Archive for June, 2009
Continue Reading June 30th, 2009
The latest Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller housing index numbers out today show the market falling less dramatically than it had been earlier in the year. The 10 and 20 city indices were both down 18% in April, versus the same month in 2008. But that decline was less severe than it had been in January, February and March.
“The pace of decline in residential real estate slowed in April,” says David Blitzer, Managing Director and Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s. ”Every metro area, except for Charlotte, recorded an improvement in monthly returns over March. While one month’s data cannot determine if a turnaround has begun, it seems that some stabilization may be appearing in a few of the regions.”
The worst hit cities include Phoenix (down 35%), Las Vegas (-32%) and San Francisco (-28%). Best performers were Denver (only down 4.9%), Dallas (-5%) and Boston (-7.7%). Dallas has held up the best since its market peaked in June 2007, falling only 9.6%. Phoenix fared worst, off 54% from its June 2006 peak.
Cameron Findlay, the Chief Economist of mortgage site LendingTree.com, says the clearest sign of where the housing market is now, lies not in a national price index from two months ago but in the cost of mortgages today. Rates on a 30 year conventional mortgage have dipped down to 5.37% from a recent high of 5.74%. That’s telling us the housing market hasn’t recovered. The Fed is still committed to buying $300 billion of long-term Treasury bonds to inject more liquidity into the system, he notes.
“There was a wide anticipation that the Fed would ease off on, not purchase as much,” he notes. “Bonds started selling off, rates started rising.” That’s changed. Findlay expects rates to stay at this level at least until the Fed finishes its bond buying in September or until more convincing signs emerge that the housing market has come back.
“It’s still down,” Findlay says of the Case-Shiller index. “The only positive news is that Colorado slightly improved. There’s still extreme pressure due to (mortgage) delinquencies.”
Read more »
Continue Reading June 30th, 2009
Home prices continued to tumble in April, falling 18.1% from a year earlier — but the change from March narrowed sharply, indicating that housing markets may be starting to turn.
Read more »
Continue Reading June 29th, 2009
I stopped by Dwell on Design, a home design show sponsored by Dwell magazine at the Los Angeles Convention Center this weekend. This was the kind of event I expected to be really slow during the Great Recession. It cost $25 to get in and had a lot of cool, but pricey products on for sale, everything from $3,000 Ligne Roset arm chairs (and they are cool) to my bottle of Vitamin Water which cost $3.80 including tax (convention center pricing). There was actually a pretty decent-sized turnout.
The big hit seemed to the handful of prefab homes on display. Green Inc. is a Los Angeles company that makes dwellings out of converted shipping containers. That’s one of their homes above.
Modern-Shed makes the most stylish sheds you’ve ever seen. Like the Green Inc. structures, Modern-Shed’s products start at around $10,000. The company wisely positions them not as a hipper replacement for the $1,000 aluminum shed you could buy at Sears but as a low-cost addition to your home. While my wife and I liked that idea, my mother-in-law and niece didn’t seem to too keen on sleeping in the shed.
Also generating a lot of interest was a 400 square foot cottage made from reclaimed wood and other products. The cottage was very cool, kind of a cross between a shabby chic country house and the Unibomber’s cabin. It’s made by an Austin company called Reclaimed Space, which auctioned off that actual home on eBay. The winning bidder paid $75,000. I remember one of the staffers in the house saying that home typically sold for $60,000, although in this case half the proceeds went to Habitat for Humanity.
Read more »
Continue Reading June 29th, 2009
As if celebrities didn’t have enough problems–like paparazzi and wrinkles–along comes the housing bust to tarnish their silvery existence. Chicago Tribune real estate columnist Mary Umberger rounded up a bunch of celebs who are having trouble selling expensive homes, including the above-mentioned Mel Gibson, 50 Cent, Tim Geithner, and Richard Gere. Christie Brinkley’s unsold home shows up in a story by Laura Mann of Newsday. That’s the tippy top of Christie’s house, known as Tower Hill, in the photo. It’s been on the market for $30 million ever since 2007. Don’t feel too bad for the uptown girl, though. According to Newsday, she bought Tower Hill in the late 1990s for less than $3 million.
Read more »
Continue Reading June 29th, 2009
When the easy money was flowing, you could get a great deal on a mortgage from just about anyone. But in today’s credit-challenged world, all the avenues for finding a mortgage come with their own set of problems.
Read more »
Continue Reading June 26th, 2009
Ory Schwartz, senior director of NorthMarq Capital’s Los Angeles
office, has arranged an $18 million first mortgage for Meadowridge
Apartments, a 176-unit multi-family complex located in Santa Clarita,
Calif.
Read more »
Continue Reading June 26th, 2009
The combination of a deep recession and widespread law-enforcement funding cuts will most likely spell a banner summer for burglars. If your house makes a good target - it’s upscale, off the beaten path, and in or near a city - an alarm system is your best defense, according to Temple University economics professor Simon Hakim, who studies security and policing. Installing one will reduce your risk of a break-in by two-thirds. To determine what you really need, follow the guidelines below.
Read more »
Continue Reading June 26th, 2009
Are banks overwhelmed and understaffed for all the work coming out of the housing bust? On June 24, Ciitgroup said it was temporarily suspending new loans brought to them by independent mortgage brokers as it seeks to fix “quality control” issues regarding loan documentation. Rob Jenson, a real estate agent with the Jenson Group in Las Vegas says he’s been trying for eight months to get Bank of America to approve the sale of house for less than the loan amount, a so-called short sale that banks say they are working more diligently to accommodate. “It’s insane,” Jenson says. “It’s getting worse.”
The house Jenson is having problems selling was originally listed for $795,000 in November. It’s a five bedroom, 4,500 square foot home in the Vegas suburb of Summerlin. Jenson immediately got a full-price, all-cash offer which he submitted to the bank late last year. “It took two to three weeks to get a workout negotiator,” he says. “Then they order an appraisal, additional documents from the seller.” Two months later the bank said okay to $795,000, but by then the buyer had moved on.
That started the process all over again. Jenson brought in another buyer, but this one needed to get a loan. By then the house had fallen in value. The property appraised at only $747,000 and the buyer couldn’t get a mortgage for the higher purchase price.
Jenson said the bank negotiator he’s been dealing with said she’s got 145 files that she is working on at once. “Bank could create some jobs,” a frustrated Jenson says. “They should hire more negotiators.”
Read more »
Continue Reading June 25th, 2009
Check out this great Washington Post story from yesterday about the backlog in foreclosures. The human interest is a woman from Glen Allen, Va., who moved out of her house last July and has been begging the bank to foreclose so it won’t be her responsibility anymore. As long as her name is on the title, she’s been going back and trying to keep it neat. She even tried to clean up from a fire that broke out in January. Here’s the final quote in the story:
We could have walked away like everyone else and said, ‘We don’t care.’ But we loved our neighbors and our neighborhood. We hold ourselves responsible.
I don’t know why she fell behind on her mortgage in the first place, but I admire her sense of responsibility at this stage.
Hat tip to Matt Stichnoth at Seeking Alpha.
Read more »
Continue Reading June 24th, 2009
Omega Commercial Finance Corp. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire a majority interest in EcoCalifornia L.L.C., a firm currently in the process of developing a golf resort and housing project in the Fresno, Calif., area.
Read more »
Previous Posts