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Biggest Losers are Now the Biggest Winners | Pound Ridge Real Estate
Markets that fell hardest during the housing crash five years ago today are racking up the biggest year over year gains as the prices in the nation as a whole through October exceeded analysts’ forecasts.
Housing markets that were on their knees just a year or so ago from foreclosures and low employment today are seeing prides rise much faster than cities that never felt the housing crash, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.
Median home prices rose 4.3 percent in the 12 months ending in October in the 20-City Composite, out-distancing analysts’ forecasts. Anticipated seasonal weakness appeared as twelve of the 20 cities and both Composites posted monthly declines in home prices in October.
The largest rebound is 24.2 percent in Detroit even though prices there are still about 20% lower than 12 years ago. San Francisco and Phoenix have also rebounded from recent lows by 22.5 percent and 22.1 percent with prices comfortably higher than 12 years ago. The smallest recoveries are in Boston and New York, two cities in the northeast which suffered smaller losses in the housing bust than the Sunbelt or California.
David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices, called the gains from the bottom markets an indication of the rebound is the underway. “Looking over this report, and considering other data on housing starts and sales, it is clear that the housing recovery is gathering strength. Higher year-over-year price gains plus strong performances in the southwest and California, regions that suffered during the housing bust, confirm that housing is now contributing to the economy. Last week’s final revision to third quarter GDP growth showed that housing represented 10% of the growth while accounting for less than 3% of GDP.
Real Estate 2012: The Year the Housing Market Turned the Corner | Pound Ridge Real Estate
9 Great Instagram Alternatives to Consider | Pound Ridge Real Estate
To say that brands weren’t happy with Instagram’s recent rollout of new Terms of Service — which were due to take effect on January 16, 2013 — is an understatement.
The free iOS and Android photo sharing app, launched in October 2010, had quickly emerged as an effective marketing tool. Companies realized that they could build brand recognition and consumer loyalty through an ongoing stream of photos that helped personalize their brand, and many were very successful in doing so.
Users were furious. One of their top concerns: Whether their photos could be used in advertisements without their permission. By the next day, Instagram had posted a statement in its blog trying to address the concerns that arose. “Legal documents are easy to misinterpret,” it said. Although Instagram has since reverted to its former advertising policy, the damage had been done.
What to do? In light of these developments, many users are looking elsewhere for alternative photo-sharing apps. There are a lot of terrific ones out there, many of which are far more robust.
Here are 9 photo apps to try:
Pxlr-o-matic
Don’t miss Pxlr-o-matic, one of the most talked about and popular photo apps, with over two million combinations to make your photos look spectacular. It’s so easy that anybody can create stunning shots (including me).
This fun and simple darkroom app makes it easy to add an effect, overlay, and border to get that retro, grunge, clean, or stylish look, all in just three simple steps. And with more options than any other photo app, you’ll never be out of new styles. If you can’t get the right combination of effects to personalize your shots, Pxlr-o-matic allows you to randomize filters, borders, and overlays. Share on Facebook, DropBox, iTunes, Flickr, or via email. There’s the PLUS version with even more options for just $0.99.
Snapseed
Snapseed is a fun and powerful app designed to enhance and share your photos, developed by the same people that create some of the most widely used professional tools for digital photography. Snapseed puts the power of photographic enhancements at your fingertips and makes it possible for anyone to enhance, transform, and share photos.
Snapseed’s vision is to deliver a photo editing experience so fun, so easy, and so powerful that it will be the only photo editing, tweaking, sharing app you’ll want to use, and it largely succeeds. With an intuitive gesture interface, Snapseed gives you the power to saturate and tilt shift your photos, or play around with filters and frames.
Hipster
Hipster is a fun way to share where you are and what you’re doing. It offers a unique integration of text and geotagging that lets you create virtual postcards to share on Facebook and Twitter. Tag friends or add date and place names to your images for a personal touch.
Simply take a snap or upload from your gallery. Add text, edit, add a cool filter and share across your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Foursquare. Simple to use and with some very cool effects
Camera Awesome
Of the photo apps out there, few come close to Camera Awesome. It has 297 presets, filters, textures, and frames, along with and many other features like image stabilization and burst modes.The free app from SmugMug is more of a wholesale camera app then a filter specialty app — its specialty “Awesomize” button is a powerful auto-fix button with a great name — but it does come with 9 Instagram-like camera filters. The app’s filters can be used with a cool sliding-scale functionality of distortion, so users can choose the hipness level they hope to achieve.
