Tag Archives: South Salem Luxury Real Estate

4 signs the real estate market is in trouble | South Salem NY Real Estate

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wish I’d said this (and in a few weeks I will have, I’m sure) but Ramsey Su at Acting Man Blog did it first and in a way I’ve been searching for the words to explain.

Every week or so we get another indicator that’s supposed to tell us how the housing market is doing.

And every part of the industry trumpets whichever metric best serves its own purpose. Thus you have the Mortgage Bankers Association touting this “good news” about interest rates, while the National Association of Realtors touts how rising home prices are a great sign, and on and on.

But none of these measures – home sales, home starts, home prices, interest rates – tell the real tale.

Then along comes this boy named Su, who gets right to the heart of the matter:

The strength of the real estate market should not be measured by price appreciation, or the number of new and existing home sales. It should be measured by the support of underlying fundamentals and whether they can help to withstand economic cycles without policy makers having to go hog wild just to avoid a total collapse.

How healthy is the real estate market today?

He looks at some troubling measures we’ve noted at HousingWire – the decline of income growth, the bulk of Americans having subprime credit, and the fact that there’s nothing left in the Fed for another bailout if (when) things go pear-shaped again.

1. The Subprime Majority

Recently, I came across a report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) titled Assets and Opportunity Scorecard. Some of their findings are quite interesting. According to the CFED Scorecard, 56% of all consumers have sub-prime credit. Sub-prime is “earned”. A consumer has to miss a few payments, or default on a loan or two to earn that status. These 56% cannot, or should not, be taking on more debt, especially a large debt like a mortgage.  They may also be struggling with a mortgage that they should not have taken out in the first place.

And with so few companies willing to loosen credit standards, even the worthy subprime don’t have many options.

2. Liquid Asset Poor

CFED found that 44% of households in America are Liquid Asset Poor, defined as having saved less than three months of expenses. As one would expect, 78% of the lowest income households are asset poor, but 25% of middle class ($56k to $91k) households also have less than three months of expenses saved.

How much of a down payment can you expect them to have on hand?

 

 

http://www.housingwire.com/blogs/1-rewired/post/28994-signs-the-real-estate-market-is-in-trouble

Flipping Moves on Up as Profits Rise 19 Percent | South Salem Real Estate

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Higher prices and fewer foreclosures have not put a dent in the flipping business.  In fact, last year saw 156,862 single family home flips — where a home is purchased and subsequently sold again within six months — in 2013, up 16 percent from 2012 and up 114 percent from 2011, according to RealtyTrac’s Year-End and Q4 2013 Home Flipping Report.

Homes flipped in 2013 accounted for 4.6 percent of all U.S. single family home sales during the year, up from 4.2 percent in 2012 and up from 2.6 percent in 2011. Flips accounted for 3.8 percent of all sales in the fourth quarter, down slightly from 3.9 percent of all sales in the third quarter and down from 7.1 percent of all sales in the fourth quarter of 2012 — the highest percentage of sales represented by flips in a single quarter since RealtyTrac began tracking flipping data in the first quarter of 2011.

The average gross profit for a home flip — the difference between the flipped price and the price the flipper purchased the property for — was $58,081 for all U.S. homes flipped in 2013, up from an average gross profit of $45,759 in 2012. The average gross profit for homes flipped in the fourth quarter was $62,761, up from 52,746 in the fourth quarter of 2012, a 19 percent increase.

 

http://www.realestateeconomywatch.com/2014/01/flipping-moves-on-up-as-profits-rise-19-percent/

 

US mortgage applications near flat in latest week: MBA | South Salem NY Real Estate

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Applications for U.S. home mortgages edged slightly lower in the latest week, an industry group said on Wednesday.

The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage application activity, which includes both refinancing and home purchase demand, slipped 0.2 percent to

The index hit its lowest level since December 2000 at the end of last year, soon after the U.S. Federal Reserve announced it would start pulling back on its $85 billion per month bond-buying program as the economy grows strong enough to stand on its own.

The interest rate on fixed 30-year mortgages averaged 4.52 percent last week, the lowest level since November and down 5 basis points from the previous week.

