The 5 bedroom home is listed for 2.25 million pounds or a bit over  4 million dollars US.

Except for the dining room, the walls are white or pale cream, so new owners could easily make their mark. The Chapmans’ style is bright and colourful with lots of flowers – whether real ones in vases, patterned roses on the red curtains and blinds in the kitchen toning with the red and pinky tiles over the range, on the bedroom curtains or in large cheerful paintings on the walls.

They’ve put a new pale oak floor in the hall and kept the original oak floor in the dining room. On the top floor they have three bedrooms and a large bathroom put in when they arrived, and they’ve just added an en-suite bathroom to the main bedroom on the first floor.

The Chapmans reckon they spent up to £350,000 renovating and decorating the house.

West Hill Road is lined with homes in a mix of styles including a Sixties apartment block, 1930s villas and, at the far end, a line of houses like the Chapmans’, all with views over London from the top floors.

And boy will that make a difference in the quality of life 10 years down the road. Instead of congestion that will squander the beauty, they will have quality and organized development.

I have has the opportunity to live in a smart growth community. Our county has insisted on 5 acre lots in most of the county and the towns and cities tend to have very organized and restrictive housing criteria with lots of greenbelts and open spaces. And it is wonderful.

Some may dislike this approach but watching the rest of Metro Atlanta explode and have a hodgepodge of housing built around it makes me see the logic and appreciate the housing appreciation that goes along with it.

Longtime residents and local officials who want to guide growth, but not hinder it, say they believe that Jasper will benefit from developing later than other parts of the South. Having watched their neighbors, particularly Beaufort County, become overwhelmed by growth that spilled over from Hilton Head, Jasper officials say, they saw what was coming and got together to set some ground rules.
“In areas like ours, where people are starved for development, they’re willing to give away the farm,” said Kevin Griffin, assistant city manager of Hardeeville, who has an advanced degree in urban planning. “But we’ve really tried to get ahead of the growth, rather than being five years behind and having to catch up.”
More than two years ago, local leaders from Hardeeville and Ridgeland got together with county officials to collaborate on a shared growth plan. A five-mile radius was drawn around Ridgeland, and another five-mile radius was set around Hardeeville, delineating where development could occur according to local zoning laws.
Any landowners who fall outside of each town’s boundary and want to build have to petition to be annexed, and if approved, pay for the installation of sewers, water, and roads. After extensive research, the joint planning committee determined that every new residential unit costs about $6,200 in services.
“People talk about smart growth, but this is more like fiscal growth,” Mr. Griffin said. “We don’t say you can’t develop here; it’s a pay-to-play environment. Suddenly, that cheap land doesn’t seem so cheap anymore. But the good developers, the ones who want to be stewards of the land, they are the ones who can adjust their plans and create a quality product.”

‘Smart Growth’ in South Carolina – New York Times.

“The economy went through a very soggy period,’’ said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Bank of America’s Investment Strategies Group. “The biggest risk to the economy is if the housing market doesn’t stabilize. That could force consumers and businesses to cut back sharply in spending. Those risks seem to be limited at this juncture,’’ she said.

Even though the economy slowed in the first quarter, inflation picked up. That could complicate the Fed’s work of keeping the economy and inflation on an even keel. “This is a knife’s edge scenario,’’ observed John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Economics Group.

An inflation gauge tied to the GDP report and closely watched by the Fed showed that core prices — excluding food and energy — rose at a rate of 2.2 percent in the first quarter, up from 1.8 percent in the fourth quarter. via Pantagraph.com

The group will acquire and manage high-quality neighborhood, community and outdoor shopping centers, Oak Brook-based Inland Western said in a statement.
Inland Western will contribute properties valued at up to $500 million to start the venture and the partners will spend another $500 million to buy and redevelop properties. An unidentified pension fund client of Morgan Stanley’s will provide 80 percent of the equity capital and Inland Western the remaining 20 percent. via Daily Herald

Now, about one in eight adjustable-rate loans (a quarter of which are subprime) totaling some $325 billion are [...]

