Category Archives: Pound Ridge

Desperately seeking high-end buyers in Costa Rica | North Salem NY Homes

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Recently, I was working on my computer when a Skype call bleeped through. I switched over to Skype and answered in video-call format. On my screen popped up Tor Prestgard, a fellow I profiled a year ago in a story about Costa Rica home markets.

At the time, Prestgard was trying to sell his 30-acre coffee farm located high in the central mountains about an hour’s ride from the capital city of San Jose. Back then, I had Skyped with him from his Costa Rican property.

This time, we were talking France to the U.S. He had left Costa Rica so his children could attend school in France, and he and his family were happily settled in the Rhone Valley wine region.

Well, not exactly real happy, because, as Prestgard told me, he was scheduled for brain surgery in a few weeks.

OK, I thought, maybe I should change the subject and quickly asked him about his property. At least that should be a more salubrious subject. And it was.

Prestgard had a caretaker managing the farm and was still looking to sell. The price hadn’t come down — it was still at just over $1 million.

Just one year ago, second homes or hobby farms in exotic locations such as this one in Costa Rica were starving for investors. The global economy was very weak and investors were playing it close to the vest, avoiding anything that smacked of risk. In addition, the banks weren’t lending. As result, Prestgard wasn’t getting much action on his listing.

As his broker told me at the time, in the old days “anyone could leverage their house in Canada, (the) United States or Europe, get an equity line and buy a house in Costa Rica. The banks have clamped down, so that type of buyer would now have to sell his or her home before moving to Costa Rica.”

Considering he had a serious operation ahead of him, Prestgard noticeably perked up when I asked if he was finally getting any interest in his farm.

Prestgard revealed that he had recently received two serious inquiries. One came from a U.S. company in the coffee industry. And just the weekend before, he had a good inquiry from a Canadian investor.

“More people are showing interest and going down to view the property,” Prestgard said. “The market in Costa Rica has definitely bottomed, and prices are starting to move up again. I’m starting to see other properties being sold. There will be two visitors to my property this week, and another is scheduled a few weeks out.”

I decided to check in with Dan Duffy, CEO of United Country Real Estate, a Kansas City, Mo.-based organization with five offices in Costa Rica serving San Jose, the central country and the entire Pacific coast.

“The velocity of sales on higher-priced properties had definitely taken a hit as it relates to the overall market,” Duffy said. “However, we are starting to see those homes move.”

There were a few areas of Costa Rica where the developers were not well capitalized and failed to finish projects, Duffy said. “That was mainly in the popular Pacific Coast region, and prices there fell anywhere from 25 percent to 40 percent.”

Things were much different in the central mountains, where there was only a 5 to 10 percent adjustment in pricing, Duffy said. “There wasn’t a lot of inventory to begin with. People who owned properties such as Prestgard weren’t highly leveraged. They didn’t have big mortgages, or the properties were bought with discretionary funds. There was also a lot of this real estate owned by locals.”

Prestgard is a native Norwegian, and his wife is an American. Prior to moving to Costa Rica, they lived in the United States and France.

“Americans tend to stick to the coastal areas of Costa Rica,” Duffy said. “When you get into the mountain areas, you tend to see a lot of Europeans. They don’t have the affinity or the absolute requirement that they see the ocean or be in walking distance to a beach like Americans. Europeans like the mountain climate where often you don’t even need air conditioning.”

I also spoke with Tor’s wife, LouAnn, and asked her about Costa Rica.

“It was a beautiful place to live,” she said. “I have never seen nature as beautiful as it is there, the color of the light, so many different colors of green. It’s a beautiful land, but we have decided not to move again. We will stay in France.”

The Prestgards moved to Costa Rica in 2009 and built or rebuilt all the structures on the property.

“We put more money into the house than most people who are selling down there,” LouAnn said. “Unless you go into the million-dollar category, the quality of construction in Costa Rica is poor. For that kind of money, our property is a good investment.”

