Vulture Investors Swarm To Houston As Flooded Homes Sell For 40 Cents On The Dollar

      "The time to buy is when after there"s blood water in the streets."

As 1,000"s of families along the Texas shoreline continue to struggle with putting their lives back together following the apocalyptic landfall of Hurricane Harvey roughly 6 weeks ago, vulture investors are increasingly swooping in to exploit their misery with offers to buy flooded homes for cents on the dollar.  As Bloomberg points out this morning, one such investor is Bryan Schild who has sourced capital from local "hard-money lenders" to scoop up 30 flooded homes for as little as 40 cents on the dollar.

Bryan Schild drives through the byways of Houston looking for what could be the investment opportunity of a lifetime: homes selling for as little as 40¢ on the dollar. “We Pay Cash For Flooded Homes $$$$$$$$ Don’t fix it, sell it. Quick close,” read the signs piled in the back seat of his Ford pickup.

Schild stops by a ranch-style house where 74-year-old Paul Matlock lives with his wife, disabled from multiple sclerosis. Matlock is desperate to leave and is considering Schild’s offer of $120,000—half the home’s value three weeks earlier. A half-dozen other investors have made offers, one as low as $55,000. “The whole thing makes me feel like there’s a bunch of vultures sitting on my back fence,” Matlock says. “They’re waiting for the dead body to fall over.”

It’s axiomatic on Wall Street that the time to buy is when fear overtakes greed—when blood (or, in this case, water) is in the streets. Now some are eyeing the billions of dollars in hurricane-ravaged property in Texas and Florida and deciding it may be the time to take out their checkbooks. Investors such as Schild figure they can buy low, either fix up and flip the houses or rent them out for several years, and unload them later, doubling their money or more.

And if exploiting the elderly isn"t enough to make you a little queasy, how about taking advantage of a disabled Army vet who has been forced to live out of a hotel room and eat two meals a day just to save a little cash after he lost his home to Hurricane Harvey...

One of Schild’s prospects is Joseph Hernandez, a disabled U.S. Army veteran married to a housekeeper. The couple are living in a hotel and saving money by eating only two meals a day. Schild has made them a painful offer. If they walk away from their two-bedroom house, worth $127,000 before Hurricane Harvey, Schild will pick up the mortgage payments, paying nothing else. Although he says he sympathizes with the Hernandezes’ plight, he thinks the offer is fair because he figures the home is now worth less than its $65,000 mortgage.

Hernandez is in a bind. He didn’t buy flood insurance because his house wasn’t in a high-risk area. He can’t afford to rebuild, and he’s been told he’s eligible for only $23,000 in federal assistance. If he turns over the deed, he’s looking at losing the entire $60,000 in equity he had before the flood. “It’s blurry, what’s coming,” he says. “We’ll probably have to sell to an investor, and that’s not good. We were forced out.”

Hernandez isn’t ready to take Schild’s deal. But Matlock, who rescued his disabled wife from chest-high water, is tempted by the investor’s $120,000 offer. Their home, now stripped to the beams, has flooded twice in two years. Schild says Matlock should be able to recover much of his loss on the house’s value through federal flood insurance. (In past storms, homeowners have complained the program lowballed them.) Before he leaves, he asks Matlock to spread the word. “Anybody looking to sell, tell them to call me,” he says. “I’ll give them a bid.”

But, it"s not just small-time, local investors looking to earn big profits from the misery of displaced Texans.  Nope, wall street investors, led by Bain Capital, are also getting involved.

The cycle begins with small-time investors such as Schild, who’s bought more than 30 waterlogged houses for an average $175,000 apiece. Then Wall Street swoops in. Gary Beasley, former chief executive officer of Waypoint Homes, also sees an opportunity. He’s pitching private equity firms and pension funds on the potential profit in buying flooded homes, repairing them, and renting them back to homeowners.

Bain Capital LP and billionaire Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com Inc., are backing Beasley’s two-year-old company, Roofstock Inc. It runs a website where investors can buy and sell single-family rental properties. Beasley thinks owner-occupants may be interested in selling there, too, and that flooded neighborhoods are the Next Big Thing. “It’s much like the housing crisis, when the institutional guys came in to buy homes nobody wanted,” he says. Like other investors, Beasley and Schild view themselves as helping homeowners to move on and Houston to rebuild.

Of course, as Andrea Heuson, a finance professor at the University of Miami, points out, most of the people selling aren"t doing so because of a lack of financial sophistication that impairs their ability to comprehend the fact that they"re getting shafted but rather just a complete lack of alternatives.

