There's wisdom in his gloomy predictions

LOWELL - Middlesex North Register of Deeds Richard P. Howe Jr. has run the registry in Lowell during an especially dramatic time in the US housing market.

He was at the Registry of Deeds when housing prices tripled, and he is there now, as overextended homeowners are losing the roofs over their heads.

For the past 13 years, Howe, 48, has had a front-row seat to the ups and downs of the industry as his agency, which records real estate transactions, entered the digital age and put previously difficult-to-access documents on the Internet. And through it all, he has not stopped talking about the real estate market, both on his blog and on various radio shows.

Recently, he was the featured speaker at the Northern Middlesex Council of Government's annual meeting, waxing about his favorite subject with some of the region's most influential people and discussing how technology is transforming the real estate industry.

"He's a credible, likeable guy," Bob Flynn, executive director of the land planning agency, said about the group's decision to have Howe as its speaker last month. "I've got 100 percent confidence in what he has to say."

Many others do, too. Last week, Lowell City Councilor Edward "Bud" Caulfield said Howe is regarded as an independent and honest voice when it comes to local housing matters.

"He's a perfectionist, and a really smart guy, so I absolutely trust what he has to say," Caulfield said.

Even Howe's sometime political foe, Lowell activist Patrick McCarthy, admits he respects the man's work. "We've had our differences politically, but that registry is about 600 times better since he's come along," McCarthy said. "It's amazing what he's done with that place."

A lawyer who hails from a political family (his father, Richard, recently retired after 40 years on the Lowell City Council), Howe joined the registry in January 1995 as the market was emerging from its early-'90s slump. "Home prices were depressed," he recalled during an interview in his office, inside the Middlesex Superior Courthouse in Lowell.

Slowly though, the nation began spending huge amounts of money on technology, to buttress concerns that as 1999 rolled into 2000, computer systems would fail. The much-hyped Y2K disaster did not happen, but the work that went into preventing it generated enormous technological advances, Howe said.

For example, these days, to review deeds, most people simply call up a digital image of that deed, via the Internet. And if they have questions about it, they can send an e-mail to someone in a position like Howe's to seek clarification. In the not-so-distant past, looking up deeds meant going to the registry during regular business hours and finding copies of the deeds in heavy books.

As the technology sector flourished, people in the business began buying houses and fixing them up, Howe said, and home prices inched up.

But that Internet boom soon became the dot-com bust. "By 2001, the tech-sector bottom had fallen out," he said.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the US government and business leaders became concerned that the economy would never recover, said Howe, a former Army captain, so the Federal Reserve - the US central bank - began charging a lot less for financial institutions to borrow money. That, combined with easier-than-ever-to-obtain credit, drove up housing prices, he said, and triggered the refinancing boom.

"People realized that, for the same monthly payment, they could pull $50,000 out of their home, and they went crazy," he said. "They'd go out and buy a new car, take a trip to Disney World, and get that new kitchen."

Because people believed they could always sell their homes for more than they paid, "the only question people were asking was, 'Can I afford the monthly payment?' " he said.

Howe and his staff became very, very busy.

"The spring of 2003 was the busiest we have ever been," he said. That year, the registry recorded 140,000 documents, he said. As housing prices continued to climb, mortgage brokers began selling new mortgages that allowed people to buy homes without a down payment.

"That summer, people here were eating PowerBars at their desks, instead of going to lunch, because of the volume of work," Howe recalled.

As 2004 began, he said, the market was still robust, but he was getting nervous: He had seen many people pull all of their equity out of their homes, and he thought the region could not sustain the high prices forever.

"You'd heard the stories about 'For sale' signs going up, and the seller getting three offers the next day, all above the asking price," he said. "That's when I started telling people, 'This won't end well.' "

He said it one morning while hosting a radio talk show on WCAP, and a caller accused him of being "a prophet of doom."

But the following year, the market caught up with Howe: Many of those low-interest and no-interest mortgages began requiring heftier monthly payments from borrowers. By late 2005, people awoke to the fact that their incomes could not possibly sustain their monthly payments.

"But they also can't sell, because the house is worth less than what they owe on it," said Howe. Still, " 'For sale' signs began popping up like dandelions. They sprouted up overnight, and stayed out there forever."

The hustle and bustle of 2003 is now long past, and the once-giddy homeowners are grim, he said.

One day this summer, the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds recorded 12 foreclosure deeds, and in every case the owners had borrowed every cent of the purchase price.

"It's a ticking time bomb," Howe said of the housing market. "If there is any turbulence in the labor market, or if heating oil and gas prices increase, this will get a lot worse, a lot quicker.

"It's going to be five years before we clean up this mess."

Houses are still significantly overvalued, and prices will continue to slide, he said.

"People need to remember, real estate does increase in value over time, but it is not a straight line. It is a very jagged line, he said. "And a lot of people get burned if they get in and out at the wrong time."

Christine McConville can be reached at cmcconville@globe.com.