I asked Duffy how he would market the property:

He answered, “If that was my property, I would make a small price reduction to make it more attractive. I would benchmark it against five or six other properties in the area. I would produce an ad that would say, ‘Highly motivated to sell due to health reasons,’ and I would make it an exclusive listing not an open listing.”

To which he added, “The people who were interested in these types of properties and relocating from the United States prior to the Great Recession never lost their interest. They just took a pregnant pause to see if their savings and retirement funds were going to withstand the full force of the recession.”

Finally, I questioned LouAnn about missing Costa Rica.

“I miss the coffee,” she said. “Even in France, it’s awfully hard to drink a cup of coffee from the store, because we used to process our own coffee for our own consumption.”

Didn’t you take some with you when you left, I asked.

“Not enough,” LouAnn and Tor answered in unison!

via inman.com

10 essentials when buying, storing firewood | South Salem NY Real Estate

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With rising fuel costs and wildfires in a lot of forested areas, whether you buy firewood or cut your own, you’re almost sure to see an increase in the cost of the wood you burn this year. So whether that firewood is your primary source of heat or just cheery ambiance on a cold night, it pays to invest wisely and then protect your investment.

Buying firewood

If you buy firewood, there are a number of different sources where you can locate it. Many people turn to their local newspaper, Craigslist or maybe a community bulletin board. Other — and sometimes more reliable — sources of firewood include local tree-trimming services, fireplace shops, and retailers that sell and service chainsaws and related cutting equipment.

Firewood is sold by the cord, which is a stack of wood 4 feet high, 4 feet deep and 8 feet long (128 cubic feet). Firewood is obviously irregular in shape, so the stack also includes the air spaces between the pieces.

That’s what a cord should look like in a perfect world. Ideally, the dealer you’re buying the wood from will deliver it in a truck that makes verification of the load easy, such as a 4-by-8-foot truck bed, with wood stacked 4 feet high. That doesn’t always happen, and you need to be careful when you see a truck roll up with wood tossed in the back: A sloping pile of firewood in a standard pickup truck may contain only 3/4 of a cord.

The other thing you’ll be looking for when you buy your wood is whether it’s dry, also sometimes called “seasoned,” or whether it’s “green.” Dry firewood has been out in the air for a while since it was cut, allowing a significant amount of the wood’s moisture to evaporate, typically down to a moisture content of around 20 percent or less. Green wood still has a lot of the moisture in it — as much as 40 percent — so when you burn it, the fire has to first evaporate that moisture. Therefore the wood burns cooler, and you get less heat energy per cord.

Visually inspect the wood that you buy. Dry wood feels light, has loose bark and darkened ends with clearly visible splits, and makes a very definite “thunking” noise when you hit two pieces together. Wet wood is just the opposite, and will sound dull and heavy when knocked together.

You’ll typically pay a little more for dry wood, but it’s worth the cost if you plan to burn it right away. If you’re going to store the wood for burning next season, then you can save some money by buying green wood and letting it dry.

There are a couple of other ways to save some money when you buy your wood. If you have a truck or a trailer, you might be able to pick the wood up yourself at the dealer’s lot and save delivery charges, and also verify your full cord at the same time. If you have wood delivered, there’ll be an extra charge for stacking, so do that chore yourself if you can. Also, you can usually get firewood in full rounds, or pre-split. If you’re ambitious, consider getting rounds — they’re cheaper, and you can get some great outdoor exercise by doing your own splitting.

Storing and seasoning the wood

Most people store a good portion of their wood supply outside where it can continue to dry and season, and keep a small portion nearby where it’s accessible and ready for use.

Long-term storage areas should be located outside where wind and sun can help with the drying. However, to minimize danger in the event of a wildfire, and also to protect your home’s siding in case the firewood contains any insects, the wood shouldn’t be stacked directly against your house. Also, wood that’s left out in the elements, even if it’s dry, will reabsorb water from rain and snow, as well as from the ground. This will cause it to become too wet to burn efficiently, and eventually it will rot.

Ideally, consider creating an outdoor storage shed for your firewood, with a raised floor, a sloped roof for runoff, and open sides for easy access and unimpeded air circulation. Make it large enough to hold a year’s worth of wood — typically two to four cords, depending on your burning habits.

