Archive for May, 2011
By admin in
bathroom design
May
16
It’s been the best of times and the worst of times the last few years for residential real estate transactions in Great Falls.
It’s a good time to buy or sell a house in the first-time buyer range of less than $200,000, Great Falls real estate brokers say, but a slow time to unload upper end homes in the plus-$300,000 range.
Realtors say the Great Falls real estate market weathered the recession much better than much of the nation and some other Montana cities such as Billings, Kalispell and Missoula.
And, while Great Falls home sales got off to a frosty start during the chilly, snowy first three months of the year, they’re springing up the last two months.
Rick Lopes, an Air Force first lieutenant who recently transferred to Great Falls, spent three or four days looking with his wife Kelly for a house. The found a $172,000 1960s vintage home with a finished basement and big yard, in the Sunrise Park area of southeastern Great Falls, not far from Malmstrom Air Force Base.
They spotted a dozen homes in their price range via the Internet in Nevada they wanted to view on a quick trip to Great Falls in February. Realtor Jim Dea showed them around in three or four days and they made their bid successfully by phone on the drive back to Las Vegas.
“We’re very pleased,” said Lopes, a military weather forecaster who has spent 19 years in the Air Force.
“The house is in a great, safe neighborhood, with parks and places to run and walk,” he said. “It has a big backyard. Some might consider it a starter home, but it’s got lots of space, including a finished basement. We bought a house we’ll be happy to live in the rest of our lives.”
Lopes said they considered buying a house in Las Vegas, where he was last stationed. He said they could have gotten more house for their money there. With 24,000 houses on the market because of the housing crisis, the average home price is $108,000.
“But we weren’t sure how stable the housing market was there and preferred living in Montana,” he said.
Sales of homes of up to $150,000 remained steady during the worst of the recession in 2008 and 2009, said Dea, a broker for ERA American Horizon Realty and president of the Great Falls Board of Realtors.
In recent months there has been stiff competition among buyers in that price range, he said, with a few clients losing out if they don’t act soon enough or bid high enough.
The strength of that market was aided by the federal first-time homeowner program from November 2008 to June 2010, he said. Qualifying homebuyers could get tax credits of up to $8,000.
In addition, more loan money was available at lower interest rates for lower priced homes through government supported mortgage programs.
Brett Haverlandt, owner and broker of Dahlquist Realtors agreed.
“Sales of homes priced under $200,000 in Great Falls have remained steady,” he said. “Our average sales price in Great Falls has consistently been about $155,000, so the bulk of our market is buying houses between $125,000 and $200,000.”
Meanwhile Jack and Lorene Sands, a retired couple living at 2708 Huckleberry Drive in the Belview Palisades area, are putting their executive home on the market for the third spring in a row. It failed to sell the first two years.
“We built it and have loved living in the four-level house with unobstructed views of the river,” Sands said. “It’s big, 3,000 square-foot house that’s great for entertaining. We’ve got great memories. But we’re getting older now — I’m 76 — it’s getting to be too big of a house now that our kids our raised. We’d like to move to a smaller house, on one level if possible.”
The couple listed the home, which features a wrap around deck and a mother-in-law apartment, at $444,000 originally, which he said might have been a little steep during the recession and have come down to $395,000 now.
“Our Realtors worked it very hard last year, with open houses and newspaper ads,” he said. “Quite a few people came through last year, but were mostly looking. Two or three couples were really interested but couldn’t get financing lined up.”
The Sands usually list the home in spring and summer, when they believe more people are looking to buy, and take if off the market in fall and winter, when they travel some and cold weather discourages home buyers.
“We’re a little disappointed at the time it’s taken to sell the house,” said Sands, a retired sheet metal contractor. “But we still enjoy living here.”
“Over the past couple of years, sales of houses in excess of $300,000 have slowed dramatically, causing owners to drop prices,” Haverlandt said. “A few purchasers have made some remarkable buys, with some houses selling below their appraised prices.”
Median price kept steady
Even though the prices for upper end homes may have fallen, Dea said, the median price of Great Falls home sales — the level at which half the home sales are higher and half are lower — did not falter in the recession.
