News about properties and real estate
Home Buyers, Start Your Engines
If you were thinking of buying a home, start looking.
The latest data from the housing market shows that sellers, after months and years in denial, are finally giving in to reality and slashing prices.
There is a distance still to go. There may even be a lot to go. But the process, long delayed, is now well underway.
The National Association of Realtors on Tuesday released its long-awaited report on prices from the first quarter. The price drops were startling.
Even top commercial properties are suffering from market crisis [South Florida]
Even top-tier properties are showing they’re vulnerable to turmoil in the residential real estate industry.
The owners of prime properties in Aventura and the West Brickell area of Miami are the latest to feel the financial pain.
Lehman Brothers Holdings is suing developer Shefaor/Tarragon to recover nearly $84 million it lent the partnership two years ago to build a high-rise condo on the site of a 285-unit rental complex. Today, the assessed value of the Aventura apartment property is $40 million, half what’s owed to the lender.
Further south, Miami investor J. Kevin Reilly and his company, Brickell Citicentre, didn’t wait for the lender to sue to take back land north of Southwest Eight Street along both sides of Miami Avenue. Brickell Citicentre two weeks ago handed over two vacant city blocks of prime developable space to New York-based iStar Financial, a publicly traded company that provides senior and mezzanine commercial loans.
As mortgage noose tightened, these 3 slipped its grip [Philadelphia]
When Janice Freeman bought her $65,000 fixer-upper in Overbrook six years ago, she was working two human-services jobs, including one with lots of overtime, and had tenants paying $1,000-a-month rent.
She was proud that buying her first house after a lifetime of renting provided a “real home” for her daughter, her foster child and her grandson.
But after she refinanced her mortgage three years ago to make necessary major repairs, Freeman lost the job with the overtime. Four months later, she lost her tenants.
Her income was cut in half while her $1,147 monthly loan payments were double what her original mortgage payments had been.
The vacation-home buyer [Central Florida]
If Daytona’s complicated real estate market could be reduced to a round of “Jeopardy!,” one answer recited by Alex Trebek might be this: the beach, Disney, deep discounts and a droopy dollar.
And the question? What factors are Realtors counting on to start a recovery in the area’s vacation-home market?
Like other types of property in the Daytona Beach area, beachside homes and condominiums experienced slower sales last year as the economy sputtered and adjustable-rate mortgages grew more expensive and harder to get. But the local decline appears to have been shallower than the national pattern, and some Realtors predict an uptick in sales this summer, the peak season for the vacation-home market.
“The market has picked up,” said Diane Caron, an agent at Ponce Inlet Realty who has scored more than a dozen sales so far this year. “Owners are accepting much lower prices than a year ago, and investors are buying at those prices,” she said.
Investment losses hard to swallow
People such as Freddie Wright, Judith Baron and Nelia Raber say they thought their money was safe in the now-troubled Paso lender
Freddie Wright has been living for years in San Luis Obispo in an old orange Ford van, a choice he makes to save money.
In 2006, a longtime friend told Wright about the thousands of dollars he had earned by investing through Estate Financial Inc., a Paso Robles lender that pools investors’ money to make high-interest loans to real estate projects.
Based on his friend’s experience, and after meeting with the firm’s president, Karen Guth, Wright invested his life savings of $38,000 in Estate Financial’s lending fund that September.
Can you lose your home over $100 in late fees?
Most Southwest Florida residents are by now quite familiar with how lenders can take back a property through foreclosure. But under Florida law, it is not just banks that can foreclose — homeowners and condominium associations can take a home to pay off past-due assessments and other fees.
It is rare, but it happens, and when an association decides to play hardball, there is no minimum amount required in order to foreclose.
Joyce Evans, 66, owns a condo in Village Plaza, a senior community near Bee Ridge and Beneva roads. Evans was going to lose her home over what originally amounted to an outstanding balance of just $112.50.