After the wood is dry, most people create a smaller storage area inside the house, such as in the garage or basement. Depending on your habits and the accessibility of your outside supply, the inside supply could be as small as two or three days’ worth, or large enough to accommodate several weeks of wood.

Finally, create some storage right at the fireplace or wood stove. One very nice solution is a canvas carrying bag with enclosed ends and sides. The wood is stacked in the bag for carrying, then the bag hooks over a decorative metal frame near the fireplace for storage, containing the wood inside the bag to minimize the mess.

You might also consider a decorative metal tub or other container to hold one or two nights’ worth of wood while keeping the dirt and chips contained. While not quite as neat, there are also a number of very attractive open metal storage racks offered by various manufacturers.

Any wood that you store inside needs to be far enough away from the fireplace that it can’t combust. And most importantly, never store newspapers, kindling, pinecones or other easily combustible fire-starting materials next to your fireplace. They can and do start house fires!

via inman.com

Pound Ridge Homes for Sale | Existing home sales fall, but up 11% from last year

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September existing-home sales fell slightly from the previous month, but remain well above year-ago levels as prices continue to escalate on new demand in key real estate markets.

The National Association of Realtors said existing-home sales declined 1.7% from August to September, with 4.75 million units sold last month, down from 4.83 million in August. Still, September numbers are up 11% from the 4.28 million units sold a year ago.

Overall, real estate is performing better than it was in 2011 with September home prices recording their seventh consecutive month of year-over-year increases, NAR said.

“Despite occasional month-to-month setbacks, we’re experiencing a genuine recovery,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist with NAR.  “More people are attempting to buy homes than are able to qualify for mortgages, and recent price increases are not deterring buyer interest. Rather, inventory shortages are limiting sales, notably in parts of the West.”

The national median price for an existing home shot up 11.3% from last year to $183,900 in September, making it the seventh consecutive month of annual price increases.

Distressed properties, including foreclosures and short sales, represented 24% of all September sales, an increase from 22% in August and down from 30% a year ago.

Foreclosures generally sold at a 21% discount while short sales sold 13% under market value in September, NAR said.

The country’s total pipeline of existing inventory fell 3.3% in September to 2.32 million homes, which reflects a 5.9-month supply. Today’s inventory level is 20% below year ago levels when the nation carried an eight-month supply.

“The shrinkage in housing supply is supporting ongoing price growth, a pattern that could accelerate unless home builders robustly ramp up production,” Yun said.

Homes also are spending less time on the market, with the median listing time now running 70 days, down from 101 days in September of 2011. About 32% of homes sold last month spent less than 30 days on the market. Nineteen percent remained listed for six months or longer.

via housingwire.com

Metrics to Evaluate Your Success in YouTube Beyond Video Views | South Salem NY Real Estate

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There are a couple of ways that you can gauge how effective and successful your online video content really is.  A lot of people focus on video views for that (we’ve debated the value in views before), but that may not be the best way to really evaluate how your content is performing on the web.  For this week’s Creator’s Tip we cover some other important ways and metrics you can look at in order to evaluate how well your video content is performing.

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Going Beyond Video Views – YouTube Performance Metrics:

1) Audience Retention – Average Length & Proportion Watched

For example, you have a video that’s three minutes long, but after 34 seconds into your video you’re seeing, everyone dropping off the radar.  Would you call that a successful video?  Even if you have a million views, but only like 100 of them get past the first minute, would that be?  I don’t think that would be a successful video.

Paying attention to how long your average viewer is watching your video is actually really important (especially now given the fact that YouTube just changed their search algorithm to focus on this).  You can find that in the analytics of your YouTube channel.  For each specific video it will give you a graph, both on your absolute retention for this video in total, how many people are still watching at various points throughout the video.

It also gives you more general comparisons to all other videos on YouTube that are similar length.  How does your video compare against all those other videos?