The median price of single-family houses sold in Great Fall was $147,500 in both 2008 and 2009, and actually climbed to $148,000 in 2010, according to Great Falls Board of Realtors statistics.
The number of houses sold did drop from 1,098 to 976 over those three years, however, and the average days on the market before selling climbed from 105 to 126.
“The recession did hit Great Falls some with higher unemployment and other factors, but not nearly as much as other parts of the country and state,” Dea said.
“But Great Falls home buyers may have been affected by the gloom and doom reported daily by national newscaster Brian Williams and others who kept talking about the country’s real estate crisis,” he added.
Haverlandt said he and Dahlquist’s staff were surprised the realty firm ended up with a surprisingly good 2010 sales year, selling the third most homes in company history despite the flat local market and challenging national economy.
National and state concerns
Statistics released last week indicated home values nationally had declined by 3 percent in the first quarter, and the 57th straight month overall, causing some economists to push back their projections of when the housing market will hit bottom, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The abundance of foreclosed homes in other parts of the country was a big factor.
And one of Montana’s top economists recently predicted that housing and home construction will be weak spots in an otherwise improving economy.
After enduring the broadest, deepest recession in 25 years, Montana can expect to see more growth in the state economy later this year — but not in construction, said Patrick Barkley, director of the University of Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research.
“It will be another two years before we see anything resembling healthy demand for new homes,” he wrote in the current issue of Montana Business Quarterly.
New construction of single-family homes is down at least 60 percent from pre-recession peak values in every major Montana market except Helena and Butte, where declines averaged 20 percent, he said.
“Homebuilding won’t take off until home prices stabilize,” Barkey said. “With prices in 2010 averaging 3 percent lower than year-ago levels, that day has not arrived yet.”
Winter chills bring May sales
The number of single-family houses sold in Great Falls during the first four months of 2011 was 208, down from 276 houses during the first quarter of 2010, Dea said. And the average days on the market before sale increased from 126 to 152 for the same period.
But the first quarter of 2010 had one economic advantage, with first time home buyers anxious to buy houses before an $8,000 tax break expired.
In addition, Dea and Haverlandt noted, the cold weather and frequent snow during the first few months this year discouraged home sales.
“January and February were very slow months for us and other brokers in town,” Haverlandt said. “It’s hard to get people motivated to look at homes during the bitter cold and snow.”
But sales have picked up significantly the last six to eight weeks, they said.
Dea said he and his wife Annette have sold seven houses in five weeks since the bad weather broke.
Dahlquist “did very well in March and April,” Haverlandt said. “Our uptick in sales this spring was better than most years.”
“The local real estate outlook appears fairly strong for the rest of the year,” he said.
“One big driver is the fact that interest rates are unbelievably low,” Haverlandt said.
Conventional, 30-year mortgage rates dropped to 4.75 percent last week and 15-yard mortgage rates dropped to 3.75 percent, he said.
“That’s about as good as interest rates can get, and Great Falls has a good supply of houses,” Haverlandt said. “It’s a great time to borrow money to buy a house.”
By admin in
bathroom design
May
13
A recently resigned Los Angeles police detective, who enticed fellow cops and others to invest millions of dollars with her, has been arrested and charged with theft and securities fraud.
Darcey Greenfield, 39, surrendered Wednesday to investigators from the San Bernardino County district attorney’s real estate fraud unit after an arrest warrant was issued late last week, authorities said. Greenfield faces 10 felony charges, including the sale of false investment securities, the sale of securities without a license and grand theft.
Greenfield pleaded not guilty to the charges Thursday, said Vance Welch, the deputy district attorney in charge of the real estate fraud unit. Her bail has been set at just over $1 million and she remains in custody at a detention center in Rancho Cucamonga, he said. Her attorney could not reached.
The fact that Greenfield was an LAPD cop heightened the importance of the case, Welch added. “We have to show that we are willing to hammer our own, or no one has any faith in the system,” he said.
Greenfield and her real estate dealings were the subject of a Times article last year.
Shortly after joining the LAPD in 1994, Greenfield told The Times in an interview last year, she began investing in real estate. Those early purchases and sales of properties were personal deals, but soon evolved into a side business that involved soliciting investments from others. She made grandiose claims, telling investors they would receive double-digit returns within months, according to authorities and documents obtained by the Times.
