News About Properties

Mercedes Homes LLC, for nearly 30 years one of Brevard County’s most prominent home builders, is ending operations two years after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

An outside executive management team brought in by the consortium of leading creditors from the bankruptcy case recently took over operations of the Suntree-headquartered company and announced its intentions to cease operations after its contracts for new homes are satisfied, though no exact timeline was provided.

The founding Buescher family, which held most top management spots at Mercedes, has not been involved in the company since late December. They are in the process of starting a new home building company to be called Mercedes Premier Homes LLC.

via Builder moves on to a new enterprise.

About a five-minute walk from the Ritz-Carlton hotel in south Orange County is a town-home community that has seen its share of hard times.

Not that long ago, Whisper Lakes was collecting only about two-thirds of the association dues its owners were supposed to pay to keep the place running. Town homes that had sold for $175,000 at the peak of the homebuying frenzy five and six years ago were going for $40,000. Shrubbery was dying, and owners complained that the buildings’ quarter-century-old, hunter-green paint scheme resembled that of military barracks.

via Townhomes in Orlando: Whisper Lakes townhomes in Orlando renovated – OrlandoSentinel.com.

An unexpected increase in Chinese property buyers is moving Singapore’s real-estate market, in the latest sign of the effects of Chinese money elsewhere in Asia.

For years, Indonesians and Malaysians were the dominant foreign property buyers in Singapore, a rich Southeast Asian city-state that is widely regarded as one of the safest places in Asia to park capital, thanks to its stable political environment and predictable laws.

Over the past year or so, though, Chinese investors have leapfrogged those and other buyers to become the biggest foreign source of property sales, accounting for 32% of foreign buyers in the first half of 2011, up from just 8% in 2007. Some of the latest residential sales exceeded five million Singapore dollars US$3.8 million, according to agents, including what local media reports say was the S$36 million purchase of a 15,000-square-foot bungalow plot in the city’s posh Sentosa Cove.

via Chinese Property Buyers Boost Role in Singapore.

Home prices and mortgage rates have fallen so far that the monthly cost of owning a home is more affordable than at any point in the past 15 years and is less expensive than renting in a growing number of cities.

The Wall Street Journal’s third-quarter survey of housing-market conditions in 28 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas found that home values declined in all but five markets compared with the second quarter, according to data from Zillow Inc. Meanwhile, rent levels have risen briskly across the country and mortgage rates, hovering around 4%, are the lowest in six decades.

As a result, monthly mortgage payments on the median priced home—including taxes and insurance—are lower than the average rent levels in 12 metro areas, according to data compiled for The Wall Street Journal by Marcus & Millichap, a real-estate brokerage that tracked 27 metro areas. It remains less expensive to rent than to buy in 15 cities. But affordability hasn’t done much to lift the sagging housing sector because many would-be buyers are unwilling to purchase a home or unable to qualify for a mortgage.

via Own vs. Rent: A Growing Reason to Buy.

The first disaster for Ron Benitez was losing his DeBary home to the massive flooding caused by Tropical Storm Fay in 2008.

Now, the retiree is facing a financial calamity: paying far more for flood insurance because of newly revised federal maps that have made his rebuilt home part of a high-risk flood zone.

Benitez, whose home was among 130 in DeBary flooded during Fay, used to carry a minimal flood-insurance policy. But with the new designation, his rates will climb sharply.

via Florida flood insurance: FEMA’s redrawn maps mean many in Metro Orlando need costly flood insurance .

Federal mortgage giant Fannie Mae was told in 2006 about faulty court documents filed by Florida foreclosure attorneys acting on its behalf but did nothing to correct the practices, an inspector general found.

A report issued Friday by the Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General said an outside law firm Fannie Mae hired to investigate allegations of wrongdoing confirmed “unlawful” practices and stated that foreclosure attorneys were sacrificing accuracy for speed by filing false documents.

After learning of the attorney misconduct in 2006, Fannie Mae failed to make any improvements in its oversight of the firms.

via Fannie Mae ignored robo-signing abuses in Florida foreclosures, investigation finds.