Haas Alumni Meeting - Real Estate Update from Nancy Wallace

At last night's Haas Alumni SF Chapter meeting, speaker Nancy Wallace, Co-Chair, Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley (is that a mouthful?!), provided the 150+ audience an update on the myriad issues affecting the real estate sector and the overall economy. According to Wallace, the mortgage-backed securities derivatives (for a quick overview of derivatives go to: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/d/derivatives/index.html) that Warren Buffett famously called financial Weapons of Mass Destruction, are here to stay, because they provide the massive international trade/financial fluidity that the world economy has come to depend on in the past two decades. She sees more government oversight of these instruments and the firms that trade them. Coincidentally, as I was driving home after the talk, I heard that Tim Geithner had announced new regulations that day giving the Commodities Futures Trading Commission a new (and leading) role in oversight of the derivatives market.
She said that Fannie and Freddie need billions more in bailout assistance (no surprise there).
One interesting issue she talked about was the lack of a national database of housing values. She said that the government does not have a good handle on the distinctions among geographic markets further broken down by loan type. She pointed out that California is being hurt more by the lack of liquidity in the jumbo market than by the collapse of the sub-prime market and until jumbo market lending recovers, neither will California's real estate market.
I talked with a couple of brokers and real estate attorneys last night and they both talked about being contacted by property owners facing foreclosure on multiple properties but having other assets the banks can go after. I encouraged them to call me when they encounter these cases because we have a number of agents in our office specializing in working with property owners in these situations, and having the resources/contacts/expertise to provide them their options and assist them in making the best decisions for that individual case.
Last, this was the first Haas alumni function I have attended and it was terrific and I'll be attending more!