Tag Archives: Cross River Luxury Real Estate

Pending home sales down 10.5% from February 2013 | Cross River Real Estate

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Pending home sales fell for the eighth straight month, down 0.8% from the downwardly revised January report and down 10.5% from February 2013, according to the index from the National Association of Realtors.

NAR’s pending sales index is an indicator of closings that usually happen within three months.

“Contract signings for the past three months have been little changed, implying the market appears to be stabilizing,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for NAR. “Moreover, buyer traffic information from our monthly Realtor survey shows a modest turnaround, and some weather delayed transactions should close in the spring.”

Existing home sales have been down since September 2013, with buyers facing the challenges of an increasing affordability gap as investors have driven up prices and lending requirements have tightened.

“Upon first glance, it may seem high that a quarter of all ZipRealty home sales closed without financing in 2012 and 2013,” said ZipRealty CEO and president Lanny Baker. “But based on our own internal analysis and data from the National Association of Realtors, the percentage of all-cash real estate transactions may actually be moderating. Nationwide, the percentage of all-cash real estate transactions reached a five-year high in 2010 at 27%, and the percentage of all-cash property sales has slowly declined or flattened every subsequent year.”

All-cash transactions accounted for 20% of the residential real estate market in 2009, and 25.6% of the market in 2011, NAR reports.

According to ZipRealty’s analysis, in 2013 26% of all the real estate transactions closed by ZipRealty agents were purchased with cash, while 25% of the homes purchased through ZipRealty agents were acquired with cash.

 

http://www.housingwire.com/articles/29460-pending-home-sales-down-105-from-february-2013

 

Rising Home Prices May Not Tell the Whole Story | Cross River Real Estate

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Everyone knows rising home prices make it a sellers’ market. Sellers can afford to hold out for top dollar because buyers are rushing to beat higher prices.

Well, not exactly. Zillow.com, the home listing and data firm, has a more refined way of looking at it, defining a sellers’ market as “not necessarily one where home values are rising, but rather one in which homes are on the market for a shorter time, price cuts occur less frequently and homes are sold at prices very close to (or greater than) their last listing price.”

The buyers’ market is, as you’d expect, the opposite: “Homes for sale stay on the market longer, price cuts occur more frequently and homes are sold for less relative to their listing price.”

Prices may indeed be rising quickly in sellers’ markets and falling in buyers’ markets, but price change alone is not the key factor.

So whether you are a buyer or seller, with a little sleuthing you can figure out who has the negotiating edge. Lots of this data are under Zillow’s Local Info button.

Zillow’s approach makes for some intriguing conclusions about conditions as the spring selling season gets rolling. The West Coast is a seller’s market, while the Midwest and East Coast favor buyers. In the recent post-crisis years, the whole country tended to move in the same direction, but now, in a return to more typical behavior, local variations are reasserting themselves, Zillow says.

The hottest sellers’ markets: San Jose, Calif., and San Francisco; San Antonio, Texas; and Los Angeles. The hottest for buyers: Cleveland, Ohio; Philadelphia; Tampa, Fla.; and Chicago.

 

 

http://www.mainstreet.com/article/real-estate/rising-home-prices-may-not-tell-whole-story?puc=yahoo&cm_ven=YAHOO

Here Now, The 10 Richest Neighborhoods In New York City | Cross River Real Estate

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[Original image via Curbed Flickr Pool/Vivienne Gucwa]

Following the example set by our sister-site, Curbed LA, we too are dissecting the Higley 1000, a list that uses information from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2006-2010 to rank the nation’s most affluent neighborhoods according to their mean household income. In their coverage of the list, Atlantic Cities notes that denser urban areas are subject to more variance than the suburbs, whose large-lot exclusionary zoning keeps them the territory of the uber-wealthy. So only somewhat surprisingly, NYC environs far outshone city neighborhoods to take the list’s top spots. Coming in at the most affluent neighborhood in the nation on the Higley 1000? Greenwich, Connecticut’s “Golden Triangle,” where a mean household income is $614,242 annually. The first New York City ‘hood to appear on the list ranks 90th. Think you can guess what it is?:

10) Upper East Side: ($278,040)

9) Cobble Hill: ($281,303)

8) Beekman Place: ($283,316)

7) Forest Hills: ($288,699)

6) Dumbo: ($295,153)

5) Tribeca: ($332,138)

4) Carnegie Hill: ($333,067)

3) Flatiron District: ($347,688)

Why the future of real estate is peoplework, not paperwork | Cross River Real Estate

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Nearly everything in our lives has migrated online over the past decade. We shop online, read books on our tablets and stream movies through Netflix. We book flights ourselves and rent cars from an app on our phone. Handshakes have given way to email and Facebook ‘likes.’

The world has undoubtedly changed, but relics of our old lives remain.

This is especially apparent in real estate with the prevalence of documents, whether deadwood or digital attachments. Real estate professionals must close the gap – to succeed in an industry where human connections and experiences now matter more than ever.

More of the Same Won’t Cut It

Think back to how agents and clients closed deals in the past. The buyer and seller would meet with their agents to negotiate until they either reached a deal, or didn’t. If they reached a deal, they would shake hands and then document it. Over time, however, the document became the meeting place. It was scanned, mailed and inefficiently tossed back and forth to close a deal. Layer on the past 30 years of digital innovations, from the fax machine and scanners to email and Google Hangouts, and our industry is left with a convoluted mesh of yesterday’s technologies that solve yesterday’s problems.

