News About Properties

New trend for first-time home buyers [Contra Costa]

In the hypercompetitive world of Bay Area real estate, a trend has emerged that brightens the prospects for first-time home buyers but tightens the options for the most cash-strapped among us.

The trend — developers converting rented apartments to owner-occupied condominiums — has been gaining speed in the past few years. As interest rates stayed low and mortgages were easily accessible, more first-time buyers were able to get into condominiums in the $200,000-to-$500,000 range while being priced out of more traditional — and expensive — homes in this hot real estate market.

Easy-to-get loans cause thousands to lose homes

Easy money has led to hard times.

The millionaire businessman living in a $5 million Palm Beach Gardens home; a couple’s county-subsidized 3-bedroom, 2-bath slice of suburbia; a Fort Pierce widow struggling to keep her hurricane-damaged house: pre-foreclosure notices have landed on all their doorsteps.

More than $106 million in home loans collapsed in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties in the first quarter of this year alone, according to a Palm Beach Post analysis of data collected by RealeSTAT.com, a local commercial firm that gathers foreclosure and default records. A little more than $68 million in mortgages defaulted in the first quarter of 2005.

Homeowners despair as insurers refuse to pay

Debate over coverage stalls efforts to rebuild and may land in court

Angry messages spray-painted on jagged pieces of scrap plywood line Beach Boulevard, where families lived and vacationed for generations before Hurricane Katrina.

Owners seek loan to avoid ‘fire sale’ of condo

Frustrated and angry homeowners of the hurricane-ravaged 1515 Tower condominium are scrambling this week to get a construction loan so they aren’t forced to sell the West Palm Beach high-rise at a fire-sale price.

Rather than just take the money two suitors are offering for the waterfront condo that was severely damaged by hurricanes in 2004, they have asked attorneys to search for a loan to cover the estimated $30 million they need to restore the 30-story building along South Flagler Drive.

Prospering In The Housing Bust

Gillette Edmunds has made good money in real estate–by knowing when to sell. Edmunds owned six investment properties: single-family homes in southeast Denver he’d purchased for around $70,000 apiece. He was leasing out the houses for an average of $700 a month, amply covering mortgage payments, property taxes and maintenance costs. Then the Denver residential market seemed to get too frothy, and before something bad happened, he dumped the homes for two or three times what he’d paid eight years before. Edmunds, who has retained his personal residence, reinvested the profits in real estate investment trusts. And indeed, the Denver market began to slide.

Housing boom could storm heartland

Could the real estate action be shifting to the heartland – the vast swath of middle America that never really was touched by the hyperinflationary housing boom? That’s what a new statistical analysis of housing price cycles in 100 major metropolitan areas suggests could be over the horizon.

Its author, Christopher L. Cagan, director of research and analytics for First American Real Estate Solutions, examined historical housing price movements and concluded that metropolitan real estate markets can be classified into three distinct behavioral categories: