mercy of the current market and whatever phase the mass psychology epicycle may be in. This is one thing that bit an awful lot of people in the last couple years. Just because renting it out is economically viable doesn't mean you can't choose to live in it yourself, but life throws curves. Having the ability to make your property into a viable rental is a pretty effective trump card for most risks of housing. Even if you can't live there because your new job is on the other side of the continent, someone will want to. Especially in San Diego.

Make it habitable, bring the maintenance up to date and keep it that way, but with that said, I would hesitate about upgrading a rental before the actual time comes to sell it. Renters can't ruin your new remodel if you haven't done it yet. Granite countertops, maple cabinets and travertine floors still need to be taken care of. Furthermore, they do got old and less attractive looking. When you go to sell, you want them to be brand spanking new to sucker in buyers without a good agent, one of those bits of detail that sells a property that has already appreciated for a noteworthy premium. Upgrading isn't what makes the property more valuable; the market has already done that. Just like most long term investors, you really made your money when you bought - you're just waiting for the market to formalize what you know is going to happen. You've already made a profit by buying when prices were cheap - you're just not sure when the check for the profit is going to get here. Warren Buffett (among many others) has made most of his billions of dollars the same way.

There are precisely two times in the history of holding a property when the price counts: When you buy it and when you sell it. In between, the market value can be thirty-nine cents for all you care. If you don't sell it then, it's not important. If you know that market is going to revert to something higher in a few years, you know you've already made a profit, you're just waiting for the check to roll in. In the meantime, you're living in it (gaining the valuable benefit of shelter) or making a little money every month from the rental.

People think they're going to outsmart all of this by waiting for the market to "bottom out" or turn around, just like they think buying property when the market is rising is a "can't miss" proposition, and for precisely the same same fallacious reason. First, nobody can predict exactly when the market will turn. Second, when it does turn, it takes a while for it sink in to the public consciousness. Mass psychology, remember - it takes a lot for things to penetrate. Third, when it does manage to get people's attention, it's because you've already missed the best window. The way you figure out that the market is going up is by missing the first ten or twenty or fifty percent of increase, if not more. Fourth, mass psychology is fickle. It's difficult turn the market back around short of what I've been calling the deferent point, but it can happen, has happened, and will happen again. Fifth, as I have said previously, what I've been calling the deferent can be very hard to discern exactly. Suppose the market is already past that by the time you wake up and smell the coffee? That's how bubbles happen, and how people get caught up in them and metaphorically lose their shirts. How many bubbles of one sort or another have we had in the last ten years? Betting on making money because of another bubble like the one we had anytime soon strikes me as a bad bet such that everybody that makes it is likely to lose. So don't make it. But the psychology of "waiting for the bottom" encourages precisely this kind of thinking.

You can always find a good investment if you've got the patience. But right now, properties that are going to make someone an awful lot of money when the market normalizes are so thick on the ground that you can't hardly avoid tripping on them. Furthermore, mortgage rates are near all time lows. The interest cost if you need a loan, or want one so that you can put leverage on your side, is even lower than the base cost in dollars. The time to make a bet that you're likely to win is when the odds are on your side - while the market is below long term trends. You know it's going to come back eventually, and as long as you can afford the property, you're just waiting for the check to arrive.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here