 

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101371017

3 proclamations from social media ‘experts’ | South Salem Realtor

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Social media “experts” abound these days. Many send conflicting messages every time technology changes, delivering “urgent” signals to hop on the next big thing or be left in the dust.

If someone refers to themselves as a social media expert, your first red flag should go up. The landscape of social media is huge. Someone may be an expert in strategies, tactics or particular channels (for example, Mari Smith is an expert in Facebook), but an expert in all of social media? Nope.

If you hopped on every bandwagon as instructed, you would be in a constant state of disarray. How could you possibly have time to run your business?

The following are directives you may receive as you search the Web, and things to consider as you hear them.

1.  ”Be on every social media channel or be left behind”

Particularly for those just getting started, this will take you down before you begin. If you have a goal of running a marathon, are you going to put “run 26.2 miles” on your calendar tomorrow morning? No. You would map out a plan that takes you from point A to the point of reaching your goal in digestible pieces. This sort of overwhelming statement is what causes people to procrastinate — sometimes for years

 

 

 

– See more at: http://www.inman.com/next/3-proclamations-from-social-media-experts-that-will-kill-your-implementation-strategy/?utm_source=20140127&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyheadlinesam#sthash.qAKuE3yS.dpuf

Is housing bubbly? There is a lot going on | South Salem NY Homes

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There is a lot going on right now in housing and mortgage markets. But one of the debates that continues to rage on is whether U.S. housing markets are in a bubble or not.

HousingWire’s own monthly HW Magazine talked about it in detail in our January issue.

So too has CNBC’s John Carney, in a post from late last year with the headline: Yep, it’s another housing bubble. And then on January 14 of this year, Peter Wallison at the American Enterprise Institute wrote a breathless op-ed proclaiming: The bubble is back.

But is it really a bubble just because home prices are rising again?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this chart published today by rating agency DBRS in their annual overview of the RMBS market for 2014 suggests that anyone claiming a new housing bubble is simply ignoring the most basic housing fundamental of them all: nominal home prices.

Most markets haven’t yet reached their pricing level highs from the previous cycle, with the exception of two markets that saw the least amount of decline.

Those who want us to think there is a bubble cite the relationship between home prices and rental rates; or look at some calculated measure of affordability. And when those are out of whack, they say it’s a bubble.

But it could be that rental rates are themselves out of whack, not housing prices. And it could be that other variables are affecting affordability rather than just prices, too. Supply and demand factors can do funny things to ratios, all of which need to be read in context.

No analysis should ignore market fundamentals, should it? Can we really be building another housing bubble if home prices in almost every U.S. market right now haven’t even surpassed levels they once were at — even after the strong price rebound we’ve already seen in the previous year?

After five years of a housing economy that has been either horrible or just plain bad, it’s difficult to believe that one good year somehow suddenly puts the nation’s housing markets back into the bubble.

 

 

http://www.housingwire.com/blogs/1-rewired/post/28599-the-most-important-chart-in-housing-right-now

Real estate prices in Ukraine will go down soon | South Salem NY Homes

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A gradual decline of price growth rate in the residential real estate is to be expected in Ukraine in the near future with possible further decrease of the prices, said the director of SHM Smith Hodgkinson Dmitry Selivanov at a press-conference in Kiev, a REGNUM correspondent reports.

According to the expert, processes which are taking place in Ukraine now, have already taken place in the Baltic countries in due time, where real estate prices reached their ceiling, stopped, and then went down by 10-20%. “We will see the same processes in Ukraine within the following year too. It concerns both Kiev and other big cities, where real estate makes profit,” said the expert and added that everything would depend on stability of the macroeconomic situation in the country and on inflation rates.

The reason of the prices going down, the expert believes, is the too overstated price for real estate. “Because, now many apartments are used not on purpose, not as a residential place, but as an object for investing. Rather than investing in banks or bond-like papers, Ukrainians invest  in the real estate,” Selivanov marked. He also expressed an opinion that most perspective for building in Kiev today is the territory of the left bank and in the suburbs, which is caused by a coming transport collapse on the right bank.

 

http://regnum.ru/english/1004619.html