Daily Archives: July 16, 2013

Memphis real estate market continues improvement | Cross River Real Estate

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The rebound in the Shelby County housing market continued in the second quarter.

Total home sales in the quarter were up 11 percent from previous year levels, with a total of 4,226 total homes sold in the county. According to Chandler Reports,total sales volume was up 21 percent as well.

The average sales price in Shelby County was $141,303, a 9 percent improvement over the $129,316 average sales price in the second quarter of last year.

The 38017 ZIP code in Collierville saw the highest number of sales in the quarter. A total of 290 homes were sold in that area alone.

 

Memphis real estate market continues improvement – Memphis Business Journal.

McDonnell invested heavily as housing market tanked | Katonah Real Estate

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Before the wedding gifts, the Rolex, the luxury clothing and the loans, there was the real estate bubble.

Gov. Bob McDonnell invested heavily in real estate in 2005, as property values were still rising, and in 2006 and early 2007, as they began to plummet.

Often with his sisters as partners, McDonnell bought stakes in four residential properties — two in Virginia Beach, one in Henrico County and one at the Wintergreen resort in Nelson County — all purchased for a total of $3.8 million. Today, the properties are assessed at about $3.2 million.

Mortgages on two properties have been refinanced this year, and a slew of activity on the mortgage loans has taken place over the years.

McDonnell’s real estate holdings were thrust to the center of the gubernatorial gift scandal after The Washington Post revealed last week that Jonnie Williams Sr., the donor at the center of the scandal, gave $70,000 to MoBo Real Estate Partners, a limited-liability corporation owned by the governor and his sister. McDonnell’s wife, Maureen G. McDonnell, also received a $50,000 check from Williams. The Post reported that Bob McDonnell viewed the payments as loans rather than gifts.

In his financial disclosures, McDonnell has listed MoBo as owning two Virginia Beach rental properties that make up the bulk of his residential real estate holdings. They bring in $50,001 to $250,000 in gross income a year, according to his disclosure.

A Virginia Beach office building purchased for $3.15 million in 2004 by Racehorse Properties — an entity in which McDonnell has an interest — generates $50,001 to $250,000 in gross income a year. It is unclear how much interest McDonnell has in the building, which houses the law firm where he worked as managing partner before being elected attorney general.

That property has increased in value. It is assessed at $4.65 million.

Real estate prices here and nationwide peaked in mid-2006, leading to the collapse in the housing market.

 

In general, home prices throughout most of Virginia have rebounded to 2005 levels, but not in all cases, real estate experts say. People who bought houses from 2006 to 2008, when prices were unsustainably high, probably owe more than their houses are worth, the experts say.

McDonnell invested heavily as housing market tanked – Richmond Times Dispatch: Henrico.

Bedford Hills Real Estate | The Hottest Real Estate Markets On Earth

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Location, Location, Location!

This screen shot is from a villa in France.  It probably costs a few million euros to own that living room. But when it comes to real estate values around the world, this villa might be in a great part of the planet, but France’s overall real estate values have fallen by 1.6% in the 12 months ending Dec. 31, 2012. Here is a look at the top 10 places where prices are rising, including a look at some property values in what has become the hottest real estate markets around.

 

Location, Location, Location! – In Photos: The Hottest Real Estate Markets On Earth – Forbes.

Cubans on the move as new real estate market grows | Bedford Real Estate

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“Its capitalist!” So goes the Cuban real estate description of a great house to buy. After President Raul Castro eased restrictions in 2011, the housing market is beginning to boom, though underground maneuvers are of course part of the wheeling and dealing.

HAVANA — At an informal housing market on Havana’s historic Paseo del Prado, Renaldo Belen puts the hard sell on a prospective buyer under a tree hung with hand-lettered signs advertising homes for sale.

A house near Boyeros, the avenue to the city’s airport, is being offered for the equivalent of $120,000, with all the amenities.

“The house is beautiful. It has four bedrooms, a pool with a bar and a fountain with a lion’s head on top. Look,” says Belen, pointing to photos on the sign, “water comes out of the lion’s mouth.”

Pausing for dramatic effect, Belen, one of the many touts, or “runners” working at the market, delivers what he hopes will be the coup de grace.

“This place needs no work. It is of capitalist construction,” he says, using a now frequently invoked commendation meaning it was built before Cuba’s 1959 revolution and is therefore of superior quality.

