Archives for April 2007
Well, you can buy the home of Bob the Builder creator’s home in the town of Putney in England. The home was bought with the royalties from the hit show that Keith Chapman created. While the home has been extensively refurbished, it does not come with the characters Bob, Wendy, and Scoop.
The 5 bedroom home [...]
Parts of South Carolina’s “Low Country” are being discovered. The region has been a sleepy and rural area, but as the opportunity to live near the ocean is being bought up, growth and development is coming to this part of the old south. Instead of lining up with hat in hand to monetize every square [...]
On Friday the Census Bureau released its report of vacancy rates and homeownership. According to Reuters:
The share of U.S. homes owned but empty rose for the 10th straight quarter at the end of March to a record 2.8 percent, the Census Bureau said Friday.
The number has been steadily climbing since the fourth quarter of [...]
The Commerce Department’s report Friday showed how the slumping residential real estate market is affecting the national economy. The combination of slower sales and tighter lending led to the economy rising only 1.3 percent in the first quarter of 2007. Businesses are pulling back in the face of the slowdown as they do not want [...]
Morgan Stanley and Inland Western Retail Real Estate Trust are teaming together to form a billion dollar fund to invest in shopping centers across the country. The REIT is aimed at upscale retail centers that are experiencing increasing rents and valuations. The open air shopping centers are some of the best performing real estate in [...]
The May issue of Realtor magazine is out. It includes an "economic report" by the National Association of Realtor’s chief economist, David Lereah. I thought I would share just a bit of his "Subprime Reckoning" article:
Now, about one in eight adjustable-rate loans (a quarter of which are subprime) totaling some $325 billion are [...]
If you were looking for good news out of the residential construction world, today is the day to go out and play golf. Quarterly results for some of the major homebuilders were released today and they were down right ugly. Take a look:
Beazer: Net loss for the three months ended March 31 was $43.1 million, [...]
Bank of America is purchasing Seattle Mortgage Co. from Seattle Financial Group for an undisclosed amount. Seattle Mortgage had been doing business as Reverse Mortgage of America since 1995 having written over 40,000 reverse mortgages and over 4 billion in outstanding balances.
Is this another example of the big boys moving in during a slowdown, [...]
Michigan has been seeing a tough time of it lately. The slowdown in the automotive industry and the free fall of housing prices in metropolitan Detroit is now taking it’s toll on state tax revenue. Of course you can trust the government officials to take the low road and automatically tell the populace that they [...]