Entries Tagged 'East' ↓

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I found this article on a local Massachusetts newspaper, the South Shore Insider, that has an interesting take on the real estate market south of Boston. It captures the true essence by a broker that has served as the  president of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

David Wluka has a brilliant line that is probably the most hones thing said in this whole process. And expectations are different too. People up until 2000 were looking at houses as an investment (where they would) retire and pay off the mortgage. The cycle of appreciation started and they started looking at it as a source of income.

Outstanding.

Why did the housing market cool down this year?

Well, you just can’t maintain an overheated market forever. There were three or four years of double-digit appreciation and it just couldn’t be maintained. It’s a natural thing, (housing) markets go up and they go down.

When you talk to people about their perception about the (housing) market, they have a short horizon. They look back three months, they look back six months. But you have to look back three to five years to understand what’s happening in the market.

And expectations are different too. People up until 2000 were looking at houses as an investment (where they would) retire and pay off the mortgage. The cycle of appreciation started and they started looking at it as a source of income.

For example, the cumulative appreciation from 1990 to 2000 was 6 percent in Massachusetts. From 2000 to 2005 it was 84 percent. The expectations of people are really up there. So (the housing market) is cooling down, but the plane is not crashing. It’s going to land. Maybe a bump or two on the way down, but the plane is going to land. via the SOUTH SHORE INSIDER

The bad news is that the housing boom in one of the hottest regions in America is over. The good news, home prices are not falling out of bed. They have stabilized with solid single digit year over year increases. The overall pricing is down since last summer, but there is not a complete meltdown of pricing as many have suggested as possible.

It was the sixth consecutive quarter of single-digit increases, and the Westchester-Putnam Multiple Listing Service proclaimed that after eight years, “The boom is over.”

“Our area has made a relatively gentle descent to a more sustainable level of sales volume and price increases,” the group said in its report on first-quarter sales. The number of houses sold was down 14 percent from a year ago and the number of available houses was up by a third.

It said that for the rest of the year, “price increases probably will level off to a percentage point or two more than underlying inflation. … In short, no more records for a while but no big trouble, either.”

The record median price for Westchester was set last summer at $711,700. In the fall, the median price was $652,250. Prices are typically highest in summer.

WCBS NEWSRADIO 880.

The Hull, Massachusetts home of John F. Kennedy’s grandfather sold at auction at a steep discount Tuesday for the price of $950,000. The home had been fraudulently purchased by Jamie Edelkind who was sentenced for 5 years in jail. He was convicted of using phony mortgage and payroll documents. The assessors office appraised the land for tax valuation at 1.3 million dollars.

Ernesto Caparrotta was the winning bidder for the eight-bedroom, 7,163-square foot mansion on in Hull, once owned by two-term Boston Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, two agents said. Caparrotta, who is building 16 luxury condos on Hull’s waterfront, did not return a call to comment on his plans, but he told WBZ-TV he hopes to “restore it and then decide what to do with it.”
Bidding started at $750,000. The auction was held in the driveway of the Nantasket Avenue property and lasted just three minutes.
“Everybody was surprised that they let it go for $950,000,” said Tom Grimshaw, a partner at Century 21 Homes by Heritage in Weymouth. “Usually if they don’t get the price they want, they don’t sell it.” A federal judge ordered the landmark property be sold after sentencing homeowner Jamie Edelkind to five years in prison.
Edelkind was convicted last year of using phony mortgage and payroll documents to borrow $3.3 million to buy the house in 2000. He later defaulted on the loan. Lehman Brothers subsidiary Aurora Loan Services of Colorado was owed $2.3 million, and could have rejected bids it deemed too low. via Boston.com.

More information on Edelkins Fraud at the Patriot Ledger.

Cathy Minehan, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, told a group in Boston yesterday that the housing market will slow down in 2006 and into 2007 but then rebound at a slower rate later in that year. This is good news for the New England region that is has housing costs and higher costs of living across the board.

“The air is coming out of the balloon,” Lereah said, who argues a balloon is a better metaphor than a bubble to describe a market he characterized as going through a temporary price correction rather than a collapse. “The bubble is not bursting.
“The solid fundamentals in our economy will keep the real estate expansion alive,” Lereah told about 250 real estate agents at the New England Realtors Conference.
Lereah said predictions of a housing bubble are based largely on data showing a widening gap in personal income growth compared with more rapidly rising housing costs. He said such comparisons ignore the fact that interest rates remain historically low despite recent increases, putting monthly mortgage payments within reach of most consumers.
“You do have an economy that is growing,” Lereah said. “You have mortgage rates below 7 percent.”via Boston.com.

In what would be a surprise to many, the Massachusetts Real Estate Market did not go in the tank as many had expected in the 4th quarter. While the rate of appreciation was not stellar, housing prices still rose 1.5 percent on slower volume. The market may be finding its equilibrium instead of going into a prolonged slide.

With the amount of debt taken out on the properties in Massachusetts, the marketplace is much more fragile that most in the country. If Massachusetts can have a soft landing from the impressive run up over the past few years, the market will end up in a very good place.