There are also 63 more filters available for download; you can pay $0.99 for 9 filters or $3.99 for all 63.
Free for iOS
Camera+
One of the most popular third-party camera apps for iPhone, Camera+ is probably the most loved for its well-designed, easy-to-use Lightbox editing suite. Lucky for those fleeing Instagram, that Lightbox also contains a huge set of filters and borders. The app doesn’t come with a social network of its own like Instagram does, but if you’re looking for an excellent camera first with Instagram-like filters second, Camera+ is a safe, attractive choice.
$0.99 for iOS
Tadaa
Tadaa is a beautifully designed app — one of the best — with many, many filters that can be viewed in real time and adjusted after the fact. It also includes options for rapid-fire shooting and tilt-shift photography, which you can use to make it look like you’re shooting miniatures. The interface — especially on the touch-calibrated editing suite — is slick and attractive, and Tadaa also features a growing social photography community.
Free for iOS
Streamzoo
Streamzoo is a free, fun and easy way to create and share beautiful photos that’ll have your friends begging to know how you did it. The app lets you follow users (@) or subjects (#), and incorporates a badge and reward system to encourage participation in the community. Choose from 20 filters, 15 borders and six crop shapes, then share on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr.
CamWow
Use CamWow and take your iPhone, iPod, or iPad camera into the past with some of the most beautiful and unique vintage effects. Unlike Pixlr-o-Matic and Camera Awesome, CamWow adds the effects in real-time, so you can see what the filters will look like as you’re taking the photo. The free version of CamWow is essentially pointless: A banner ad stretches across the bottom of the app, and you have to pay $1.99 to remove a hideous CamWow watermark from your photo.
Free for iOS — a $1.99 in-app purchase is really worth it
Hipstamatic
Hipstamatictakes the Instagram/Kodak connection to the next level: Where Instagram borrowed the filtered look from the venerable photography company and ported it onto the iPhone, Hipstamatic borrows the whole camera.
Shooting with the Hipstamatic camera, you choose your film, your lens, and your flash — the different combinations result in different effects. The standard app costs $1.99 and comes with three different flashes, film rolls and four different lenses — you can buy more of these with “Hipstapaks,” available to purchase inside the app. It’s fun to use, if only because it might be the only camera app for the iPhone on which you have no idea what your final product is going to look like until after it’s “processed.”
$1.99 for iOS
via pamorama.net
4 Reasons Why Facebook Should be on the Naughty List | Pound Ridge Homes
It’s that merry time of the year when children everywhere are on their best behavior in hopes of landing themselves on Santa’s nice list. I have never personally met anyone who didn’t make the nice list, however I DO know a certain social network that should miss out this year. For some strange reason (going public) Facebook has decided to act up this year and deserves to find itself comfortably on the naughty list. Why on Earth would I doom Facebook to receive a lump of coal this year? Here are 4 reasons why!
1) Auto-play Video Ads
A recent report said that Facebook is planning on rolling out 15 second video advertisements that automatically play. Some might disagree, but I think this is a very bad idea. How annoying is it when you are on YouTube and a video ad automatically plays or on a news site and a distracting video mysteriously starts playing? By even proposing this type of advertising solution, I feel like Facebook is totally disregarding their users. Un-wanted auto play ads might prompt users to hit mute so that they don’t have to hear them, nullifying the whole strategy. Also, what about the users who access Facebook at work? Will they log into Facebook less due to fear of corny ads automatically playing when the page loads? Facebook will probably figure out a more user friendly way to go about this (I hope). It seems like they need to learn the hard way that what makes the investors happy doesn’t always make the users happy.
2) Naughty Instagram Deal
As you may have heard, Instagram announced that its new terms of service reserve the right to leverage user photos into ads. You may also have heard that Instagram chose to backtrack on that idea due to the outrage that many social media users expressed. While this concept is much like Facebook’s Sponsored Stories, I feel that using user generated content as ads without their content or even compensating them for it is not a very “social Zen” thing to do. I fault Facebook for this because I would assume since Facebook owns Instagram, this was a brainchild of those who have to please the investors. If you think about it, the idea itself was genius. It would have been a continuous stream of sincere photo content, most of which would have been about a brand. A brand would be crazy to not want to buy that content and leverage it to make money. This would have been the perfect scheme had nobody noticed the fine print.
