Freak out, shake it off, cowboy up
Comments 
1
By Richard Mize
Published: October 11, 2008
Do not move along. There is something to see here. If you haven’t yet, go ahead and freak out — and get it out of your system.
OK, now get your breath, calm your nerves and look around. If you have a job, and a car, and a house, you just did what a lot of folks think the stock market did this week: You flushed your fear.Advertisement
Credit ‘black hole’
Look around again. And, as the Realtors have been saying, repeat as needed: "Good Thing You’re in Oklahoma.”
True, because of the housing slowdown, a couple of Oklahoma City’s prominent home-building companies are in dire straits and flirting with bankruptcy.
They’ve been working like the devil to find investors willing to step in and pay subcontractors and suppliers.
One of them, probably both, has numerous mechanic’s liens for tens of thousands of dollars attached to houses it has built and can’t sell. Sales staff have been let go, meetings with creditors have been held — and fingers have been crossed across the metro area because nobody in Oklahoma City’s tight-knit home-building industry wants to see anyone fail.
Realtors are scrambling for scraps. Two Realtors I know have their own homes on the market, partly because they need to downsize their houses to match their downsized income — that’s just from the housing slowdown.
Now, because of the craziness on Wall Street, home sales have stopped dead, another Realtor told me.
Because of the housing slowdown and the credit crunch, some residential developers have gone quiet.
One told me his banker told him no lender was willing to touch any project with a "de” in it.
The credit crunch — OK, "black hole” is more analogous — killed a big deal for the land under Penn Square Mall, for sale by Simon Property Group, which has it under a 99-year ground lease expiring in 2060. The black hole has swallowed other deals and who knows how many contracts were never drawn up?
But ... Dr. Bob Blackburn, who leads the Oklahoma Historical Society, told me Oklahoma thrived, for the most part, during its first boom, from 1898 to 1929, shaking off the Panic of 1907 and another scare in 1911.
State will survive
Blackburn said he thinks we’ll take some more major hits but that the present boom will keep on booming.
We did, after all, sidestep the dot-com crash by sidestepping the dot-com boom, and we have (keep your fingers crossed) missed the housing value crash because we skipped the housing bubble.
So, freak out. Get over it. Then cowboy up.
Toolbar sponsored by: David Stanley Ford
Related Topics:
Business, Economic Indicators, Real Estate, Real Estate Sales, Consumer Credit and Debt, Housing Starts
Thank you for joining our conversations on NewsOK.com. We encourage your discussions but ask that you stay within the bounds of our terms and conditions. Please help us by reporting comments that violate these guidelines. To review our rules of engagement, go to Commenting and posting policy.
Leave a comment. Log in below or sign up (it's free).Editor's note: It is not our intent to offer comments on crime or fatality stories.