The Massachusetts Association of Realtors’ statistics, which cover about 80 percent of all home sales in the state, did portray a market that is losing steam, at least for single-family houses. While the median price hit $350,000, sales of such homes fell 8.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005 from the same period in 2004.
“Our strong seller’s market has been replace by a more balanced one that will help stabilize home prices,” said David Wluka, president of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.
The condo market, however, continues to be strong. Sales volume climbed in the fourth quarter, rising 6.8 percent, and the median price hit $270,000, a 3.8 percent increase. Condo sales in the final quarter accounted for 32 percent of all residential sales, the largest ever recorded.

Bay State Q4 home sales reflect a slowing market - 2006-02-16.

The Green Monster and Kenmore Square are the key names in the area outside of Fenway Park, traditionally a college and middle class neighborhood. It looks like the powers of gentrification and high rise buildings are moving in and going to transform the area into a showplace.

McQuillan said he and Samuels are close to assembling a site at the corner of Brookline and Boylston for a new high-rise that could be as tall as 20-stories.

Behind the move is a groundswell of demand for new housing near Fenway, a boom driven in part by the exploding growth of major hospitals and research institutions in the nearby Longwood Medical Area.

“What we are going to see over the next six or seven years is a complete transformation of the neighborhood,” McQuillan told members of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties at a briefing yesterday morning. via BostonHerald.com

I am wondering to those out there, is there a chance that Boston will price itself out of being Boston? Meaning, Bostonians have always been either Blue Blood Brahmans or Matter of Fact Joes. Is there still room for the Joes?

The famed Plaza Hotel is now offering private residences for sale. The property is offering 1, 2, and 3 bedroom units and Duplex and Triplex Penthouses for sale. Pricing is not set, but if you go into the registration section of the Plaza Residence  website, you can see the approximate pricing for the property.

• 1 Bedroom Residences – approximately 2 million
• 1 Bedroom Residences Park View– approximately 4.5 million
• 1 Bedroom Residences – approximately 3.75 million
• 1 Bedroom Residences Park View– approximately 7.5 million
• 1 Bedroom Residences – approximately 8.5 million
• 1 Bedroom Residences Park View– approximately 9.5 million
• Duplex and Triplex Penthouses: Starting at 15  million,  with rumors of the pricing topping out at 35 million plus.

So if you want a great place to live, and have some significant money to burn, these units will be going on sale in the near future. And send me an invite, it looks amazing.

Tell me this is not right out of a Soprano’s episode from a couple of years ago. The politician greases the wheel to get a previously undeveloped property for the powerful development firm. In no way am I implying that this is the case in reality, but the irony and perception has to make some heads turn.

Christmas could come early for the powerful LeFrak Organization - and possibly get a portion of the Jersey City waterfront developed more quickly - if a bill sponsored by Assemblyman Lou Manzo passes the Legislature.

Proposed earlier this year, the legislation would allow developers to borrow money from a state fund created in 1997 to spur the development of “brownfields,” or sites where the responsible polluter hasn’t been identified.

The law would “grandfather in” developers who signed agreements with the state prior to 1997 to bear all the cleanup costs for their site.

It looks like the developers are using the tactics of their opponents in areas where they feel high density growth is needed.

They look like citizens. They sound like citizens. And now they are starting to act like citizens.They are showing up at public hearings wearing T-shirts proclaiming that they are “Citizens for Better Life” and taking sides in the hottest debate in Fairfax County: growth and what it should look like.

But Citizens for Better Life is not an ordinary citizens group. Instead of coming from the community where the projects would be built, Citizens and other groups like it are organized by the builders themselves.The counter offensive, led by the architect of a proposed development off the Dulles Toll Road in Vienna and Northern Virginia’s leading building trade organization, takes a page from the neighbors it is up against in the battle over dense growth in Fairfax.

“A lot of people are telling me I’ve got to be insane to get involved in this,” acknowledged Christian J. Lessard, the architect behind Citizens for Better Life.

Lessard’s Vienna-based firm, the Lessard Group, is designing the vast Parkview community, a proposal for nearly 2,000 homes that developers are seeking to build off the toll road in Vienna, as well as the controversial MetroWest development near the Vienna Metro station. Read the rest at The Washington Post

I can not imagine this working, as the backlash will be strong and swift. The one benefit is that it allows the developers side to be heard at meetings and on TV, something that a 3 piece suited spokesperson can not convey.

The Housing Bubble Blogger  has a feature story today on speculators buying up condos in Las Vegas. Interesting take on condo speculation in that town. I had friends who went to UNLV and their parents would buy a condo and then sell it after graduation. Made some good money doing that.

The Boy in a Big Housing Bubble has a post on the coming battle in the Congress over the plans for a reduction in the mortgage deduction. As he so eloquently puts “Maybe everyone just knows there’s a better chance of Cicely Tyson fighting Mike Tyson than there is of Congress battling to reduce the mortgage interest deduction in an election year (or any year for that matter).“

Socket Site talks about the damage that interest only mortgages can cause in San Francisco. Even the realtors are fearful.

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