Developer Renzo Renzi’s attempt to stop foreclosure auctions on two Miami condominium projects through Chapter 7 filings has failed.
Renzi’s companies lost an $18.2 million foreclosure judgment in Miami-Dade County Circuit Court in December, and used the Chapter 7 filings in January to stall the auctions.
Bankruptcy judge rejects efforts to stop foreclosures on Miami condo projects | HousingWire.
Robert Shiller, Karl Case and David Blitzer — leading experts in the housing market — believe several headwinds will keep a lid on housing gains, such as a low level of new home starts, an unexpectedly slow migration of so-called shadow inventory onto the market, and difficulty for buyers to secure financing, writes NBC News.
Yale University economist Shiller said:
“You’ve got a lot of breathless commentary in the media. All this talk that we’re in this great recovery—we probably are in the short run, the longer run doesn’t look so terrific to me.”
The year’s solid economic start faded late in the first quarter, but the recent setback is a temporary one, analysts claim.
The slow in activity is partly due to ongoing fiscal drags, including the budget sequester. However, a modest reacceleration is expected in the second half of this year, as the housing market continues to gain traction, according toFannie Mae’s economic outlook.
Housing is expected to act as a tailwind for the economy throughout the year and into 2014, even though there may be a few hiccups in overall economic activity.
“Our May forecast predicts that the second half of 2013 will be a little stronger than the first half, despite the slowdown during the past couple of months,” Doug Duncan, chief economist for Fannie Mae.
He added, “Employment numbers are getting better, albeit it at a relatively slow pace, and the April employment picture should help boost consumer sentiment toward the economy overall. However, we continue to keep an eye on potential headwinds to our forecast, including the long-term effects of sequestration, spending constraints, the sovereign debt crisis, and the impending debt ceiling.”
Residential investment contributed to economic growth for the eighth consecutive quarter, adding 0.3 percentage points during the first quarter of 2013.
Additionally, the annualized pace of total housing starts in March surpassed the one million market for the first time since the housing crisis, driven solely by a surge in multifamily housing.
Multifamily homebuilding has benefited from a shift in tenure choice over the past several years toward renting, according to Fannie Mae.
For instance, the homeownership rate continued to decline in the first quarter, dropping to 65% — the lowest rate since the third quarter of 1995, the report noted.
By contrast, new single-family home sales rose in March, jumping 51%, which is the biggest gain since the second quarter of 2003.
Despite the robust gain in new home sales in the first quarter, homebuilders’ confidence from the Nation Association of Home Builders’ survey continued to cool in April, declining for the third consecutive month.
Housing will reaccelerate economic growth: Fannie Mae | HousingWire.
When you’re building a website, it’s tempting to get distracted by all the bells and whistles of the design process and forget all about creating compelling content. But having awesome content on your website is crucial to making inbound marketing work for your business.
So how do you balance your remarkable content creation with your website design needs? Why, with your ‘About Us’ page, of course! For a remarkable ‘About Us’ page, all you need to do is figure out your company’s unique identity, and then share it with the world.
I know … easier said than done.
Still, there’s no excuse for you to neglect one of the most important pages on your website — which also happens to be one of the most commonly overlooked pages. Let’s read on to discover six companies with awesome ‘About Us’ pages and see how you can emulate them on your own website. By the end of this post, showing off how awesome your company is won’t seem like such a challenging feat.
Have a cool story about how your product or service was created? Put it on your ‘About Us’ page. Good stories humanize your brand and provide context and meaning for your product. What’s more, good stories are sticky — which means people are more likely to connect with them and pass them on.
Yellow Leaf Hammocks does an amazing job of telling you about its product by describing the founder’s journey to Thailand and the birth of his “big idea” for the brand. Like any good storyteller, Yellow Leaf Hammocks uses words to paint a picture, rather than simply describing the events that happened. Sentences like “the hammock wrapped around him, cocooning him in its cloudlike embrace” immediately give you a mental picture of what’s happening.
