Real Estate & Mortgage

Housing Rebounding

SmartMoney magazine says are in line for a rebound:
Seattle
Raleigh
Des Moines
Philadelphia
Denver, Colorado
Birmingham, Ala.
Salt Lake City

The Boom then gloom markets as they call it: Las Vegas, Miami and Phoenix.California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida. The article states that when you take these states out of the picture things get much more rosier.

According to PMI’s “risk index,” which estimates the odds of prices falling in a given market, at least 65 percent of the nation’s 386 metro areas have less than a 10 percent chance of seeing lower prices two years from now. What’s more, the government’s sweeping bailout of the financial sector could boost the housing market by making borrowing easier for buyers.

25 metropolitan areas that look particularly promising, and there are more than a few surprises.
Seattle

Thanks to Microsoft, Amazon.com and Boeing, unemployment remains under 4 percent. That, in turn, has kept median sales prices from falling far. Only 11.5 percent of local homeowners who bought within the past five years have negative equity on their property, well below the national average of 29%, according to Zillow.

Among Seattle’s neighborhoods and suburbs, yesteryear’s star performers—affluent areas like the Victorian-studded Queen Anne district or Redmond, home of Microsoft—are beginning to slide back a bit. The most resilient part of the region lies across the Duwamish River from downtown, in West Seattle. The small community is directly accessible by only one bridge. That can lead to traffic snarls, but many residents simply bike 20 minutes to jobs downtown. On weekends the relative seclusion means the 2.5-mile Alki Beach promenade along Elliott Bay doesn’t get too crowded. As long as people like great views of water, mountains and city skylines, “those homes will always maintain their value,” says local broker Febe Cude. Dave and Alison Keith recently sold their two-bedroom townhome in West Seattle for $289,000, up more than 25 percent from their purchase price four years ago. They plowed that windfall into a home in the same neighborhood with twice the living space and a fenced-in yard, for $429,000. “You’re always nervous, but I feel like things are holding up well here,” Alison says.

Des Moines

Best places for jobs

Top Jobs because of Real Estate?

San Jose moved from 91 to 14 in 2006. San Francisco is down from 86 to 31. Washington DC actually fell from 5 to 32. Raleigh  remained among the five best in the job growth category.  Phoenix reigned at No. 1, largely because of housing development. Given the recent housing bust, it will most certainly be dethroned in that category. The same goes for Florida-Orlando, Sarasota, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale is predicted to go down for 2007 becasue of real estate.

The List:

1. Salt Lake City
2. Raleigh NC
3. Phoenix
4. Jacksonville
5. Orlando
6. Tulsa
7. Austin
8. Albuquerque, N.M
9. Wichita, Kan
10. Oklahoma City

Best Cities for driving?

Drive rush hour traffic on the LA 405 and 10 interchange and you have a recipe for ill will.

More than 2,500 drivers who regularly commute in 25 major metropolitan areas were asked to rate road rage and rude driving in telephone surveys between January and March. The survey was conducted by Prince Market Research has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

The list, ranked from those reporting the most incidents of road rage to the fewest:

1. Miami

2. New York

3. Boston

4. Los Angeles

5. Washington, D.C.

6. Phoenix

7. Chicago

8. Sacramento, Calif.

9. Philadelphia

10. San Francisco

11. Houston

12. Atlanta

13. Detroit

14. Minneapolis-St. Paul

15. Baltimore

16. Tampa, Fla.

17. San Diego

18. Cincinnati

19. Cleveland

20. Denver

21. Dallas-Ft. Worth

22. St. Louis

23. Seattle-Tacoma

24. Pittsburgh

25. Portland, Ore.

Whose making the big bucks?

Whose making the big bucks? It would be great if by buying a home there meant you made the big bucks. But, in fact you probably have to earn this income in order to own a home there.

Greenwich, CT - $112,493
Cupertino, CA - $110,518
San Ramon, CA - $109,500
Bethesda, MD - $109,417
Lower Mound, TX - $104,921 Named by Money as one the best place to retire also.
Burke, VA - $104,770
West Bloomfield Township, MI - $102,619
Palo Alto, CA - $101,584-Right down the road from Cupertino
Pleasanton, CA - $101,443
Yorba Linda, CA - $100,465 Home to the Nixon Library

(Source U.S. Census data, Onboard projection/aggregation)

Affordable Homes

This from BankRate.com. Housing is still affordable in the right spots

The article says that Coastal metropolises like Los Angeles, New York, Boston and San Francisco all might be ranked among the most desirable places to live, but they are expensive! Thus home prices make it tuff to find affordable housing.