Others take a less rosy view. “What worries me is people making pretty dramatic decisions without the education to figure out what the alternatives are and without looking at the situation rationally,” says Andrea Heuson, a finance professor at the University of Miami who specializes in mortgages. Some of those considering Beasley’s strategy don’t want to be named for fear of looking like catastrophe profiteers, Beasley says.

Many homeowners would be forgiven for panicking. During hurricanes Harvey and Irma, wind and water damaged almost 1.8 million homes, causing uninsured flood losses of as much as $57 billion, according to CoreLogic Inc., a real estate data firm. Homeowners without federal flood insurance are most likely to be desperate. Those with policies don’t yet know how much they’ll get for their losses, which is key to deciding whether it makes sense to sell.

On the upside, these displaced families will be able to buy their homes back from Bain at double in the price in 5 years or so...

$700 Billion Unpaid Mortgage Balances In Hurricane Harvey And Irma Disaster Areas

Even as the damage from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma is still being tallied, a preliminary assessment released last week by Black Knight Financial Services estimated that as many as 300,000 borrowers in the vicinity of Houston could become delinquent on their loans and 160,000 could become seriously delinquent, or more than 90 days past due. 

That number is roughly four times the original prediction because new disaster zones were designated and more homes flooded when officials released water from reservoirs to protect dams, according to CNBC"s Diana Olick. In total, the number of mortgaged properties in Texas disaster zones is 1.18 million, with Black Knight adding that Houston disaster zones contain twice as many mortgaged properties than Katrina zones, with four times the unpaid principal balance.

Putting the Harvey damange in context, after Hurricane Katrina mortgage delinquencies in Louisiana and Mississippi disaster areas spiked by 25%. The same could happen in Houston, as borrowers without flood insurance weigh their options and decide to walk away from the property. While they will get some federal relief, if rebuilding would cost more than the principal in their homes, they could decide to walk away according to Olick.

What about Irma?

According to a preliminary analysis by Black Knight released today, Florida FEMA-designated disaster areas related to Hurricane Irma include a whopping 3.1 million mortgaged properties.  As Black Knight"s EVP Ben Graboske explained, both the number of mortgages and the unpaid principal balances of those mortgages in FEMA-designated Irma disaster areas are significantly larger than in the areas impacted recently by Hurricane Harvey.

Quantifying the damage, Black Knight calculates that Irma-related disaster areas contain nearly three times as many mortgaged properties as those connected to Hurricane Harvey, and nearly seven times as many as those connected to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In dollar terms, this means that there is some $517 billion in unpaid principal balances in Irma-related disaster areas, nearly three times the amount as in those related to Harvey and more than 11 times of those connected to Katrina.

“While the total extent of the damage from Hurricane Irma is still being determined, it is clear that the size and scope of the disaster is immense,” said Graboske.

“Indeed, in terms of the number of mortgaged properties and their associated unpaid principal balances, Irma significantly outpaces even the number of borrowers impacted by Hurricane Harvey. With FEMA expanding the number of Irma-related designated disaster areas late Wednesday, Sept. 13, to a total of 37 Florida counties, more than 90 percent of all mortgaged properties in the state now fall into such areas. More than 3.1 million properties are now included in FEMA-designated Irma disaster areas, representing approximately $517 billion in unpaid principal balances. In comparison, Harvey-related disaster areas held 1.18 million properties – more than twice as many as with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – with a combined unpaid principal balance of $179 billion. Irma-related disaster areas now contain nearly seven times as many mortgaged properties as those connected to Katrina, with more than 11 times the principal balances.

Combining the preliminary estimates for both Harvey and Irma suggests that over 3.3 million total mortgaged properties are located in Irma and Harvey-related FEMA Disaster zones, while the dollar amount of total unpaid mortgage balances in these two zones is massive: between Irma"s $517 billion and Harvey"s $179 billion, the total potential damage could impact as much as a $696 billion in notional mortgage values, which banks could be on the hook for if current occupiers decide to simply walk away.

Based on back of the envelope analyses by Black Knight, an extrapolation of the Katrina damage would suggest that Florida could suffer as much as 750,000 mortgage delinquencies as a result of Hurricane Irma.