3) Forcing Users to be Findable in Facebook Search
Facebook is currently in the process of rolling out its new privacy controls, however even with these new controls, there is one thing that is taken out of the user’s control. If you are the type of person that doesn’t want people to be able to find you through a Facebook search, you are out of luck. Facebook has now taken away the option for users to hide from search. While there are still some other quality privacy controls, this one seems pretty important to keep. In my opinion, Facebook is making the less social users play nice with others and forces them into a situation where they will have to perform an engagement action. What if you have a crazy ex that won’t leave you alone or a group of people that you don’t want finding you on Facebook? Blocking them may be your only option!
4) Charging Users to Communicate
This is the most recent thing Facebook has done which should land them on the naughty list. It might not seem like a big deal, but it does speak to the fact that Facebook is trying to ring out revenue in any way possible. As of right now, when you send a message to another person that you are not friends with on Facebook, that message lands in the “Others” subsection of the Facebook Messages Inbox. Facebook is currently testing an option to charge a one-time fee ($1) for users to send a message to another non-friend user’s main Inbox. From the social perspective, this might allow users to meet new people within Facebook; however from the marketing perspective I think it is rather silly. It seems to be a petty attempt at revenue and is sure to open a floodgate of potential spammers who think this would be a way to directly connect with potential customers for $1.
Separately, these four items are forgivable, but for me they make Facebook a top candidate for the naughty list. As soon as I am finished typing this, I am going to write a very sternly written email to Santa!
Do you agree? Has Facebook seemed to slowly go from nice to naughty?
The Economic Data Looks Weak, But It’s Stable | Pound Ridge Real Estate
LPS: 7.12% of U.S. loans are delinquent | South Salem NY Realtor
Mortgage delinquencies ticked up in November even though the nation continued to experience declining distressed inventory levels and fewer delinquencies year-over-year, according to data firm Lender Processing Services.
Roughly 7.12% of all U.S. loans surveyed by LPS ($24.99 -0.69%) ended up classified as delinquent in November.
LPS reached this conclusion after analyzing statistics from its own loan-level database, which can access data on 70% of the entire mortgage market.
From October to November, the U.S. delinquency rate edged up 1.19%, while still falling 9.06% from a year earlier.
The number of properties 30 or more days past due, but not in foreclosure, totaled 3.53 million in November, while 1.584 million were 90 or more days delinquent.
When tallying delinquent homes with properties in foreclosure, the distressed segment of the market includes 5.35 million homes.
The U.S. states of Florida, New Jersey, Mississippi, Nevada and New York had the highest percentage of non-current loans.
Those with the lowest percentage of non-current loans in November included Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska and North Dakota.
The nation’s pre-sale inventory rate hit 3.51% last month, down 2.84% from October and a decline of 16.42% from last year.
via housingwire.com
Existing Home Sales Hit 3-Year Peak | Pound Ridge NY Homes
- By:
- Peter KingDecember 21, 2012 – MortgageLoan.com
Sales of pre-owned homes rose strongly in November, topping an annual rate of 5 million units and reaching their highest level in three years.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reports that existing home sales in November were at a seasonally adjusted rate of 5.04 million in November, a 5.9 percent increase from October’s downwardly revised rate of 4.76 million.
The figure represents a 14.6 percent annual increase from the November 2011 rate of 4.40 million and is the highest rate reported since sales hit an annual pace of 5.44 million in Nov. 2009.
“Momentum continues to build in the housing market from growing jobs and a bursting out of household formation,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist. “With lower rental vacancy rates and rising rents, combined with still historically favorable affordability conditions, more people are buying homes.”
Yun said sales were depressed in some areas affected by Hurricane Sandy, but those impacts were offset by gains in other areas, so that overall sales in the Northwest were up.
Prices up 10 percent from last year
Median home prices also showed a healthy gain over the past 12 months, increasing 10.1 percent to $180,600 in November. It was the ninth consecutive month of annual price gains for existing homes, which hasn’t occurred in over six years.
Distressed properties, including foreclosures and short sales, continue to make up a declining share of all sales, falling to 22 percent in November, down from 24 percent the month before and 29 percent in November 2011. Yun predicted that share will drop into the teens early next year, owing to declining numbers of seriously delinquent mortgages.
Despite the decline in distressed home sales the share of homes bought by investors has remained fairly steady, accounting for about one in five sales in November and unchanged from one year ago.
