Selling a home short can stave off foreclosure

Selling a home short can stave off foreclosure

Danielle Merriweather added up all the numbers, and they didn’t look good:

* The mortgage was $1,162 a month.

* The winter gas bills ran $500 a month.
* She had four children to care for.

* And little money was coming in after the young mother lost her job as a medical biller.

“It’s not easy to come up with that kind of money when you don’t have a job,” said Merriweather, 29, who bought her home on Detroit’s west side two years ago. “I was just like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t afford this house.’”

Puig’s bankruptcy may be one of many more to come [South Florida]

Puig’s bankruptcy may be one of many more to come [South Florida]

Condo converter Puig Inc. is a casualty of the housing downturn. Some think the Hialeah company’s bankruptcy may be one of many more to come.

Since South Florida’s raucous real estate party ended, the hangover has taken different forms — sales plunging, foreclosures rising, lawsuits flying.

Now, a Hialeah condo conversion company has gone bankrupt in one of the biggest bankruptcy cases yet to come out of the soured housing market.

Puig, a private condo conversion company in Hialeah, is seeking protection from creditors who claim they were stiffed for nearly $120 million. Founder Juan Puig relinquished operations to corporate turnaround specialist Ron Glass in April, and lawyers are set to return to U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Miami today.

Homebuyers roll the dice

Homebuyers roll the dice

With this simple start, Denver’s weekly Tuesday morning auction of foreclosed homes got underway: “Good morning. I’ll start with the standard disclaimer. For any bankruptcy filings we may have been told about by 10 a.m. this morning, those properties will not be offered for sale today.”

One recent morning, eight people gathered in a conference room in the city’s Webb Municipal Office Building. One was Richard Dewar, a deputy public trustee of the Denver clerk and recorder, arriving promptly at 10 a.m. from his office across the hall.

“Today, we have about 50 properties,” Dewar told the group.

They represent the number of foreclosed homes that were newly available for purchase that week.

Prime pumps

Prime pumps

A state law mandating replacement of underground storage tanks is driving gas station owners to sell at a time when interest is brisk in the properties most suitable for redevelopment.

Many are viewed as development opportunities but others are sold to continue as service stations at a time when gas prices are high.

In a second wave of South Florida sales and leases in less than a year, BP is offering 22 stations for sale, including three available for redevelopment.

About a third of the properties did not sell in a first offering that included 34 stations last August.

Malibu, Encino at top of the real estate market [Southern California]

Malibu, Encino at top of the real estate market [Southern California]

For Travis and Leryn Davis, the moment couldn’t be better for moving up. The Davises — with two kids crowding their 1,100-square-foot house — have the good fortune to live in one of the region’s hottest neighborhoods.

As other real estate markets in Southern California plod, stagnate or worse, the Davises’ Encino ZIP Code continues to march right along, enjoying annual price percentage gains in the double digits.

Through the first four months of the year, single-family homes in the 91316 ZIP Code in Encino experienced an 18.2% jump in price over the same period last year when measured by cost per square foot, according to real estate tracker DataQuick Information Systems. Although most buyers focus on median sales prices, analysts say the price per square foot offers the most reliable snapshot of how a market is performing over a wide area.

Facing huge debts, investors ponder next steps

Facing huge debts, investors ponder next steps

As lenders begin to seize houses that were purchased in an unusual series of transactions two years ago, investors are attempting to arrange complicated sales and several are beginning to struggle with difficult decisions on whether to file for bankruptcy.

Nurses and other middle-class investors bought more than 100 Murrieta-area houses in 2004 and 2005 through Stonewood Consulting Inc., a Murrieta mortgage brokerage that the California Department of Real Estate is now seeking to bar from the industry. The first of those houses fell into the foreclosure process last fall, and the owners began filing lawsuits in January. Stonewood clients often paid far more for their houses than did buyers of comparable houses nearby and, according to numerous neighbors and real estate agents who followed the purchases, $50,000 to $120,000 more than the original asking prices —- a pattern that raised eyebrows in the slackening market.