3) Engaging Content? – Views in Relation to Subscribers

Don’t just look at the number of views you’re getting total.  Look at the number of views you’re getting in relation to how many subscribers your channel has.  For example, if you have 100 subscribers and you’re getting an average of 100 views per video, you’re making some pretty darn good content.  Now you just need to grow and get some more subscribers.  If, however, you have a million subscribers and you’re only getting 100 views, then you’re making some really junky content.  Looking at that ratio can be really important and telling for how engaging your content is.

Look at the rate of how many subscribers you’re earning from each particular video.  If you have one and you’re just picking up ten subscribers out of 100 views, and that’s kind of your average, what can you do to increase that?  When you see that you have a video that maybe you have a ratio of half your views, which may never happen, but if you have half your views converted into new subscribers, for example, you had a video of 100 views and you got 50 new subscribers off of it, then that would be like a really successful video.   That is way more valuable to you than getting, like, a viral video even, with a million views.  As long as then you get 500,000 subscribers, then that’s even better.

3) Ratio of Views to Number of User Interactions

This is really the key for determining how successful your video might be.  Interactions like you’re getting comments, you’re picking up new subscribers, or people are clicking that like button, all those types of things.  Are they going to your channel?  Are they checking out other video content of yours?  All that kind of stuff you can see in your analytics of your YouTube channel, and kind of determine how engaging your content is.  If someone just watches one of your videos, and then maybe they watch it as an embedding on Facebook, or just leave completely, you know that’s probably not as successful a video.  Even if it gets lots of views, if it’s not pulling people into your content to check out more of your stuff and engage with you and your stuff in some sort of way it isn’t successful.

For another example, our videos here right now average around 1,000 views on a regular video.  We usually have over 100, sometimes 200 comments after a couple of weeks of these videos being published.  This is really good, because it’s good to engage with your viewers.  I’m part of another channel that might get, 10,000 views easily per video, but they only have, 50 comments.  I would say even though that one’s got way more views, the first channel is way more successful in terms of engaging an audience.  Look at some of the other stuff, not just purely views.

4) Elicit Emotion? Ratio of Shares to Number of Views

Another thing that goes into measuring how successful your video is, is if it elicits enough emotion and value in your viewers for them to feel compelled to share this online in their social networks.  Let’s not just look at the pure number of shares you get, but look at the number of shares in relation to how many views that you have.  Look at that ratio.  If a video that gets half a million views only gets like 100 shares, that’s probably not doing as well, in this regard as if your video has 1,000 views but you get 100 shares.  That’s a way more viral video than the other one, because viral videos are determined by how much their shared in relation to the number of views that they have.

There are a couple of ways you can check sharing that’s going on around your video content.  One is just to look in the YouTube analytics.  It’ll give you there a little graph and then some statistics of how your stuff is being shared.  You can also go to Topsy if you just want to see what people just copy and pasted the URL and Tweeted it rather than clicking on the share button underneath your video and shared it.  You can go to Topsy and look at exactly how many people Tweeted it from there.  It’s kind of a rough estimate, actually.  It’s not exact.  You can see some of that there and some of the Facebook things.  It’s not very great at Facebook since a lot of Facebook is private, but you can get an idea of how your stuff is being shared through those two sources.

via reelseo.com

Fannie: Sales Up 9 Percent in 2012 | Pound Ridge NY Real Estate

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Fannie Mae’s economists expect total home sales to rise approximately 9 percent this year from last year’s depressed levels.

Although home prices are likely to dip somewhat in the winter season following typically stronger spring and summer months, Fannie Mae’s experts still believe that home prices hit bottom earlier this year. Combined with record-low mortgage rates, aided by the Federal Reserve’s latest round of mortgage-backed security purchases, more consumers are likely to enter the housing market, the company said today.

Sales will top out at 4.98 million this year and continue to increase next year, reaching 5.19 million units for the first time in years. Fannie predicts prices will rise 2.9 percent this year and 1.6 percent next year. Housing starts will reach 746,000 this year and rise to 888,000 in 2013.