The charges filed by San Bernardino County prosecutors stem from investments totaling $265,000 that Greenfield collected in 2008 from a husband and wife and another man who lived in that county, according to court filings.
Greenfield is accused of violating state laws that establish the terms under which people can sell securities, such as real estate.
One of the charges alleges that she illegally assured the investors that she would sell a piece of her own property to reimburse them if their deals went sour. Prosecutors also allege that Greenfield lied to the investors when she told them the properties in which she was investing their money were secured by official deeds of trust.
Greenfield told the investors their money would be used to help homeowners in foreclosure, according to the district attorney’s office. The victims were promised they would get back a high rate of return and their principal, but they received nothing, authorities said.
Greenfield’s reach extended far beyond the investors in the San Bernardino County criminal case. Over several months in 2007 and 2008, Greenfield told The Times, she collected about $2 million from investors. San Bernardino County officials put the total amount raised from Los Angeles County residents at $3 million.
At least 13 LAPD employees are known from Greenfield’s court records to have invested with her, including four detectives and five supervising sergeants. Police officials say they suspect that the total was higher because officers were probably pooling their money and investing under a single name.
The money disappeared. Greenfield claimed she had been swindled by a man named Leroy Dowd. According to Greenfield, Dowd, the 70-year old bishop of a South Los Angeles church, had persuaded her to give him the cash she raised to help him catch up on late mortgage and tax payments on his church and several other properties. In exchange, she said, he promised he would repay her with hefty profits when the properties were sold or the mortgages refinanced.
Dowd was eventually arrested on unrelated fraud charges. He pleaded guilty to duping an elderly woman into signing over the deed to her Claremont house and selling it from beneath her, as well as stealing more than $40,000 from a bank in a check-kiting scam. Dowd was released from custody last year, and his whereabouts are unknown. San Bernardino County authorities said they were not currently investigating him.
Some of Greenfield’s investors have questioned her claims that she was an unknowing victim of Dowd, saying they believe she was somehow involved in the scheme. It is a charge that Greenfield denied in an interview with The Times last year. Los Angeles police officials launched an investigation into Greenfield, but she resigned from the department earlier this year before disciplinary proceedings were completed.
LAPD officials did not return calls for comment.
At least three officers, including Greenfield, have declared bankruptcy as a result of the investments. Others went further into debt to pay back friends and relatives who gave them money to invest. The debacle has been an embarrassment for LAPD officials, who were left to ponder how officers trained to solve crimes ended up being taken so easily.
joel.rubin@latimes.com
By admin in
bathroom design
May
10
By Jeff Ostrowski
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Home prices continued to fall in the first quarter and still may not have hit bottom, although Palm Beach County property values no longer are dropping like a rock.
While home prices nationally fell 3 percent from the fourth quarter to the first quarter, values here dipped only 1.8 percent, according to data released Monday by real estate website Zillow.com.
Martin County prices fell 1.3 percent from the fourth quarter to the first, and St. Lucie County values rose by 0.1 percent, Zillow said.
That bit of not-so-bad news is tempered by the huge crash in local home prices. While national home values are down 30 percent from their peak, properties in Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties have plunged 57 percent in the past five years. Martin County values are down 51 percent.
“That’s just a phenomenal bloodletting,” said Stan Humphries, Zillow chief economist.
The huge drop has pushed affordability measures such as price-to-income ratios – which soared to absurd heights during the boom of 2005 to 2007 – to more realistic levels, Humphries said.
An improving job market means Palm Beach County home prices could hit bottom in the near future, although Humphries wouldn’t predict when. The uncertain foreclosure picture complicates predictions, he said.
Zillow had expected national home prices to hit bottom this year, but a weaker-than-expected housing market led Humphries to forecast that national home prices would keep dropping into 2012.
“Home values will not fall forever,” he said. “They will fall to the level at which you excite some demand.”
In Palm Beach County, much of that demand is driven by foreign buyers and investors who are paying cash for homes.
Jack McCabe, a real estate analyst in Deerfield Beach, also sees further declines for Palm Beach County home prices.
“The big double-digit declines are over, but I still think we’re going to see single-digit declines this year and next,” he said.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, predicts prices will continue to drop by 1 percent a month for the rest of the year.