To be sure, there are mitigating circumstances: Florida borrowers likely have more insurance and less exposure to loss, but for those homes with the most damage, homeowners will be making the same calculation as those that suffered devastating flooding after Harvey. Another issue in Florida according to Olick is that even a decade later, the housing market is still recovering from the foreclosure crisis. Five percent of Florida borrowers still owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, and an additional 5 percent have very little equity in their homes. Home prices in Fort Myers, which saw considerable flooding from Irma, are still 29 percent below what they were during the housing boom.

Still, in order to avoid a surge in foreclosures, lenders are more likely to offer borrowers, even seriously delinquent borrowers, options to catch up, although the biggest risk to lenders will be in Houston, where some homeowners may see no good reason to stay.

There was some silver lining: “As Irma forged its path of destruction through the Caribbean, one relatively positive development was that Puerto Rico escaped the direct hit many had predicted. From a mortgage performance perspective, this was particularly good news, as delinquencies there were already quite high leading up to the storm. At more than 10 percent, Puerto Rico’s delinquency rate is nearly three times that of the U.S. average, as is its 5.8 percent serious delinquency rate. In contrast, the disaster areas declared in Florida have starting delinquency rates below the national average, providing more than a glimmer of optimism as we move forward.”

Unfortunately, Hurricane Maria, now a Category 3, is expected to hit Puerto Rico some time on Wednesday, adding to the damage already suffered from Irma, and potentially sending the already bankrupt territory reeling even deeper into the financial hole.

How The Feds Blocked Effective Flood Insurance

As the floodwaters brought by Hurricane Harvey last week recede and new hurricane Irma moves slowly toward the Eastern U.S., it might be edifying to review how millions of Americans, despite federal anti-flood efforts, came to live and work in hazardous to dangerous flood-prone areas.

The foundation of the current disaster traces back at least to the late 1920s under Republican interventionist Herbert Hoover. In 1927, a very destructive flood occurred along the Mississippi River. Secretary of Commerce Hoover’s relief campaign greatly increased the power of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to implement supposed flood protection. 

No doubt, the Flood Control Act of 1928 helped construct what was considered one of the most impressive systems of levees in the world along the Mississippi River. However, the one thing it did not do was control flooding. While the new levee system prevented flooding in some areas, it quickened the natural current of the river which helped produce flooding in other areas. Other unforeseen consequences were the reductions in natural soil deposits and natural flow of water into the river"s flood plains.

Less than a decade later, another damaging flood in New England helped drive the passage of the National Flood Control Act of 1936. This Act was a real turning point in terms of centralization. Besides doubling the size of the federal flood-control program, it signaled that Congress would no longer merely provide occasional flood relief and regard floods as principally a local matter. It effectively enlisted the federal government and Army Corps of Engineers in the battle against floods.

For the rest of the 1930s and 1940s, private insurance markets were undermined because the Army Corps of Engineers built hundred-year flood walls which reduced risk just enough for homeowners to make private flood insurance too costly. On the other hand, private insurers saw these walls as insufficient protection which did not reduce risk enough. Regardless, an impasse was created for private markets that was both figuratively and literally cemented in place by the Army Corps.

Enter the New Deal central planners of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1953. TVA began monitoring flood-prone areas in and around one hundred and fifty towns and cities in its jurisdiction. At first, TVA used a worst-case standard from the Army Corps, regardless of whether such a flood had ever actually occurred.

This stringent standard was quickly abandoned when it was realized that it would eliminate huge areas of potential development that not only local private and public planners wanted, but TVA as well since part of its conflicted mission was spurring development. Thus TVA adopted a new standard skewed in favor of development that was based on past floods that occurred inside a 60- or 100-mile zone from proposed development.

Outside TVA’s jurisdiction, the U.S. Geological Survey and Army Corps of Engineers mapped flood plains with roughly the same backward-looking standard. By the end of the 1960s, all three agencies had laid the groundwork for a national map of floodplains. A very bad standard had been created.

Of course no tapestry of disastrous policies would be complete without a contribution by Lyndon Baines Johnson, thus the Southeast Hurricane Disaster Relief Act of 1965. This Act authorized $500 million in spending to assist in repairing damage created by Hurricane Betsy.

Next came the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, which created the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which covered up to $250,000 in damage to single-family houses and buildings in cities and towns meeting the flawed federal flood-plain criteria.

The absolute death knell for any semblance of economic and actuarial soundness in the NFIP came in 1973, when Congress allowed coverage to be extended to property owners who should have enrolled in the program and paid for insurance but did not.