Every company has a story to tell, so break out your storytelling skills from that random English class you took years ago and put them to work on your ‘About Us’ page. Using descriptive and emotive copy, an ‘About Us’ page with a story works harder for your business than a generic one.
You’re not like everyone else — so why should you sound the same as everyone else? Stand out with an ‘About Us’ page that shows off who you really are with witty headlines and a real brand voice.
That’s exactly what video production company LessFilms accomplished on its site using witty copy and the image of a large wrestler (yes, a wrestler). Although the wrestler dude and the funny headlines have nothing to do with LessFilms’ business model or product, they show off the founders’ sense of humor and give the brand a personality.
People tend to think that ‘About Us’ pages have to sound formal to gain credibility and trust. Most people find it easier to trust real human beings rather than a description that sounds like it came from an automaton. Trying to sound formal on your ‘About Us’ page results in stiff, “safe” copy and design — the perfect way to make sure your company stays invisible.
Eight Hour Day does a great job of showcasing the people behind the company to make the brand seem human. Including the founders’ names in the header of the website and featuring the photos of them on the ‘About Us’ page drives home the point that Nathan and Katie are a “couple that loves to create.” Even the picture of their dog makes you think Eight Hour Day has real people behind the brand.
The chief US economist for Deutsche Bank, Joseph LaVorgna, tweeted some great news a little while ago.
He push-posted an economic review of the housing industry that shows the recovery is doing even better than originally thought:
“We believe investors still do not fully appreciate the direct positive effects a rejuvenated housing
sector will have on the economic outlook,” according to the report LaVorgna is tweeting about.
“When combing through the GDP accounts, we estimate that total housing-related spending — beyond just residential construction — accounts for a much larger share of the economy than some market participants currently may believe,” the analysts write.
So the outlook remains bright, as HousingWire yesterday reported, but it’s still not as good as it once was, Deutsche Bank notes.
WESTCHESTER COUNTY, N.Y. – While coyote incidents are on the decline overall, Westchester County experts say that coyotes are typically more active during the spring season and it could be the reason for an increase in coyote attacks on small pets in Westchester County.
Two recent incidents involving pets caused New Castle Police to send out an alert to residents about coyotes Monday, but the latest statistics on coyote reports to the Department of Enivronmental Conservation show that incidents in New York are on the decline. There were at total of 36 incidents reported to the DEC in 2012, down from 39 in 2011 and 80 in 2007, according to the latest reports released by the DEC.
Statistics may not be helpful for the Westchester families who have recently lost pets to recent coyote attacks. But Maggie Ciarcia, a licensed NYS wildlife rehabilitator who serves Westchester County, said there is a strong correlation in coyote attacks on small pets during the spring season.
“Right now is the time of year when coyotes have their babies,” Ciarcia said. “The coyote pups are typically born in late-March into early-May so they’re more likely to hunt for any food they can find in the spring. They’ve been here all along, not just to have their pups, but they’re typically more active in the spring.”
Coyotes view domestic dogs as a threat to their young during the “spring denning season,” according to the DEC. Ciarcia said the incidents in Chappaqua were most likely the result of one mother looking to feed and protect its young.
“My guess would be those all involve the same coyote family,” Ciarcia said. “Normally they eat mice or rodents and do a great job of keeping the rodent population down but coyotes can become very situated to humans and to easy food. So we always warn people not to feed coyotes or leave food for outdoor pets.”
Watch Out For Coyotes In Westchester This Spring | The Bedford Daily Voice.
With rates headed up, demand for purchase loans fell a seasonally adjusted 4 percent from the week before during the week ending May 10, but was still up 10 percent from a year ago, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in releasing the results of its latest Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey.
After declining for seven weeks in a row, rates for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($417,500 or less) averaged 3.67 percent, up from 3.59 percent the week before, the MBA said. Points also increased to 0.41 from 0.33 (including the origination fee) for 80 percent loan-to-value ratio (LTV) loans.
Applications for refinancings were down 8 percent from week to week, but refi requests still accounted for 76 percent of all mortgage applications. Source: mbaa.org.
