News about properties and real estate
UK personal wealth at £6 trillion
The wealth of UK households has been given a dramatic boost by rising house prices, says the Halifax bank.
It calculates that total net personal wealth more than doubled between 1996 and 2006, to £6.336 trillion.
More than half that rise is due to higher house prices which pushed up the value of peoples’ homes, after mortgage debt, to £2.7 trillion.
While house prices rose by 216% in that time, the lender says mortgage debt rose more slowly, by just 163%.
Weighing risks, rewards of real-estate trusts
Despite housing woes, investment funds that focus on property can pay off.
Here’s a thought for the bold: Take the subprime mortgage meltdown as a buying opportunity and plunge into REITs.
But only if you have a cast-iron stomach.
A REIT, or real estate investment trust, is stock in a company that’s something like a mutual fund but specializes in buying office buildings, malls, apartment houses, mortgage-backed bonds or other real estate holdings. There are about 180 REITs of various types, plus a string of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that invest in them.
Survey: Huntsville real estate most affordable in Alabama
Huntsville has been ranked Alabama’s most affordable residential real estate market in Coldwell Banker LLC’s 2007 Home Price Comparison Index.
The study looked at 2,200 square feet, four bedroom homes in 317 American markets. The average price of such a home in the Huntsville market was $212,183. That price was $232,375 in Mobile, the state’s most expensive residential market, which makes a total gap of $20,192.
“The real estate market has certainly changed over the last year,” Coldwell Banker CEO Jim Gillespie said in a statement. “I continue to point out that we cannot make national blanket statements about appreciation and inventory. Real estate is a local business, with each market having its own story to tell.
Commercial real estate crunched
The global credit crunch that has rattled financial markets over the past few weeks is finally reaching the vast commercial real estate investment and development industry in the United States.
Predictions by some analysts that prices for office buildings and other commercial properties are poised to drop are sending shivers through the business, driving down real estate company share prices and delaying some deals.
“We are seeing fewer people at the table, but when it comes to the best buildings there are still plenty of people who want to buy them,” John Cushman, the chairman of the real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, said.
But bidders that had been borrowing heavily to leverage property acquisitions were falling away as lenders shut out marginal players, Mr Cushman said. However, so far the long-robust market had cooled but not collapsed.
In real estate? Better get a second job [Florida]
Moonlighting as a waiter at Rosario’s, an Italian restaurant on the oceanfront, is no comedown for real estate agent Todd Jachim.
After all, the food is great, working conditions pleasant and the owner and customers extremely nice, said Jachim, who has worked as a waiter before and still thinks it’s a fun job. And not incidentally, “I’m making good money up there,” he said.
Still, Jachim, 35, has built a career as an agent for four years and has no plans to give up on it. He’s waiting tables five nights a week but is still “fully involved in real estate” during the day.
Jachim is among a growing number of Volusia-Flagler area agents — and even a few brokers — who have started earning income elsewhere, often as they hold on to their real estate connections with an eye to the market reviving. Some have gone into teaching school or other full-time jobs, worked part-time jobs or, if they can afford it, just take a break from work entirely.
Real estate ownership has become definition of American Dream
When a press release from a frustrated young woman threatening to sue the real estate industry “for the sake of her generation” if she couldn’t get a mortgage found its way into my inbox, I was intrigued.
Despite the dubious premise of her threats, Carolyn Houck, an upstart developer of utopian communities, nonetheless represents feelings about real estate, its professionals and the sense of the younger landless generation being cheated by the landed Boomers that were not new to me. Describing herself as “hopping mad” about business as usual in the industry, Houck said she’s ready to take her case to court.
“I’m a statistic,” Houck told me when reached in her home in Sonoma County. “When you have unstable living environments, you have fundamental stress – that causes you to not be able to be effective in the world. All these future-thinking young people are spending all their time on housing, and I don’t think the older generation has any idea what we’re experiencing.”