While none of this is to say that had more rigorous private standards prevailed and the Army Corps and TVA never been created, that no one"s residence or workplace would ever have flooded.

However, there"s no doubt that the federal government"s perverse subsidization of residential and commercial development in flood-prone areas as well as artificially cheap flood insurance completely detached from risk assessment have contributed to not only the untold loss of billions of dollars of property, but lives as well.

Ron Paul Explains Why "Government 'Aid' Only Makes Disasters Worse"

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Texans affected by Hurricane Harvey, including my family and me, appreciate the outpouring of support from across the country. President Donald Trump has even pledged to donate one million dollars to relief efforts. These private donations will be much more valuable than the as much as 100 billion dollars the federal government is expected to spend on relief and recovery.

Federal disaster assistance hinders effective recovery efforts, while federal insurance subsidies increase the damage caused by natural disasters.

Federal disaster aid has existed since the early years of the republic. In fact, it was a payment to disaster victims that inspired Davy Crockett’s “Not Yours to Give” speech. However, the early federal role was largely limited to sending checks. The federal government did not become involved in managing disaster relief and recovery until the 20th century. America did not even have a federal agency dedicated solely to disaster relief until 1979, when President Jimmy Carter created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by executive order. Yet, Americans somehow managed to rebuild after natural disasters before 1979. For example, the people of Galveston, Texas successfully rebuilt the city following a major hurricane that destroyed the city in 1900.

FEMA’s well-documented inefficiencies are the inevitable result of centralizing control over something as complex as disaster recovery in a federal bureaucracy.

When I served in Congress, I regularly voted against federal disaster aid for my district. After the votes, I would hear from angry constituents, many of whom would later tell me that after dealing with FEMA they agreed that Texas would be better off without federal “help.”

Following natural disasters, individuals who attempt to return to their own property - much less try to repair the damage - without government permission can be arrested and thrown in jail.

Federal, state, and local officials often hinder or even stop voluntary rescue and relief efforts.

FEMA is not the only counterproductive disaster assistance program.

The National Flood Insurance Program was created to provide government-backed insurance for properties that could not obtain private insurance on their own. By overruling the market’s verdict that these properties should not be insured, federal flood insurance encourages construction in flood-prone areas, thus increasing the damage caused by flooding.

Just as payroll taxes are unable to fully fund Social Security and Medicare, flood insurance premiums are unable to fund the costs of flood insurance. Federal flood insurance was almost $25 billion in the red before Hurricane Harvey. Congress will no doubt appropriate funding to pay all flood insurance claims, thus increasing the national debt. This in turn will cause the Federal Reserve to print more money to monetize that debt, thus hastening the arrival of the fiscal hurricane that will devastate the US economy. Yet, there is little talk of offsetting any of the costs of hurricane relief with spending cuts!

Congress should start phasing out the federal flood insurance program by forbidding the issuance of new flood insurance policies. It should also begin reducing federal spending on disaster assistance. Instead, costs associated with disaster recovery should be made 100-percent tax-deductible. Those who suffered the worst should be completely exempted from all federal tax liability for at least two years. Tax-free savings accounts could also help individuals save money to help them bear the costs of a natural disaster.

The outpouring of private giving and volunteer relief efforts we have witnessed over the past week shows that the American people can effectively respond to natural disasters if the government would get out of their way.

The Next Shock For Texans: Insurance Often Doesn't Cover Floods

A complete assessment of the property damage wrought by Hurricane Harvey will take weeks, if not months, to deliver. But as the first disaster victims return to their homes, some are being forced to confront an unfortunate reality: Gaps in their homeowners’ insurance that will leave them on the hook for thousands of dollars’ worth of damages.

According to analytics firm CoreLogic, hundreds of thousands of affected residents in Texas and Louisiana aren’t insured for flooding damage. The firm estimated that residential flooding has caused $25 billion to $37 billion in damage spread across 70 counties in Texas and Louisiana hit by Harvey. Of that, about 70%—or $18 billion to $27 billion—is uninsured.

Scientists have confirmed that Harvey caused a "1-in-1,000-year flood" and that the total cost of property damage and lost productivity could be as high as $190 billion.

One homeowner who spoke with the Wall Street Journal said the first thing she did when she returned to her home was check the details of her insurance policy.

“Among them is Andrea Womack, a 38-year-old mother of four.

The carpet and some clothing in her one-story house in Houston’s Settegast neighborhood were damaged by water. On Friday morning, Ms. Womack was waiting for an insurance company representative to come by and go through what was covered.