“There’s no guarantee that we’ll hit bottom and just stop,” Baker said. “We could overshoot on the downside.”
Foreclosures remain a wild card . There is already a glut of homes on the market, and an unknown number of foreclosed properties will be added to the inventory.
It doesn’t help that about half the region’s homes are owned by people who owe more than the homes are worth.
In Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, 48 percent of homeowners were underwater in the first quarter, Zillow said. In Martin and St. Lucie counties, the figure is 60 percent.
Nationally, home values fell faster in the first quarter of 2011 than any quarter since 2008, Zillow said. Also, “negative equity” reached a new high, with 28.4 percent of single-family homeowners underwater on their mortgages.
With 21,000 properties listed for sale in Palm Beach County, home prices can’t improve, said real estate broker Richard Bass, who runs Keller Williams offices in Boynton Beach, Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale.
“My guess is we’re going to drag along the bottom for a while,” Bass said. “It has to, until some of this is inventory gets soaked up.”
All the bad news means Florida home prices might finally be nearing bottom, McCabe said. “I haven’t said I think it’s a good time to buy for years,” he said, “but we’re getting near that point.”
By admin in
bathroom design
May
7
Q. I currently own a home and am underwater on the value. If I were to sell my house and buy another, what would happen to the remaining balance that I owe?
A. In case there’s anyone left who doesn’t know what you’re talking about, “underwater” means you owe more on your mortgage than you could get by selling the house.
With some mortgages, including FHAs and VAs, a qualified buyer can take over your mortgage along with the house. That’s not likely to happen, though, if the buyer can purchase a similar house for less money and get a new mortgage at today’s lower rates.
So, nobody will buy your house if the present mortgage stays on it. It will have to be paid off. There are several possibilities:
• Perhaps your bank would agree to take whatever you can get on the open market and cancel the rest of the debt. That’s usually possible, though only if you can prove you have no other assets and are near destitute.
• Perhaps the lender would agree to a short sale, but they’d seek a judgment against you for the unpaid balance.
• Perhaps your lender wouldn’t agree to anything and you’d have to pay off the shortfall with your own funds.
• Or perhaps you’d just walk away and abandon the property, so the mortgage will go into foreclosure. Then you wouldn’t have good enough credit to get a loan on another house.
Some people who must move, due to this situation, end up holding on to the present house and renting it out. They take on the worries and risks of being landlords, hoping for enough rental income to cover the mortgage payments.
No question, it’s a difficult situation and through no fault of your own. If you don’t have to move, just hang in there. Or if you want to move, look at it this way: What you lose on your house, you’ll make up by buying someone else’s house for less than it would have cost formerly. The extra money it’ll take to pay off your present mortgage is the same as the savings you’ll make over what you would have paid for the new house a few years ago.
Q. I had to carry private mortgage insurance because I had a low down payment. I paid full premium upfront for complete coverage. In January 2011, I lost my place due to an electrical fire. My mortgage was down to much less due to extra payments I had been making.
When the insurance was placed, I was told if the building was destroyed, the mortgage would be paid. And if there was any difference, I would get the overage. Now the lender institution tells me insurance coverage descends as the mortgage decreases, and the payment will be just for the amount of the mortgage at the time of loss. Since I paid for full coverage, is this right?
A. Mortgage insurance pays off the remaining debt, which becomes smaller every month as you pay the loan down.
What you believe you were told about “overage” is a perfect example of why everything should be in writing to head off misunderstandings. Carefully read any documents you ever received about your insurance.
Q. My wife and I purchased condos before we got married in 2007. After we got married, we moved into her condo and have been renting mine out. We now want to move into a home (we just had our first baby), but I can’t imagine we are going to be able to get much of a home mortgage loan if we already have two existing mortgages.
A. When you apply for a loan to buy your own home, lenders will give you credit for the rental income that you can expect on those two condos. After all, many investors own lots of rental property and are still able to borrow on further mortgages.
Q. I’m currently looking to purchase some tax deeds on some delinquent properties in my county. What are my legal rights and abilities with property law (restitution or commandeering the property) once I do this?
