13 Popular Kitchen Storage Ideas and What They Cost | Katonah Real Estate
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Tread Lightly Around the Rickety Homes of Wilderness Dwellers | Katonah Real Estate
Photo by Antoine Bruy via Art the System
From 2010 to 2013, French photographer Antoine Bruy spent his life threading through the remotest regions of Europe, capturing the daily existence of the ultimate in civilization-eschewing people. His Scrublands series tells the stories of individuals and families whose extreme brand of self-reliance translates to, among other things, the most rudimentary and ramshackle of homes—think “The Burrow” from Harry Potter, but without all the magical bits holding it together.
read more…..
http://curbed.com/archives/2014/08/04/houses-wilderness-people.php
This $460,000 West 56th Street One-Bedroom Is … Something | Katonah Real Estate
8 images
Well, there’s definitely a reason (more than one, actually) that this apartment, a one-bedroom co-op in Midtown West asking only $460,000, is so cheap. Let’s start with a quick rundown. Floors: tile throughout. Windows: two in the bedroom, around half of one in the living room. Painted wall murals: most definitely, although their precise location is not entirely clear. Living room curtains framing something that looks like a window but is definitely not a window: yup.
And if this place wasn’t confusing enough, there’s the cryptic brokerbabble: “The reasonably sized living room space can fix anything that you have.” Is the living room magic? If any living room is magic, it could be this living room. (Perhaps more importantly, is it reasonably sized?) There’s also this paragraph about the kitchen: “The special feature of this apartment including marble tiles in the kitchen I’m decorated wall. It was painted by a talented artist.” The identity of the artist, and what exactly he or she painted, remain a mystery, like most everything about this apartment.
read more…
http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/04/21/this_460000_west_56th_street_onebedroom_is_something.php
Housing Starts Rise 2.8% In March | Katonah NY Homes
Numbers released by the Commerce Department Wednesday suggest that last year’s rapid housing recovery is continuing to slow.
Housing starts rose 2.8% in March to a seasonally adjusted rate of 946,000. This is higher than the month before, but 5.9% lower than the rate one year earlier. Housing starts measure actual groundbreakings on new construction and are thus a timely measure of market conditions.
Other data also suggest a slowdown. Building permits, a good indicator of the future, were 990,000 (seasonally adjusted) in March. That’s 2.4% below the revised February rate, the fourth drop over the last five months.
The numbers missed expectations by economists surveyed by both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal; economists surveyed by Bloomberg predicted housing starts at 965,000 and permits at 1.01 million.
Yesterday’s National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index showed builder confidence a bit slack; the index rose just 1 point in March to 47. A score of 50 or higher indicates that more builders view conditions as good than poor.
However, the March data shows starts of single-family homes at 635,000 (seasonally adjusted), a rate that is 6% above February’s revised figure. Construction of single-family homes dropped in January but has been steadily rising each month since.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2014/04/16/housing-starts-rise-2-8-in-march/
House prices in Britain are rising again | Katonah Real Estate
AFTER their worst slump for a generation, house prices in Britain are rising again. In the 12 months to January 2014, the value of homes increased by 6.8% across the country and by 13% in London, according to the Office for National Statistics. In the capital, where cash-rich buyers have viewed property as shelter from economic turmoil in the euro zone and elsewhere, prices are now at an all-time high after adjusting for inflation. In his old job at Canada’s central bank, Mark Carney, the boss of the Bank of England, was accused of presiding over a housing bubble. But since the crisis the bank has a bag of new tricks it can use to steady the market (see print article).
With base rates at an all-time low, mortgage repayments as a percentage of income are near their historic lows for first-time buyers, according to the Council for Mortgage Lenders, a trade association. That has allowed homeowners to borrow ever larger amounts of money from the banks. If real wages continue to stagnate across the country, they may struggle when interest rates eventually start to rise.
Explanation:
This interactive chart allows readers to compare the ups and downs of Britain’s 13 regional housing markets as measured by the Office for National Statistics. The data begin in 1968 for nine regions and countries, extending to 12 from 1992 onwards. As well as prices in nominal and real terms (deflated by the retail prices index), we have presented affordability measures for first-time buyers compiled by the Council for Mortgage Lenders. There are five different measures:
• House-price index: in nominal terms, rebased to 100 at the select base date. • Prices in real terms: the house-price index is deflated by retail prices and rebased at 100 to take account of the effects of inflation on purchasing power. • Mortage payments as % of income: first-time buyers’ median mortgage interest payments as % of income (at the time of housing completion).
