Entries Tagged 'North' ↓

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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.

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.

In a sign that the housing bubble has hit outside of Chicago, the property values fell drastically and schools and local governments are at a loss to fill the hole after a homes value fell from 400 million dollars to 120 thousand dollars overnight.

This week, however, things went downhill fast, as school systems and towns throughout Porter County, Ind., scrambled to fill gaping budget holes resulting from a colossal goof in the tax valuation of a modest two-bedroom house in Valparaiso.

And on Friday, the owner of the wildly overvalued ranch was scratching his head, wondering if it’s too late to sell.

“We’d sell it for 5 percent of that!” said Dennis Charnetzky, 32, who heard about the mistake that afternoon while working at his home remodeling business.

Pausing, he reconsidered: “At least I don’t owe $8 million in taxes.”

In October 2004, give or take, a real estate agent–or maybe a title company employee–checking on the value of the Valparaiso property on a county computer system apparently tapped the wrong key. Officials figure it was an accident.

The unidentified user stumbled onto a restricted screen, and then changed the value of the $120,000 house in the 1100 block of Chicago Street to $400 million. via the Chicago Tribune

We are so worried about hyping the Housing Bubble that I had to have some fun with you. It is interesting in this day and age how a large the ramifications of a single clerical error in a computer has created such trauma for a community.

Continue reading →

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.

The consolidation of the real estate industry in the face of a slow down is starting to occur. Even though Dayton has not had the run up of other regions, the marketplace looks like it will be consolidating as the smaller agencies merge with the larger ones.

Real Living Inc. has acquired Mark IV Realty and Associates in Huber Heights. The office has 15 agents and Real Living hopes to increase that number to 25 by moving other local Real Living employees to that office and hiring new agents. Neither a time frame nor terms of the deal were disclosed.

The acquisition will help Real Living continue its growth in the Dayton market. The company increased its number of agents from 123 last year to 179 this year, and sales have gone from $114.5 million in 2004 to $153 million in 2005.

Real Living Inc. is the fifth-largest real estate firm in the country measured by number of transactions, said Clyde Corle, vice president and general manager of the company’s Dayton operations.  via Dayton Business Journal

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.

The Boston area real estate market has slowed down according to real estate agents interviewed in an article in the Boston Globe today. The market, which has been rising at a blistering pace over the past 10 years, has turned into a buyers market.

“A weakening housing market will be a significant weight on the economies that have benefited from the real estate boom,” said Mark Zandi, economy.com’s chief economist. “It means fewer jobs in sectors such as construction. It short circuits equity withdrawals that supported household spending on home improvements, restaurants and vacations.”

The cooling market represents a return to normalcy, said Maggie Tomkiewicz, president of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

“The market was overheated,” she said. “A seller now needs to be more realistic.”

Housing sales are still rising, and the price increase is 4 percent greater from September 2004 to September 2005. So for the chicken littles out there, the sky is not falling, just the rate of growth is slowing down.

What is a real estate bubble? Everyone is working hard to either confirm or deny that a bubble is occurring in the real estate market, but since the definition is so muddy, we can not determine what the parameters are? With the stock market, there is a period where stocks rise quickly, then fall drastically. That is the typical bubble effect, but in real estate, this process occurs over years. People do not sell their houses for too little money, they will either take it off the market, or leave it on the market and be patient.

The New York Times delves into this question with a well written and well thought-out article on what a real estate bubble could be. In the late 1980’s, the northeast had a difficult period in real estate.

Adjusted for inflation, the losses were far worse: about 30 percent in parts of the Northeast and even more than that in Southern California. Prices peaked in about 1988 and did not return to their highs - relative to the price of everything else in the economy - until about 2000.

In Boston, where prices fell 25 percent in the early 1990’s, after adjusting for inflation, “people were bringing checks to the table” to cover shortfalls in selling prices because their mortgages were larger than what the buyer paid, said Robert Buckley, a real estate lawyer in Boston.

This happened to people we knew, where they had to bring a check to the closing table. Very scary for young homeowners. But this was not the rule, but an aberration.

Adding to the current confusion is a flurry of recent statistics that have pointed every which way. The Commerce Department reported last week that the number of homes starting to be built last month surged more than 10 percent compared with a year ago, a sign of builder optimism. But the number of existing homes for sale in several markets, including New York, Boston and Washington, is also rising, as is the average amount of time it takes to sell a home. In Manhattan, the recent fall in apartment prices caused The New York Post to exclaim, “Real Estate in Bubble Trouble.”

Taken as a whole, the numbers suggest that the hottest markets really are cooling off, in a way that seems more serious than other pauses of recent years. Still, both versions of the booms end - the gentle one and the harsh one - look possible. So both definitions of bubble remain in play.

So the term bubble will be tossed around over the next couple of years. Some areas that are overpriced will decline a little, other areas will continue to grow consistently. Isn’t that the nature of the real estate market?

Sometimes it does not pay to commit real estate fraud.

Long Island man who tried to flee to Germany and Mexico has been sentenced for masterminding a 3-point-1 million dollar real estate fraud in Nassau County.

The Nassau District Attorney says 35-year-old Sam Hilany of West Hempstead has been sentenced to two to six years in prison,

DA Denis Dillon says Hilany stolen money from real estate investors, an attorney, a title closer and an appraiser through a scheme of making up fake buyers with phony ID’s, and falsified employment, income and asset information.

Newsday reports that the worst part of the scheme was:

He bought most of these properties low, and would sell them high to people who didn’t know they were buying them,” Wallace said. “That’s what’s so insidious about this kind of case: Not only are the banks victimized, but the individuals who had their identities stolen are victimized.”

Mortgage and Investment fraud is a growing problem in the country, one that needs to be monitored much more closely.