‘I signed up for insurance a while back, but on my papers it says it does not cover flood insurance. So I’m not sure’ what will be covered, she said.”

The Federal government’s flood-insurance program has written 250,000 policies for Houston residents, compared with 1.7 million housing units that may’ve experienced flood damage, according to WSJ.

“Overall, households and businesses in Harris County, which includes Houston, held roughly 249,000 federal flood insurance policies as of June 30, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There are about 1.7 million housing units in the county.”

The reason is simple: Even in flood-prone areas, many homeowners don’t read the fine print of their insurance policies until disaster strikes.

“Many homeowners never examine details of the policies they buy, and it is only after a flood they learn the basics: Standard homeowners’ policies provide payouts for damage from wind, fire, fallen trees and other storm-related events—but not flooding. For that, people generally need to buy separate policies from the U.S. government, through its nearly 50-year-old National Flood Insurance Program.”

In an ironic twist, homeowners with mortgage debt might be better off than their peers who own their homes outright.

“Those homeowners who do have flood insurance are likely those whose mortgage lenders require it, said Etti Baranoff, an associate professor of insurance at Virginia Commonwealth University.

‘The mortgage company checks if your home is in a flood zone or not, and they’ll make you take’ a policy out if so, she said.”

But even those who bought flood insurance from the federal government may not receive enough to cover all their property damage, according to WSJ. These policies pay out a maximum $250,000 for rebuilding and $100,000 for personal possessions.

Some homeowners are putting the cleanup on hold until they’ve spoken to an insurance agent.

“"That’s kind of storm Houstonians judge everything by,’ said Mr. Truss, 36 years old. ‘It did not flood during Allison.’

Even so, the couple’s bank still required them to get a federal flood policy that they bought through their Allstate agent.

‘We’re hearing you have to have [all the damaged items] to get insurance’ claims paid, Mr. Truss said, surveying the piles of clothes, toys and books in his front yard. He said he was initially going to wait until he heard from insurance officials before clearing out the house, but “it would be a disaster if we kept waiting any longer.

He’s trying to photograph every item to show an insurance adjuster eventually.”

The National Flood Insurance Program is already bracing to pay out claims equal, or perhaps larger, than the amount disbursed after Superstorm Sandy.

“Standard homeowners’ policies do pay for some damage from water—such as if it enters the house after the wind rips off the roof or a tree crashes through the attic. But if water overflows a riverbank or gushes down a street to seep into a house, the homeowner can expect a claim to be rejected, according to industry lawyers.

The federal flood insurance program’s payouts for Harvey appear on track to rival those made for superstorm Sandy in 2012, the nation’s third costliest hurricane (behind Katrina in 2005 and Andrew in 1992.) So far, 130,622 Sandy claims have cost the program $8.4 billion, an average of $64,331 apiece, according to the Insurance Information Institute trade group.”

And in what’s likely to be a boon for auto makers, payouts for car-related damages could be “several times larger” than those for homes.

“Insurers’ payouts for cars damaged by Harvey’s flooding could be several times larger than those they make for homes. Investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods puts insured personal and commercial auto costs at roughly $4.7 billion. But not all the estimated 500,000 vehicles flooded by Harvey are covered by insurance.

Overall private-market insurance payouts for Harvey are expected to be dominated by payments to business policyholders and range from $10 billion to $20 billion altogether. At the high end, they would likely top those for Sandy, which cost $19.8 billion in 2016 dollars, according to the Insurance Information Institute.”

However, KBW noted that 13% of Texas motorists don"t own any car insurance whatsoever, according to Insurance Research Council. And of those who do, more than a fifth don"t buy " comprehensive" coverage, which protects against flooding damage. Many vehicle owners go with just the bare-bones liability coverage that is required by law.

In areas where homes were damaged by both flooding and wind, homeowners should expect insurers to try and dispute some of their claims, according to WSJ, local courts should be sympathetic to homeowners.

“If there is a breath of wind and breath of storm surge, that ought to be enough to put in front of the Texas courts and ask for relief for these people,” said David Wood, a policyholder lawyer for corporate clients at Barnes & Thornburg LLP in Los Angeles."

While individual homeowners may end up settling for reimbursements that don’t cover the damage, at least, according to JPM, the economies of the 70 counties affected by the storm may find an “offset” in the construction boom expected to follow the storm. The investment bank says it could provide a slight boost to US GDP estimates in the third and fourth quarter.