Quite Possibly Worse Than 2008

 

I blame the "Yellowstone Effect" - every hayseed and bumpkin with a few acres surrounding their home now thinks of it as "a ranch".

Yesterday, I had a "conversation" via text with a friend who lives in Waller County, Texas.  It is a far flung suburb of Houston with small acreage homes and some tract suburban homes with "better than Houston school districts" (like that is saying much - sort of like an average, normal kid getting into the special Olympics and beating the hell out of all of the retarded children or a biological man getting into the boxing ring and beating the shit out of a bunch of biological women).

My Waller County friend is convinced that her very modest home (manufactured double wide that is in need of either serious repair or replacement...like 10 years ago) which sits upon 20 acres of open cow pasture is somehow worth roughly 16 million dollars.  Her rationale is that at some point, someone paid $40,000 per acre for Waller County dirt and her cow pasture is worth millions.

I am new to Texas so, what do I know???  Maybe it's different here?  Maybe it's different this time?  Maybe it's different here this time?

I have a phrase for this - Texas booms big and it also busts big.  Everything is big in Texas, right?

Just for grins and giggles, I "mosey'd" on over to Zillow to check out the number of listings in Waller County, Texas and OMG do they have an absolute cow shit load of listings.  There is a whole haystack of homes with asking prices well over $400,000 that have been on Zillow for well over three months.  There are quite a few with "new price" or "price reduced" in their descriptions as well.

I don't think this ends well for the debtors or the debt holders who are signatories on all of that mortgage paper.