• Beazer: Net loss for the three months ended March 31 was $43.1 million, or $1.12 a share, compared with a net income of $104.4 million, or $2.35, a year earlier, the Atlanta-based company said today in a statement. Revenue slid 35 percent to $826.3 million.

  The company recorded $86.9 million in pretax expenses to walk away from land-option contracts and to write down the value of land.

• Meritage: reported a drop in profit in the first quarter and also said it was seeing signs of a rebound in demand. Scottsdale, Arizona-based Meritage, the 13th largest homebuilder, said its first quarter profit plunged 81 percent to $15.1 million, or 57 cents a share, from $79.7 million, or $2.86, a year ago.

  The company forecast earnings of $2 to $2.50 a share for 2007. Six analysts in a Bloomberg survey project earnings of $1.73 a share, excluding items, on average.

• Pulte: reported a first-quarter net loss of $85.7 million, or 33 cents a share, compared with a profit of $262.6 million, or $1.01, a year earlier. Revenue fell 37 percent to $1.87 billion, the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan-based company said yesterday in a statement.

• Ryland:  said yesterday after the close of regular trading its net loss in the three months ended March 31 was $24.4 million, or 58 cents a share. That compared with a profit of $90 million, or $1.86, a year earlier.

  First-quarter revenue fell 34 percent to $706.4 million, the Calabasas, California-based company said in a statement. New orders in the quarter plunged 26 percent to 2,989. The company had forecast earnings in January of $3.75 to $4.25 a share for 2007.

But there is some good news. In the corporate world, when the proverbial sh#t hits the fan, companies have learned to clear the decks. Remember that piece of land that Jim bought from his cousin that has a canyon running through it, write it off. And all of the other blunders that have been sitting on the balance sheet disappear fairly quickly.

What is nice is when the market turns around the companies have gotten rid of the weak parts of their business and are ready to be aggressive.

Information for this post came from Bloomberg.

Bank of America

Is this another example of the big boys moving in during a slowdown, or is it a market that Bank of America thinks is ripe as the baby boomers gray?

Bank of America Corp. has agreed to buy the reverse-mortgage business of Seattle Mortgage Co., a subsidiary of Seattle Financial Group Inc. Seattle Mortgage markets its reverse mortgages under the name Reverse Mortgage of America.

Charlotte-based BofA (NYSE:BAC) has been piloting reverse-mortgage products with customers in Arizona since November. “Seattle Mortgage has been a pioneer in developing mortgage products and services that address the senior population’s growing need for greater financial liquidity,” says Floyd Robinson, president of BofA consumer real estate. “This is in line with Bank of America’s desire to grow its consumer real estate business by utilizing our significant advantages in size and scale.” via the  Charlotte Business Journal:

Why is it that when it is time to cut services the first thing the policians look to is education and not the pork that surrounds them like road projects to the middle of nowhere. Don’t bother answering that, we all know that politicians have learned the fastest way to a tax increase is to threaten the children. (they hate it when I phrase it that way)

So watch out Detroit homeowners, soon the fine folks from the state government will be doing is hurting the schools to make a point and further depress the value of your homes.

This time it looks like slow real estate and construction markets are dragging down sales tax receipts. The state School Aid Fund relies on sales and real estate transfer taxes for nearly 45% of the $12.6 billion it had expected to receive by Oct. 1. Granholm’s proposed $125-per-pupil cut is based on the expectation that $200 million of that money won’t be available.
Sales tax collections have been below year-ago levels in four of the last five months, and total collections are 3.9% below those in 2006, according to the latest report from the Senate Fiscal Agency. Jay Wortley, the agency’s economist, said Thursday that economic anxiety among consumers, who are delaying or canceling buying decisions, is the likely culprit. via the Detroit Free Press