Given that “capitalist” has been a dirty word in communist-run Cuba for the last half century, the description perhaps grates on the nerves of Cuban leaders.

Cuban real estate market grows: A child stands at the door of a farm with a 'For Sale' notice on the outskirts of Havana Tuesday. IMAGEReuters: Desmond Boylan

But its widespread usage is a sign of the times on the Caribbean island, where President Raul Castro has loosened things up as he tries to modernize the country’s economy in the name of preserving the socialist system put in place by his older brother Fidel Castro.

Cubans on the move as new real estate market grows.

China’s Real-Estate Sector Sees Solid Housing Demand | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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China’s real-estate sector showed strength in the first half of the year amid solid housing demand, despite government controls on the market and slowing economic growth.

While the buoyancy in the housing market could lead to tighter market curbs in the months ahead, analysts said that for now, growth levels were within tolerable levels.

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Reuters

Workers welding a steel frame at a construction site in Hefei, Anhui province.

Total property investment in China in the first half of the year rose 20.3% compared with a year earlier to 3.68 trillion yuan ($599.3 billion), according to data released Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics. That is marginally slower than the 20.6% growth in the first five months of the year.

The statistics bureau doesn’t give data for individual months.

Residential and commercial property sales totaled 3.34 trillion yuan in the January-June period, up 43.2% over a year earlier. Sales totaled 2.59 trillion yuan in the five months ended May, up 52.8%.

“Inventory levels in major cities are leveling off, so we’re positive on construction starts and expect growth in this portion of the market to reach 5% to 7% this year,” said Johnson Hu, an analyst at CIMB Securities.

Construction starts by area in the first half rose 3.8% from a year earlier to 959.01 million square meters. They were up 1% at 736.13 million square meters in the January-May period.

The increase comes despite a more than three-year government campaign to keep real-estate prices in check amid fears that higher housing costs could lead to social unrest. Efforts include limiting home purchases, squeezing credit to developers and tightening down-payment requirements.

Larger developers have been buying land in what are known as tier one and tier two cities—China’s most affluent and developed cities—because of expectations of continued housing demand from migrants as the government pushes ahead with its plans to speed up urbanization. Developers typically purchase land and keep it in what they call a land bank for later use.

“Despite uncertainties in the macro environment and credit conditions, most of the developers we talked to last week still have aggressive plans for land banking” in the second half of this year, said Credit Suisse analyst Jinsong Du.

 

China’s Real-Estate Sector Sees Solid Housing Demand – WSJ.com.

Phoenix housing market sees ‘boomerang buyers’ sooner than expected | Bedford Corners Real Estate

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Early in the housing crisis, financial experts estimated it might take up to seven years for people who lost a home through a foreclosure or short sale to qualify for a mortgage to buy again.

Thousands of new Phoenix-area homeowners are proving the experts wrong. These “boomerang buyers” — so called by real-estate insiders because they were out of the market and have now come back — have returned as a major market force much earlier than expected. Many buyers are qualifying for a new loan only a few years after defaulting on their last mortgage.

Boomerang buyers are expected to account for almost one in every five home sales in metro Phoenix this year, according to a national housing analyst. That’s double the projected U.S. rate.

The boomerang phenomenon is being driven by several factors. Many former owners face rising rents, and now that their finances and the housing economy are more stable, they want to own again. And many of these tens of thousands of metro Phoenix families who are renting are attractive to mortgage backers and some lenders again because they have rebuilt their credit and because any purchases they make add strength to the real-estate recovery.

“Probably 25 to 30 percent of the borrowers calling us now have had a short sale or foreclosure in their past,” said Mike Metz, managing director of Scottsdale-based Sun State Home Loans.

Lenders and government agencies backing mortgages do require steep down payments and decent credit scores from most boomerang buyers. The sooner a loan application comes after a foreclosure or short sale, typically the more up-front money is required.

These former homeowners, like many other prospective buyers, are scrambling to make a deal before home prices and interest rates climb too high.

“Foreclosed homeowners who are now renting are in a panic,” said John Burns, a national real-estate analyst.

Metro Phoenix has a bigger pool of potential boomerang buyers than most areas. More than 250,000 houses in the region were foreclosed on during the crash, and 80,000 other borrowers sold homes through short sales to avoid foreclosure.