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/04/british-house-prices
Peek Inside 1945’s ‘Celestial’ Chrysler Building Observatory | Katonah NY Real Estate
Photo courtesy of The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon, Day by Day by David Stravitz; Princeton Architectural Press
Today we take a break from our regularly-scheduled Library of Congress programming to have a look at a tipster’s request: the observatory on the 71st floor of New York City’s Chrysler Building. The observatory—which featured, according to the book The Chrysler Building: One Kansas Mechanic and His Jazz-Age Tower of Babel, “a celestial motif, with sun rays painted on the walls, and Saturn-shaped lighting globes hanging from the ceiling”—opened to the public in 1945, 15 years after construction halted on the tower. The book also says that the steeply-pitched gabled ceiling succeeded in creating a feel of “disorienting splendor,” a technique used by architect William Van Alen to “dramatize a state of mind.”
http://curbed.com/archives/2014/02/28/peek-inside-1945s-celestial-chrysler-building-observatory.php
Katonah NY Real Estate Weekly Report | Katonah NY Homes for Sale
| Katonah NY Weekly Real Estate Report | 2/21/2014 | |
| Homes for sale | 39 | |
| Median Ask Price | $995,000.00 | |
| Low Price | $359,000.00 | |
| High Price | $8,250,000.00 | |
| Average Size | 3770 | |
| Average Price/foot | $370.00 | |
| Average DOM | 141 | |
| Average Ask Price | $1,580,074.00 | |
Existence of year-round Martha’s Vineyard rentals confirmed | Katonah Real Estate
Search HomeAway.com for vacation homes and cottages on Martha’s Vineyard and you’ll have to sift through more than 2,000 properties.
Ask a broker if he knows of a place where you can stay year-round, and you’ll probably hear what Martha’s Vineyard Patch.com editor Louisa Hufstader heard from her Realtor mom: Keep looking, and ask around.
Who wants to rent year-round on Martha’s Vineyard? Well, all the hard-working people who take care of the tourists but can’t afford to own, for one. Hufstader ultimately found an apartment through a Facebook group, but rounds up a bunch of other resources for year-round renters, ranging from regional housing authorities to local newspapers and, of course, Patch.com’s real estate section. Source: patch.com.
– See more at: http://www.inman.com/wire/existence-of-year-round-marthas-vineyard-rentals-confirmed/?utm_source=20140127&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyheadlinesam#sthash.EnYYXrjb.dpuf
Cuomo title insurance reform bill would slash rates, crack down on kickbacks | Katonah Real Estate
US existing home sales fall to lowest level in nearly a year | Katonah NY Homes
U.S. home resales fell sharply in November to their lowest level in nearly a year, hurt by a rise in interest rates since the spring and ongoing price increases that have shut some home buyers out of the market.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said on Thursday that sales of previously owned homes dropped 4.3 percent last month, the third monthly fall in a row, to an annual rate of 4.90 million units.
That was the lowest annual rate since December 2012, and well below the median forecast in a Reuters poll of a 5.03 million unit pace.
“It is a clear loss in momentum for home sales,” NAR economist Lawrence Yun told reporters.
Mortgage interest rates have risen sharply since May on expectations the Federal Reserve would start winding down a bond-buying economic stimulus program. The Fed announced on Wednesday it would start tapering its monthly bond purchases next month.
Yun said the rise in mortgage rates, coupled with fast-rising prices, had made home buying less affordable for many Americans.
The data carried a hint, however, that home price gains may be cooling off. The median price nationwide rose 9.4 percent inNovember from the same month in 2012 to $196,300. It was the first time in a year that prices didn’t rise at a double-digit pace.
Yun said the NAR was “very concerned” about plans by the Federal Housing Finance Agency to reduce the maximum size of mortgages which can be bought by taxpayer-owned finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He said this could further impede the housing market’s recovery.