Condo-Minimum

Condo-Minimum

With the condo glut growing as new towers are finished, and buyers walk away from presale contracts, developers increasingly are resorting to auctions to unload units at steep discounts.

Unlike ubiquitous foreclosed-home auctions, these events seek to establish market prices for untainted, often upscale properties. In an aggressive test of the strategy, 39 luxury coastal condominiums in Long Beach, Calif., went under the hammer in late August at about half their previous asking prices.

“We believe people are sitting on the sidelines looking for an excuse to buy. We gave them that excuse,” said David Parsky, director of Citi Property Investors, a Citigroup Inc. unit that is the controlling owner of the West Ocean Two building in Long Beach.

Associations look to cash advance for help

Associations look to cash advance for help – Forbes.com/a>

Two years ago, Captiva Lakes Villas in suburban Miami was struggling to pay its water and garbage collection bills, and its condo association was mired in a $60,000 budget shortfall.

Like other homeowner associations around the country, Captiva Lakes Villas saw many members, some with unmanageable mortgages, stop paying fees amid a slowing economy. Cash-strapped associations took out loans, raised fees, curtailed services or even fired management companies as past-due assessments piled up.

Captiva Lakes Villas took another, more innovative route. It teamed with Miami-based Association Financial Services, which, backed by private investors, gives associations a cash advance to cover its shortfall and use for maintenance, landscaping, repairs and other responsibilities.

Assemble across-the-board insurance coverage for your home

Assemble across-the-board insurance coverage for your home

As some Central Florida homeowners continue to pick up the pieces left from Tropical Storm Fay, others are keeping an eye on Ike and Josephine — and hoping their insurance policies have them covered against every peril.

Basic homeowner’s insurance is just that — basic. It doesn’t cover damage from flood or the loss of expensive clothing or jewelry, among other things. But it’s possible to assemble across-the-board coverage for your home.

So what does gold-plated, top-notch home-insurance protection look like?

It starts with standard home insurance

As prices plunge, housing experts wonder when recovery begins

As prices plunge, housing experts wonder when recovery begins

With the pep talk from real estate agents contradicted by doom-and-gloom reports on the housing industry, nobody seems to really know if or when the market will begin to recover.

Consumers who have been sitting on the fence are being advised by sales agents that it’s a great opportunity to buy as Las Vegas home prices have plunged 25 percent from a year ago and the average foreclosure home is selling for $190,000.

Pundits are saying you’d be a fool to buy now and watch your home value continue to free-fall for at least another year.

“The recovery is a tricky question,” Realtor Steve Hawks of ReMax Platinum said. “For people who bought a home for $200,000 and their neighbor across the street owes $450,000, if you ask the homeowner who bought for $200,000, the recovery has begun. You ask the homeowner who owes $450,000, that homeowner will be giving you a much different answer.

Where Homes Are Selling Fastest [Northern California]

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

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.