A. I think you’re asking about the delinquent taxpayer’s right of redemption. Available in some states, it’s a length of time for paying off the back taxes, interest, fees, and getting the property back. If you’re going to buy tax foreclosures, tax deeds, liens or certificates — whatever they’re called in your area — you should have your own real estate attorney on tap. That’s the person who will give local information.
• Edith Lank will respond to questions sent to her at 240 Hemingway Drive, Rochester, N.Y. 14620 (please include a stamped return envelope), or readers may email her at www.askedith.com.
$PHOTOCREDIT_ON$ 2011, Creators Syndicate Inc.$PHOTOCREDIT_OFF$
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By admin in
bathroom design
May
4
Recommend
By Owen Fletcher
(Adds Citic Bank official’s quotes and background on China’s property-tightening measures in 2nd-5th paragraphs, China Vanke’s April sales data in 6th-7th paragraphs, background on more possible tightening moves in 8th-9th paragraphs, banking regulator’s moves to address property sector in 10th-12th paragraphs.)
BEIJING (MarketWatch) — China Citic Bank Corp. (0998.HK), the seventh-largest Chinese lender by asssets, warned Wednesday of severe risk in China’s real estate market this year and said it plans to cut lending to the sector, in a sign banks could start to feel the impact of government efforts to cool the property market.
“Citic Bank relatively clearly sees that real estate risk this year is severe,” said Shi Yuan, the general manager of the bank’s risk management section, on a quarterly teleconference. He noted Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has repeatedly stressed the importance of continuing with the government’s property-tightening measures, such as limiting home purchases and raising down-payment requirements.
The remarks come amid signs the government’s effort to bring stubbornly high home prices under control are having more effect, and amid concern a drop in prices could put financial pressure on banks.
“We especially are paying attention to risks in the funding chain for developers. We believe as tightening continuously gets stronger, the true real estate risks will appear,” Shi said.
Citic Bank aims to reduce its real-estate loans this year by a third, he said. “We are being more prudent, and the risk is controllable.”
In a sign of the impact of the tightening measures, China Vanke Co. (000002.SZ), the country’s largest property developer by market share, said Tuesday its property sales in April rose 1.3% from a year earlier to CNY7.9 billion, slowing sharply from 47.8% growth recorded in March.
“The property tightening measures have made a clear impact on the market with a slowdown in transactions, and new homes continue to enter the market which lead to some inventory pressure,” Vanke board secretary Tan Huajie said Tuesday in a statement.
China may further expand home purchase limits to new cities to prevent speculative capital from flowing into third- and fourth-tier cities, the Shanghai Securities News reported Wednesday, citing an unnamed source close to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. China could also extend the property-tightening measures currently in place in Beijing to other cities, the paper said, citing the source.
Government officials have repeatedly expressed concern about housing prices, which have remained high despite a recent slowdown in transaction volumes. Wen and President Hu Jintao said separately over the weekend that the central government remains determined to bring down prices, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
The China Banking Regulatory Commission said last month it ordered banks to launch a new round of stress tests on property loans and to step up efforts to prevent credit risks. It said however the tests don’t represent a judgment on the real-estate market. In March, CBRC’s assistant chairman, Yan Qingmin, said earlier stress tests found the maximum tolerable fall in real-estate prices was 30%. Prices of newly built homes in 49 of the 70 large and medium-sized Chinese cities covered by a government survey rose in March from the previous month, down from 56 cities in February and 60 in January, the National Bureau of Statistics said last month.
Separately, the CBRC said Tuesday it has no plan to issue new regulations governing property trusts in May, refuting earlier reports it may impose further tightening controls on property trusts to curb risks in the real-estate sector. The regulator said it has been consistently asking trust companies to conduct property-related business while exercising proper risk management.
Many property developers have turned to property trusts for financing in the face of lending curbs and restrictions on developers’ capability of raising funds from the stock market, but there has been increased regulatory scrutiny on such activity as the authorities seek to contain credit risk.
Also Wednesday, Citic Bank’s general manager for financial planning, Wang Kang, said the bank will face pressure in the medium and long term in efforts to continuously replenish capital, but that new regulations on capital adequacy ratios issued by China’s bank regulator Tuesday won’t have a short-term impact on the bank.
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