 

 

http://www.housingwire.com/blogs/1-rewired/post/29259-why-the-future-of-real-estate-is-peoplework-not-paperwork

 

That’ll Be $19.5M for This Highly Photogenic Aspen Compound | Cross River Real Estate

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21 images

Equal parts glassy modern, traditional ski lodge, and austerely cement-clad in an almost post-Soviet vein, this circa 1995 Aspen compound is a bit of a hot mess, architecturally speaking. But whoever designed the interior is a miracle worker; so often, when chalets go for darkly handsome and somewhat brooding they end up looking way too severe or even a bit raunchy. Could be that all the vintage fineries—which thankfully, stop just short of Anthropologie catalogue excess—pull this place out of the design limbo it was born into. Of course, the listing asserts that “every detail… was crafted from imagination and ingenuity,” but anyone willing to plunk down $19.5M on this 14,000-square-foot six-bedroom head-scratcher will have to come to grips what a hodge-podge it is from the outside. Get an eyeful in the gallery below.

 

http://curbed.com/archives/2014/03/10/thatll-be-195m-for-this-highly-photogenic-aspen-compound.php

Don’t Waste Money on These 5 Remodeling Projects | Cross River Real Estate

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The herky-jerky real estate market — recovering here, lagging there and nearly reaching a bubble in some cities – has buyers, sellers and homeowners all scratching their heads. Uncertainty is the word.

It’s risky to delve into lavish home improvement projects that are unlikely to earn back what you put into them. Even if you’re in one of the markets where CNN Money expects the greatest increases this year – Oakland, Calif.; Tampa, Fla.; Fort Worth, Texas; New Orleans; Richmond, Va.; Hartford, Conn.; Baltimore; Birmingham, Ala.; New York; and Memphis, Tenn. – don’t go hog wild.

Best: Honolulu

The payback on remodeling is up, says Remodeling magazine, which each year publishes a report on the resale value of 35 home improvement projects. But that’s “up” from years of decline. “This trend signals an end to the long slide in the cost-value ratio, which began to fall in 2006 and didn’t begin to rebound until last year,” the magazine says.

Some improvements can raise your home’s value quite a bit, but getting your entire investment back is rare.

The best city for return on your remodeling dollar is Honolulu, Remodeling says. The top 10 cities, in order, are:

  1. Honolulu
  2. San Francisco
  3. San Jose, Calif.
  4. San Diego
  5. Bridgeport, Conn.
  6. Fort Myers, Fla.
  7. Charleston, S.C.
  8. Oklahoma City
  9. Washington, D.C.
  10. Austin, Texas

Money wasted

You can easily end up pouring money down the drain by launching into a home remodeling job without learning what the payback might be. Ask several local real estate agents what a particular project might do to your home’s value. You might go ahead anyway. But you’ll do it with your eyes open.

 

 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/don-t-waste-money-5-211851621.html

Ask Stacy: What’s the Best Way to Pay Off My Mortgage Early? | Cross River NY Homes

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This week I’m answering three questions with a common thread. They’re from readers interested in ditching their mortgage ASAP.

Question No. 1:

Could you go over some different ways to pay off your mortgage early? I am retired and have a fixed income, and would like to retire the debt on this house. I make an extra payment a year, and tried to do a 15-year fixed, but the costs to get the APR down to a reasonable rate drove the mortgage back up to my original loan amount. I felt that I was starting all over again. Thanks. — Richard

Question No. 2:

I have a mortgage loan at 2.75 percent with a variable interest rate (that adjusts) every year, with 11 years remaining. I am making an extra payment of $100 every month. Can you help me lower my interest or years left? Thanks. –Fernando

 

 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ask-stacy-best-way-pay-160035947.html

I Turned My Tiny, Dark, And Overpriced New York Apartment Into A ‘Smart Home’ For Just $300 | Cross River Homes

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The SmartThings kit has all the basics you need to get started connecting your home.

My apartment gets almost no natural light.

That’s one of the problems with living in New York. I spend about a zillion dollars per month in rent, and still have a teeny tiny apartment that faces the back of a bunch of taller buildings that block the sun. My bedroom window faces some other guy’s bedroom window across a narrow, dark alley.

So no matter what time of day it is, I always have the lights on in my apartment.

For the last several weeks, my apartment has been programmed to light itself up. Whenever I enter my building, my apartment knows I’m home and switches on the lamp in my living room so I don’t have to fumble around in the dark. When I leave the room, the light shuts itself off.

That’s because I’ve been testing something called SmartThings. SmartThings isn’t just one gadget, but a Web-connected system of everyday objects that can control everything in your home from your lights to your coffee maker. I tested one of the SmartThings starter kits, which sell for $199 or $299.

How It Works

SmartThings starts with the hub, a small white plastic box that looks sort of like a WiFi router. The hub plugs into your router and talks to the rest of the connected objects in your home. Since the hub is connected to the Internet, you can control everything from a computer or the SmartThings app, even if you’re out of the house.

From there, you set up the objects you want connected. My starter kit came with two motion sensors, two multi sensors that can tell you when a door or window is open, two presence sensors that you clip to your keychain so the hub knows when you’re home (the app can also double as a presence sensor using your phone’s GPS), a smart outlet for controlling lamps or appliances, and a moisture sensor that goes under the sink to alert you in case of a leak.

 

 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/turned-tiny-dark-overpriced-york-164004491.html