First published on MortgageLoan.com at: http://www.mortgageloan.com/existing-home-sales-hit-3-year-peak-9323
via mortgageloan.com
Pawlenty: Lending is not what it once was | Pound Ridge Real Estate
via housingwire.com
FHA commits to additional tightening | South Salem NY Real Estate
The Federal Housing Administration has committed to several changes to FHA mortgage programs that, while less drastic than measures proposed by Senate Republicans, will limit the ability of some borrowers with low credit scores to qualify for loans, and raise minimum down payment requirements and premiums for borrowers taking out mortgages larger than $625,000.
The changes are designed to shore up FHA’s reserves after the agency reported a $16.3 billion deficit in a report to Congress last month, raising the specter that FHA will require a taxpayer bailout next year for the first time in its 78-year history.
Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, announced today that the FHA had committed to change and that in return, he will support Acting FHA Commissioner Carol J. Galante’s nomination to be FHA commissioner.
Corker released a letter from Galante, who promised FHA would “move on” several policy changes by Jan. 31, 2013:
- Increase underwriting criteria for borrowers with FICO credit scores between 580 and 620 by establishing a maximum debt-to-income ratio.
- Increase the down payment requirement and the insurance pricing for loans between $625,000 and $729,000 to protect FHA against loss on high balance loans that are outside Fannie and Freddie conforming loan limits and scale back the government’s footprint in the housing market.
- Crack down on lenders that advertise under the false pretense that borrowers can “automatically” qualify for an FHA-insured loan three years after a foreclosure. Borrowers who have experienced a foreclosure must have re-established good credit and meet underwriting criteria, including the policy change outlined above for borrowers with credit scores under 620. FHA also committed to analyzing whether a foreclosure due to a one-time event, such as a job loss, resulted in a different or better performance than other reasons for foreclosure.
- Place a moratorium on the full drawdown reverse mortgage program, the Standard Fixed Rate HECM, to assess its viability after $2.8 billion in losses.
In her letter to Corker, Galante said FHA is finalizing a letter to lenders that will require borrowers with FICO scores below 620 to have a total debt-to-income ratio of no more than 43 percent to be eligible for processing through FHA’s automated underwriting system, TOTAL Scorecard. Borrowers with DTIs exceeding 43 percent will have to be processed manually, with lenders documenting compensating factors such as a larger down payment or a higher level of reserves.
Galante said FHA will raise the minimum down payment on loans between $625,500 to $729,000 from 3.5 percent to 5 percent. Since June, FHA has been pricing mortgage insurance premiums for loans in that range at 150 basis points, instead of 125 basis points. Another premium increase announced in November will raise the premiums to 155 basis points — the maximum currently allowed by law.
In normal housing markets, FHA is only allowed to guarantee loans of up to $271,050. But in high-cost markets, FHA is permitted to insure loans of up to 125 percent of the median home price, up to a limit of $729,750.
Congress boosted loan limits for FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008, after the secondary market for “jumbo loans” not backed by the government collapsed. Before the ceilings were implemented, Fannie and Freddie’s “conforming loan limit” was $417,000 in all but a few high-cost markets.
While Congress allowed Fannie and Freddie’s loan limits to slip back to $625,500 last year, it restored FHA’s ability to insure loans of up to $729,750 in high cost markets through 2013.
That means FHA is the only option for government-backed loans of $625,500 or greater. Borrowers can still obtain “jumbo loans,” but can expect to pay higher rates because lenders must keep them on their books.
The combination of higher down payment requirements and increased mortgage insurance premiums is aimed at scaling back the FHA’s market share of those loans.
Galante said she would “move on these additional actions by January 31, 2013” but did not give an exact date for when the changes would take effect. An FHA spokesman confirmed the letter’s authenticity, but said no further information was available.
Galante said she had confirmed that the Obama Administration will support these new policies.
Corker, a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, said that as a result of Galante’s committment to these FHA reforms, he will drop his opposition to her bid to become FHA commissioner.
“While this is only a first step, I am encouraged that Acting Commissioner Galante has committed to structural reforms that we both believe put FHA in a much stronger position. Given the reforms she is committed to, I believe that having an accountable commissioner with her resolve and expertise will be in the best interest of the taxpayer,” Corker said in a statement.
Last week, Corker announced he had sponsored an amendment to FHA legislation calling for a minimum credit score of 620 for all borrowers, a two-year shutdown on the entire reverse mortgage program, a maximum loan limit lowered to $625,000, and 20 percent down payments for mortgage applicants who experienced a foreclosure during the preceding seven years.
via inman.com