News About Properties

Where Homes Are Selling Fastest [Northern California]

Houses in Sunnyvale, Calif., home to companies such as Juniper Network (JNPR), AMD (AMD), and Yahoo! (YHOO), are typically on the market for 66 days, making it the fastest-selling real estate market in the country. That’s the good news. The bad news is that listings a year ago in the affluent Silicon Valley suburb normally sold after just 31 days on the market.

Even in the fastest-selling Zip Codes in the country, that trend is repeated over and over again. Nothing is selling as fast as it once did as buyers hold off, waiting for prices to drop even more. In some areas the median days on the market have extended beyond weeks into several months. In fact, after searching the nation for communities where homes were selling the fastest, it became clear that not a single Zip Code has eluded the housing slump. But some places are doing better than others. A lot better.

After Sunnyvale, Austin, Tex., another high-tech center, comes in second at 68 days. The third-fastest-selling Zip is the Scripps Ranch neighborhood of San Diego, a wealthy inland market where listings were typically 70 days old, a span that would have been unthinkable during the real estate boom.

Meet the Nouveaux Neighbors

Andre LeBel knew he had come home when he walked into a bar in St. Petersburg, Fla., ordered a Bloody Caesar and the bartender made it without cocking an eyebrow.

The spicy drink — a blend of vodka, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce and tomato and clam juices — is popular in his native Canada, but until recently it was virtually unknown elsewhere. That was before Canadians started to snap up property in the U.S., drawn by the buying power of the newly strong Canadian dollar and the depressed prices of American real estate. The largest proportion of foreign buyers of U.S. homes from May 2007 to May 2008 — 24% — were Canadian, double the percentage a year earlier, according to a recent report by the National Association of Realtors.

Most Canadian buyers head for the Sunbelt, with Florida accounting for a third of all of their purchases, the report said. The Realtor group estimates there were 7,200 Canadian buyers of Florida homes in the period covered by the report, more than double the 3,500 a year earlier. In some Florida resort communities, so many Quebec residents have bought second homes that French is now commonly spoken.

Blaine hotel builders sued

Blaine Hospitality faces foreclosure proceedings after defaulting on a $5 million loan to Home Federal Savings. The developer says construction delays are to blame.

The developers of a 98-room hotel near the National Sports Center in Blaine are facing foreclosure after defaulting on $5 million in construction financing.

Home Federal Savings Bank of Rochester is suing Blaine Hospitality of Bemidji, Minn., its partners and several subcontractors who have mechanics liens against the hotel property. Michelle Jester, a Minneapolis attorney representing Home Federal, last week declined to comment about the complaint.

2 payments: No problem

In today’s difficult real estate market, many sellers are looking for alternatives to dumping their existing home on a low-ball offer, especially if they’ve already found another home they need or want to go ahead and buy.

Renting out the previous home has proved to be a reasonable solution for some of these sellers, and it’s a good one if you are careful about how you do it. Read these stories of two Atlantans who have done it and the expert advice they heeded to make sure they did it right.

Amy Symms had just finished creating her dream place in Connecticut. She bought a two-bedroom plus loft condo and gutted it, fashioning a high-end haven in an exclusive area.