News About Properties

With homes that average 20,000 square feet, a vacant lot asking nearly $30 million and enough resident movie stars and film execs to fill a red carpet, the gated community of Beverly Park is one of the most exclusive, expensive places in Los Angeles, a land of exclusive, expensive places.

Celebrity residents include Denzel Washington, who purchased his property from Michael Eisner. Eddie Murphy, media mogul Sumner Redstone and Sylvester Stallone also live in the enclave. Barry Bonds owned a Beverly Park home until March, when he sold his 17,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom, eight-bathroom home for $22 million.

via L.A.’s Star-Studded Neighborhood.

With institutional capital pulling back from the single-family rental market in recent months, the question of its future in this market remains. RealtyTrac has released a new report that studies the markets where Wall Street has invested the most in single-family rentals and predicts in which of those markets institutional investors are likely to remain in the near future.

Daren Blomquist, VP of RealtyTrac, tells GlobeSt.com, “Some of the markets that were originally darlings of the single family rental operators have fallen out of favor in part because of new construction that will now compete with the existing single-family rentals, but also because of rising prices that make acquisition costs much higher and therefore returns less attractive. These markets include parts of California as well as even markets such as Phoenix and Las Vegas and to a certain extent Atlanta.”

via Will Wall Street Remain Landlord? – Daily News Article – GlobeSt.com.

Diversification is essential since real estate can be just as volatile as stocks and other assets. Remember the housing bust when the market peaked in 2006 and declined for years?

In my book The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome I wrote about a southwest Florida couple who loaded up on real estate at the height of the housing boom more than eight years ago in hopes of quickly “flipping” the properties and making easy profits.

When the bust came, they got nailed and were stuck in a situation where they had to sell the properties, but couldn’t find any buyers. At the same time, they were clobbered with higher property tax and insurance bills on the homes they owned, which ate up all of their cash and nearly bankrupted them.

via Managing Real Estate Assets in Your Retirement Portfolio.

The latest weapon in the luxury high-rise arms race: a private pool in every unit on every floor.At ONE KL, a 35-story luxury building in Kuala Lumpur completed in 2009, the building’s tagline boasts, “94 Apartments, 95 Swimming Pools.” In the Bahamas, each of the 34 units at Honeycomb, a condominium with a hexagonal-patterned facade that’s expected to be completed in mid-2016, will have a 70-square-foot pool with a transparent edge, offering views of the marina and ocean.

And in Mumbai, 30 stories of about 100 residential units at Bandra Ohm will include crescent-shaped pools on balconies enclosed in acrylic, the same material used for large aquariums. Site work is expected to begin next year.

via Luxury Condos with Private Pools – WSJ.

South Florida home prices soared from 2000 to 2005, then plunged during the next six years before quickly bouncing off the bottom.

But the market’s mood swings appear to be over, analysts say.

Housing settled into a more reliable investment in 2014, even as double-digit price gains disappeared. Expect the market to slowly strengthen in 2015 – and for buyers to enjoy a little more power.

via Housing market: South Florida prices cooling, but that’s a good thing.

This year, I sold one apartment and bought another. It was a reminder that the words “home” and “investment” don’t belong in the same sentence.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favor of home ownership. The tax breaks are impressive. Home ownership forces us to save: With each mortgage payment, we whittle down the loan balance, so eventually we own a valuable asset free and clear. Most important, a home provides us with a place to live.

But what about the price appreciation? According to Freddie Mac , home prices have climbed just 3.7% a year over the past 30 years, not much above the 2.8% inflation rate. To make matters worse, this figure doesn’t reflect the hefty costs of buying, owning and selling a home. What if you include those? Consider one columnist’s sorry tale.

via Don’t Buy a Home as an Investment.