“The U.S. fiscal cliff and debt ceiling debate as well as the weakened global economic environment are likely to create the strongest headwinds facing any real improvement this year,” said Fannie Mae Chief Economist Doug Duncan. “With these issues hanging in the balance, we believe risks remain tilted to the downside. News from the housing sector is more positive, with various indicators showing continued momentum toward a sustainable, long-term recovery. Notably, home prices are inching back into positive territory on a year-over-year basis. Results from our September National Housing Survey also show consumers’ home price change expectations have remained positive for nearly a year.”

via realestateeconomywatch.com

10 Tips To Make ‘Working From Home’ Work For You | North Salem NY Real Estate

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Much like how freelancing isn’t for everyone, the idea of working from home is not really everyone’s cup of tea either. Sure, you get to work in your bunny slippers, no one steals your lunch from the fridge and if you hate office politics and traffic jams, it’s actually a godsend to be able to work from home. But that doesn’t mean that life’s going to be a bed of roses.

For starters, if you were to choose to work from home, most bosses would ask that you take a paycut (in lieu of not having to turn up at the office). Plus, you can absolutely expect your friends and family to take advantage of your newfound ‘freedom’. The working hours will become a blur, and sometimes if you are not careful, you’ll find yourself working 7 days a week just to catch up with all the time you’ve lost! But if you have decided that working from home is your only option, here are a few tips that may help you make the best of it.

Recommended Reading: 9 Things You Should Consider Before Freelancing Full-time

1. An Understanding Family

One of the hardest thing about working from home is setting boundaries with the people you share ‘home’ with. It’s definitely easier to understand that you are not to be disturbed when you are at the office than when you are in the back room.

Start setting boundaries from the first day you start work. Granted it will get some getting used to (about 66 days in fact) but your children, flat mates, siblings or parents must learn to give you your 8 hours (or more) a day so you can get things done.

2. Get Help

If you have very young children, you will need to get help. A 3-year-old would consider having to go poo an emergency and they expect you to treat it like one (drop everything and get me to the loo quick!). In this case, it would be helpful to have another adult in the house, or to drop your children off at daycare, or a babysitter’s to get a few uninterrupted hours to yourself.

(Image Source: Camilo Jimenez)

During busy periods, you can always get a cleaning lady to help straighten up the mess you call home. Give yourself the peace of mind required to get your work done.

3. Get Your Own No-Fly Zone

It will help to have a room, a workstation or at the very least a desk in a quiet area in your home. Here is where you keep your laptop or PC, fax machine or phone, work documents like reports and invoices, your stationery etc. And it would be good to ensure that no one but you are to use your equipment.

In case this is not possible, stock up on your essentials (e.g. always keep some ink stored away for emergencies).

(Image Source: apartment therapy)

For some inspiration, check out the Modern Office Designs from Around the World

4. I’m Working, Honey!

Within these four invisible walls, you are working and you are to treat it like how you would treat your old office. Coming to work is merely a hop into your ‘cubicle’ and going home is ‘hopping out’. Everything else should remain as it was – keep problems, issues and matters that have to do with home outside of your no-fly zone. If you can convince yourself to compartmentalize like this, it will be easier to convince everyone else.

5. Deliver the hours

Depending on what has been ironed out in the clauses of your contract (or discussed over two cups of coffee) you will be expected to deliver certain working hours for your work-from-home job. The good news with working from home is that nobody is keeping track; the bad news is nobody is keeping track (let that sink in for a bit).

(Image Source: Fotolia)

Don’t think that you can prop up your feet and catch a whole season of your sitcoms in one afternoon and try to work it back during the weekends.

Do it often enough and it will turn into a habit in the long run. Have some self-restraint and keep the entertainment to after hours or the weekends.

Read also: Time-tracking App for Freelancers [Mac]

6. Have a Routine (and Breaks)

Apart from the reason that we are just tired of commuting, another reason to work from home is because of other responsibilities you have that require you to be home. It could be because of your children, your old nana or your spouse who had suffered a broken leg from an accident. In this case, you will need to set a routine that will ensure that you can be there for them and for your company.

For the rest of us, the routine will help with keeping up with house chores – and the breaks you schedule in will help you keep your sanity. It’s also great to help you recharge for the next project or refuel your inspiration. If you get breaks while you’re in the office, there is no reason you can’t take breaks when you are at home.