The article refeences Lawrence Yun an Econmist from NAR. He says high home prices in popular coastal cities appear to be driving a wave of migration to less costly locales, according to , economist at the National Association of Realtors, or NAR. "Californians are buying up properties in cheaper neighboring states. On the East Coast,  prospective homeowners are seeking out property in Virginia and the Carolinas."

It appears  United Van Lines reported that California had a higher number of outbound moves relative to inbound ones for the first time since 1995. For every 44 moves into the state last year, the company handled 56 outbound moves.States with a much higher number of people moving in rather than out included Oregon, Idaho, Arizona and North Carolina.

Overall, housing affordability nationwide is at its lowest point in 15 years, according to the NAR. In December, the percentage of households in California able to afford a median-priced home stood at 14 percent, according to the California Association of Realtors. New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C., and increasingly, South Florida homes, , according to Yun, are also progressively unaffordable. The most affordable markets, by contrast, tend to be in the Midwest.

Foreclosures Up

RealtyTrac™ an online marketplace for foreclosure properties, released its January 2006 Monthly U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, which shows 103,540 properties nationwide entered some stage of foreclosure in January, a 27% increase from the previous month and a 45 percent increase from January 2005.

The report shows a January national foreclosure rate of 1 foreclosure - repo property for every 1,117 U.S. households, continuing an upward trend in which the national foreclosure rate rose in every quarter of 2005.

"This is the first time since we introduced the report in January of 2005 that we've seen back-to-back months with increases of more than 20 percent," noted James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. "While some of this might have to do with the seasonality of normal real estate cycles, it appears that rising interest rates and softening home prices are beginning to push foreclosure inventories closer to the historic average of one percent of all U.S. households."

Who has the biggest rate of foreclosure? Georgia wins.

Georgia foreclosures spiked in January. The state reported 7,342 properties entering some stage of foreclosure, more than twice the number reported in December. Georgia documented the highest foreclosure rate among the 50 states -- one new foreclosure for every 422 households.

Who was 2nd? The land that has been one of the hottest . With one new foreclosure for every 483 households, Nevada documented the second highest foreclosure rate among the 50 states. The state reported 1,795 properties entering some stage of foreclosure, a 60 percent increase from December and more than 2.5 times the number reported in January 2005.

With a total of 3,747 properties entering some stage of foreclosure, new foreclosures in Colorado tripled from December to January and increased 36 percent year over year. The state recorded one new foreclosure for every 488 households -- the third highest foreclosure rate among the 50 states.

4th Quarter Homes Sales stay blistering

David Lereah, NAR’s chief economist, said rising interest rates dampened the sales pace in the closing quarter of last year. “Mortgage interest rates were at the highest level since the third quarter of 2003,” he said. “At the same time, we’ve seen strong double-digit appreciation in home prices, so a modest slowing from record sales was to be expected. The good news is that home sales are being sustained at historically high levels.”

The latest report on total existing-home sales shows that nationwide the seasonally adjusted annual rate* was 6.90 million units in the fourth quarter, up 0.3 percent from the 6.88 million-unit level in the fourth quarter of 2004 but 4.7 percent below the record pace of 7.24 million units in the third quarter of last year. The second highest sales rate was 7.22 million in the second quarter of 2005.

The strongest performance was in Arkansas, where the fourth-quarter resale pace jumped 29.8 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2004. Alaska existing-home sales rose 28.4 percent from a year earlier, while Louisiana posted the third highest increase, up 28.1 percent. Six other states also recorded double-digit sales gains from a year ago. Twenty-three states and the Wahington DC Real Estate posted declines, although 39 states set records for all of 2005.

Total existing-home sales, including single-family and condo, were at the third-highest pace on record in the fourth quarter of 2005. In addition, 24 states showed increases in sales activity over the same period in 2004, according to the National Association of Realtors®.

Real Estate Broker

The top Real Estate Brokers all over the country was archived by Rismedia recently.

The Realtor group was written about and discussed with sales and commissions. The Power Realtor survey is here.

We are also linking to some of the top online Realtors and Realtor websites here.

California Real Estate

California real estate
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According to a January housing affordability report released today by the California Association of Realtors, homes are becoming a tough buy for more Californians.

About 18 percent of the state's households could afford to buy a median-priced home in the state in January, compared to 23 percent of households in January 2004, the association reported.

Pheonix Real Estate

Home prices in Phoenix have outpaced outpace income gains as rising Phoenix and Scottsdale home prices keep outpacing residents income. This trend is making it harder for buyers to find houses in the Phoenix area.

Phoenix real estate