Approximately 22,000 home sales, or 19 percent of all home sales, in metro Phoenix this year will involve boomerang buyers, according to an estimate by Burns’ company, Irvine, Calif.-based John Burns Real Estate Consulting.

“Phoenix is the third-biggest U.S. market for boomerang buyers,” Burns said. The California metro areas of Riverside-San Bernardino and Los Angeles are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.

The many prospective buyers also face a challenging market in metro Phoenix because of the shortage of the number of affordable properties for sale.

Buying again

Phyllis Borchardt is one recent boomerang buyer.

She and her husband, Larry Fetkenhauer, bought a Sun City Grand home in May for $138,000, blocks from the house they had rented for three years. The couple had moved from Temecula, Calif., in 2005 and bought a house for $250,000 in Buckeye.

As home prices fell and Phyllis’ business as a real-estate agent brought in less money, the couple tried to refinance to lower their mortgage payment through the federal Home Affordable Refinance Program, or HARP. After submitting documents to their lender for a year, the couple still weren’t approved for a loan with a lower interest rate. Then, in 2010, Fetkenhauer lost his job as a kitchen designer at one of the big-box home-improvement stores.

 

Phoenix housing market sees ‘boomerang buyers’ sooner than expected.

Real estate horror continues with ‘zombie foreclosures’ | Chappaqua NY Real Estate

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Joseph Keller doesn’t expect he’ll live to see the end of 2013. He blames the three story house at 190 Avondale Avenue.

Five years ago, Keller, 10 months behind on his mortgage payments, received notice of a foreclosure judgment from JP Morgan Chase. In a few weeks, the house would be put up for auction at a sheriff’s sale.

The 58-year-old former social worker and his wife, Jennifer, packed up their home and moved. Joseph thought he would never have anything to do with the house again. And for about a year, he didn’t. Then it started to stalk him.

He had become caught up in a little-known horror of the U.S. housing bust: the zombie title. Six years in, thousands of homeowners are finding themselves legally liable for houses they didn’t know they still owned after banks decided it wasn’t worth their while to complete foreclosures on them. With impunity, banks have been walking away from foreclosures much the way some homeowners walked away from their mortgages when the housing market first crashed.

First, in 2010, the county sued Keller because the house, already picked clean by scavengers, was in a shambles, its hanging gutters and collapsed garage in violation of local housing code. Then the tax collector started sending Keller notices about mounting back taxes, sewer fees and bills for weed and waste removal. And last year, Chase’s debt collector began pressing Keller to pay his mortgage, which had swollen, with penalties and fees, from $62,100.27 to $84,194.69.

The worst news came last January, when the Social Security Administration rejected Keller’s application for disability benefits; the “asset” on Avondale Avenue rendered him ineligible. Keller’s medical problems include advanced liver disease, hepatitis C and inactive tuberculosis. Without disability coverage, he can’t get the liver transplant he needs to stay alive.

Real estate Foreclosure: Joseph Keller and his wife Jennifer stand on the porch of their abandoned house in Columbus, Ohio, September 30, 2012. IMAGE

 

 

Real estate horror continues with ‘zombie foreclosures’.

U.S. News’ best nursing homes | Armonk Real Estate

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An estimated 3.3 million Americans will live in the nation’s nearly 16,000 nursing homes during 2013. That number translates to 1 in 7 people ages 65 and up, and more than 1 in 5 of those 85 and older. They and their families will want and need a way to find a source of the best possible care. For many, it won’t be easy.

To help them, U.S. News has collected meaningful data and ratings about nearly every nursing facility in the United States, and built from them a searchable database designed to highlight the highest-rated homes likely to meet each user’s needs.

The data behind Best Nursing Homes come from Nursing Home Compare, a website run by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. CMS sets and enforces standards for nursing homes enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid, as most are. The agency also collects information from states and individual homes and assigns each home (other than a few too new to have built up enough months of data) a rating of one to five stars in each of three categories:

  • State-conducted health inspections
  • Nursing and physical therapy staffing
  • Quality of medical care

On January 2013, 3,036 nursing homes earned an overall rating of five stars from the federal government.

Top Places to Find Nursing Home Care

When it comes to finding a top-quality nursing home, residents of some states face a far easier task than others. While California and nine other states have at least a hundred top-rated nursing homes in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Nursing Homes ratings, several states have only a handful of nursing homes that meet the same standards.

 

 

U.S. News’ best nursing homes – 2013 – Caregiving – MSN Healthy Living.