7. Open Up, Be Reachable

The problem most managers have with their employees working from home is that they can’t keep an eye on them. Make it easier for your boss by being reachable whenever possible. Let them know when you are not around like when you are heading out to the bank or post office, and when you will be back.

(Image Source: Fotolia)

Keep yourself in check at all times so your boss doesn’t have to. After a while once a routine is set in, the reins will loosen and you will have the freedom to roam about freely… which could lead to another problem.

8. Deliver the goods

One thing that should always be at the back of your head is that your productivity should not diminish when you work from home. If it is counterproductive for you to be working from home, what’s to stop them from making you brave traffic and parking wardens to turn up at the office again?

(Image Source: Fotolia)

Set quotas for yourself and discuss roadblocks or problems that you have with your colleagues or managers while working on a project. Consider joining in brainstorming sessions via conferencing tools, but stay away from the office politics or gossip.

Read also: Best of Online Meeting and Web Conferencing Tools

9. Get out of the house

Moderation is key. Working in solitude has its disadvantages but only because humans are social creatures. Hence, getting out of the house is very important. If you don’t have to go back to the office to have meetings or deliver progress reports, you can bring your laptop and work at a coffee shop or meet a friend during lunch.

The idea is to break the monotony of working with your shadow and your reflection.

10. Stay healthy

Get plenty of fluids and eat healthy, and if you aren’t a fan of exercise, just try to move around whenever you can. This gets oxygen into your blood circulation which can be the cure to that dullness you’ve been feeling after looking at the same project day in, day out for months! Relax with music, some light reading or make lunch for yourself.

(Image Source: Fotolia)

Also you should pamper yourself for being able to keep away from online distractions and for getting the job done with minimal (or no) supervision. Not everyone can do it, so when you do, reward yourself for it!

via hongkiat.com

Housing industry recovering faster than many economists expected | Pound Ridge NY Real Estate

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Housing is snapping back faster than many economists had expected, with home builders stepping up production of new homes nationally and fresh foreclosures in California falling to their lowest level since the early days of the bust.

Demand for housing has surged as interest rates have plummeted and home prices in many markets appear to have bottomed, particularly in states such as California where inventories of foreclosures and other lower-priced homes have sunk. The turnaround in prices and record-low supply of newly built homes also are luring builders back after six years of pain.

“The numbers are strong in September, and that is definitely a positive sign,” said Celia Chen, a housing economist with Moody’s Analytics. “It is confirmation that housing is lifting off the bottom.”

  • Also
  • Foreclosure activity drops

Residential construction starts rose 15% nationally last month from August to their highest annual rate in more than four years. A separate report showed that the number of troubled California borrowers entering foreclosure hit its lowest level in the third quarter since the dawning of the mortgage meltdown.

If the gains in housing hold, they could give consumer confidence a boost and help the broader economy recover. Housing has played an important part in lifting the nation out of past downturns but was hampered this time by the severity of the Great Recession and the huge number of vacant and foreclosed homes dragging down the market for years.

Now rising prices are helping homeowners in properties that for several years have been underwater, in which the house wouldn’t bring enough in a sale to pay off the mortgage. Rising values could play a role in lifting household finances if families feel more secure about the direction of the economy.

Any positive economic news presumably would be a boost for President Obama‘s reelection campaign, though both he and Republican challenger Mitt Romney have largely avoided a detailed debate on housing policy. Many on the left have said that Obama’s tepid and patchwork response to the housing downturn resulted in a slower recovery while the right has decried his policies as interventionist failures.

Michael D. Larson, a housing and interest rate analyst for Weiss Research, said the Federal Reserve‘s policies to keep mortgage interest rates low and Obama’s foreclosure prevention efforts have played some role in the recovery — but the improvements can mostly be attributed to natural market dynamics.

“It is certainly encouraging; housing has been this lead anchor around the economy’s neck,” he said. But “most of this is just the passage of time. I think if the Fed or the government had done absolutely nothing … we still would have seen some demand return.”