– See more at: http://www.inman.com/wire/purchase-loan-demand-eases-as-mortgage-rates-rise/#sthash.WkQbJNTm.dpuf
Purchase loan demand eases as mortgage rates rise | Inman News.
The gap between Hong Kong home prices and sales is the widest on record as new taxes, rising supply and the prospect of higher mortgage costs deter buyers in the world’s most expensive housing market.
Residential buildings stand in the Mid-levels area of Hong Kong. Photographer: Lam Yik Fei/Bloomberg
The CHART OF THE DAY tracks Centaline Property Agency Ltd.’s weekly index of home prices against monthly sales of residential units, according to data compiled by Bloomberg dating back to 1996. Prices have fallen 4.2 percent from a record reached in mid-March, compared with a 77 percent contraction in sales from their post-global financial crisis peak in 2010. The lower panel shows the U.S. benchmark interest rate compared with America’s unemployment rate.
The Hong Kong dollar’s peg to the U.S. counterpart has kept borrowing costs in the city at near-record lows, underpinning a 109 percent gain in home prices since the beginning of 2009, even as the government imposed several property curbs to cool demand. The city’s housing market got an additional boost in January 2012 when the U.S. Federal Reserve pledged to keep interest rates low through at least late-2014.
“When people were expecting prices to rise, as they had been over the last couple of years, none of the government’s measures could deter buyers because borrowing costs were low,” said David Ng, an analyst at Macquarie Securities Ltd. in Hong Kong. “Now, the opposite is happening.”
Since 2010, Hong Kong has charged an extra tax of up to 20 percent of the value of homes on buyers who resell them within three years and raised the minimum down-payment on mortgages for homes costing more than HK$7 million ($902,000). In October, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying imposed an extra 15 percent tax on all home purchases by companies and non-residents, and promised to raise land supply
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Hi, everybody. Our top priority as a nation is reigniting the true engine of our economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class. And few things define what it is to be middle class in America more than owning your own cornerstone of the American Dream: a home.
Today, seven years after the real estate bubble burst, triggering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and costing millions of responsible Americans their jobs and their homes, our housing market is healing. Sales are up. Foreclosures are down. Construction is expanding. And thanks to rising home prices over the past year, 1.7 million more families have been able to come up for air, because they’re no longer underwater on their mortgages.
From the day I took office, I’ve made it a priority to help responsible homeowners and prevent the kind of recklessness that helped cause this crisis in the first place.
My housing plan has already helped more than two million people refinance their mortgages, and they’re saving an average of $3000 per year.
My new consumer watchdog agency is moving forward on protections like a simpler, shorter mortgage form that will help to keep hard-working families from getting ripped off.
But we’ve got more work to do. We’ve got more responsible homeowners to help – folks who have never missed a mortgage payment, but aren’t allowed to refinance; working families who have done everything right, but still owe more on their homes than they’re worth.
Last week, I nominated a man named Mel Watt to take on these challenges as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Mel’s represented the people of North Carolina in Congress for 20 years, and in that time, he helped lead efforts to put in place rules of the road that protect consumers from dishonest mortgage lenders, and give responsible Americans the chance to own their own home. He’s the right person for the job, and that’s why Congress should do its job, and confirm him without delay.
And they shouldn’t stop there. As I said before, more than two million Americans have already refinanced at today’s low rates, but we can do a lot better than that. I’ve called on Congress to give every responsible homeowner the chance to refinance, and with it, the opportunity to save $3,000 a year. That’s like a $3,000 tax cut. And if you’re one of the millions of Americans who could take advantage of that, you should ask your representative in Congress why they won’t act on it.
Our economy and our housing market are poised for progress – but we could do so much more if we work together. More good jobs. Greater security for middle-class families. A sense that your hard work is rewarded. That’s what I’m fighting for – and that’s what I’m going to keep fighting for as long as I hold this office.
Obama Weekly Address: Growing The “Healing” Housing Market | RealClearPolitics