Several recent trends have underscored improvement in housing. Nationally, home builder stocks are up, prices have begun a modest recovery, and sales of newly built and previously owned homes have risen.

The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that construction of houses and apartment buildings rose in September to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 872,000, marking the third straight month of improvement. The figures surpassed economists’ expectations of about a 770,000 annual rate.

September had the best monthly performance since July 2008, when housing starts were on an annual pace of 923,000. Compared with September 2011, new housing starts jumped 34.8%, the Commerce Department said.

Last month’s growth was “surprisingly strong,” said David Crowe, chief economist at the National Assn. of Home Builders. “As consumer confidence rises and jobs return, more local markets and more consumers will join the buyer market, and I expect housing construction to continue a modest but fairly steady rise throughout 2013 and into 2014.”

The annual rate of new home groundbreaking still is far below the peak of more than 2.2 million units reached in early 2006 during the housing bubble. But the pace has picked up dramatically from the low of 478,000 in April 2009, and is up sharply from the 706,000 annual rate in May. Building permits for private housing construction, a sign of future activity, also jumped in September, up 11.6% from August and 45.1% from a year earlier. The annual rate in September was 894,000 building permits.

Patrick Newport, an economist with IHS Global Insight, said the increases were likely due to gains in household growth after years of people doubling or tripling up to wait out the worst of the downturn.

“What’s kicking in right now is simply the demographics,” Newport said. “We have been building at too low a rate for four years, and so demand has been suppressed because of the recession, and now it is starting to kick in.”

On the other side of the housing pipeline, the shortage of cheaply priced homes in California appears poised to continue. The number of Californians entering foreclosure dropped in the third quarter to its lowest level since early 2007, according to a report from real estate firm DataQuick. Foreclosure filings have fallen as banks work toward completing more loan modifications and short sales. An improving economy and rising prices have also helped.

“Prices in most areas today are up significantly from their low point in early 2009,” said John Walsh, president of DataQuick. “Additionally, during the past year, we’ve seen short sales overtake the foreclosure process as the procedure of choice to deal with homeowner distress.”

Notices of default fell 10.2% from the prior quarter and 31.2% from the same period last year, DataQuick reported. A total of 49,026 notices of default — the first stage of foreclosure in California — were filed on homes in the Golden State last quarter.

That was the lowest number since the first quarter of 2007, and a 63% decline from the first quarter of 2009, when notice of default filings peaked in the state.

The number of homes lost to foreclosure rose 5% from the prior quarter and dropped 41% from a year earlier. A total of 22,949 homes were lost to foreclosure last quarter.

via latimes.com

Denver a real estate market to watch, says report | North Salem NY Homes

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Metro Denver has been named one of the country’s top 20 real estate markets to watch next year in the “Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2013” report released Wednesday.

In its 34nd year, the commercial real estate study is compiled by the PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP financial services firm and the Urban Land Institute.

This year, it was released in conjunction with the ULI’s Fall Meeting, Wednesday through Friday at the Colorado Convention Center. The meeting is being attended by about 5,000 real estate professional from around the country.

Denver ranks 14th on the list of “U.S. Markets to Watch: Overall Real Estate Prospects.”

The report says that Denver’s housing market was not hit as hard by the housing downturn as many other cities, with fewer homes in foreclosure or sitting delinquent than most.

“Denver’s economy has remained healthy, maintaining the ability to absorb a diverse employment base,” the report notes.

PwC’s Wendy McCray, partner in the assurance practice for the Denver PwC office, said Denver’s large young population — about 16 percent are 25-34 years old — “tells people there’s good job growth and Denver’s economy is more diverse.”

The “Emerging Trends” study is based on surveys of more than 1,000 commercial real estate experts, including investors, developers, lenders and brokers.

Here are some of the city’s other rankings:

• Denver ranks eighth among promising investment markets, moving up three spots from the 2012 report, due to “strong growth potential. … An attraction is the city’s central location in the country’s southern and western regions, as well as Denver’s ever-expanding international airport.”

via bizjournals.com