Real Estate Trends Archives - Authentic Properties

Five Real Estate Trends to Watch for

If the housing market were human, it would look like just wrestled a few alligators, after running an obstacle course through a snake pit. The market is beaten and bruised, but still trying to emerge from the recession, which is why Greg Rand, a 20-year real estate veteran and author of Crash Boom (www.crashboom.com) from Career Press, wants people to know about five new trends that could help them beat the housing blues. “One of the key elements of a free market is chaos,” Rand says. “Chaos is how the markets figure out how to move forward. The important thing to

California home sales slowed from June to July

SAN FRANCISCO—A real estate tracking firm is reporting that sales of California homes slowed last month.San Diego-based DataQuick said Tuesday that nearly 35,000 new and resale houses and condos were sold statewide in July. That represents an 11 percent decline from June and 1.4 percent decrease from July 2010. DataQuick says the median California home price in July was $252,000, down 0.4 percent from June and 6 percent from July last year. The median price peaked in early 2007 at $484,000 and hit bottom in April 2009 at $221,000. The firm says more than half of resale home sales last

Raising the Debt Ceiling: How Will It Effect Real Estate?

The effects of politicking in Washington led to some historic events for our country. Unfortunately, our most recent events have all been rather negative, to say the least. So, we are once again hearing that mortgage interest rates are at all-time, historic lows. I would not want to give our Washington elites too much credit for being the reason for these low rates. But the truth of the matter, is that due to our debt issues, our financial system must continue to make money as affordable as possible to those borrowing. This will help improve the velocity of money and

SOCAL Housing Market Improves Slightly

The Southern California housing market showed some signs of stabilizing last month with sales popping up more than average from May to June, a real estate data firm reported Tuesday. Sales rose 11.6% from May, driven by first-time buyers and investors scouring the market for bargains. A total of 20,532 newly built and previously owned homes sold in the region last month, according to DataQuick of San Diego. That tally was nevertheless a 14.0% decline from the same period a year ago, the last month that buyers could close on their home purchases and qualify for the popular federal tax

Technology Leads a Rebound in U.S. Office Rents as Occupancies Increase

Image via CrunchBase Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) drew attention from landlords in March when it leased most of a 36-story downtown Seattle tower built during the recession, a sign that technology job growth would help lift U.S. office rents and occupancies. “The reduction of big blocks of space is always the first indicator of recovery,” said Patrick Callahan, chief executive officer of Urban Renaissance Group, a Seattle-based commercial real estate developer and investor that manages about 2 million square feet (186,000 square meters) of properties. The U.S. office market gained 3.7 million square feet of net occupied space in the three

Pending real estate sales rise in May

Image by Getty Images via @daylife After an April dip, pending home sales rose sharply in May, for the first annual increase in over a year, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors. NAR’s Pending Home Sales Index rose 8.2 percent month-to-month and 13.4 percent year-over-year in May, to 88.8. An index score of 100 is the average level of contract activity in 2001, the first year that index data was collected. May saw the first year-over-year index increase since April 2010, NAR said. The index, which tracks homes under contract, is a leading indicator, and the

A Sliver of Hope for California Housing Market

Image by Getty Images via @daylife California‘s mangled real estate market saw a sliver of promise Tuesday, despite a downward national trend in home sales. The California Association of Realtors said pending home sales statewide rose in May, the first year-over-year increase in 18 months.CAR said its Pending Home Sales Index in May was 118.3, up 1.6% from April’s revised index of 116.4 and a 12% gain over May 2010. The index is based on contracts signed in May. CAR considers pending home sales an indicator of future sales activity.”May marked the first year-over-year increase in pending sales since November

Silicon Valley Home Prices Exploding Amid IPO MIllionaires

Image via CrunchBase A surge in wealth from technology stock sales and initial public offerings is spilling into the Silicon Valley real estate market as newly rich workers bid up home values in suburban cities south of San Francisco. The median price of single-family houses sold in Palo Alto, home of Facebook Inc., climbed 20 percent in May from a year earlier to $1.63 million, the biggest jump since 2008, according to preliminary figures from research company DataQuick. In Mountain View, the base of LinkedIn Corp., prices rose 3.1 percent to $957,500, the ninth year-over-year gain in 12 months. The

Underwater Mortgage: Is It OK to Walk Away?

In spite of the mild economic recovery we’re experiencing, the percentage of homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages — that is, they owe more than their homes are worth — has barely budged. According to new data from CoreLogic, 22.7 percent of homes with mortgages were underwater in the first quarter of this, versus 23.1 percent in the fourth quarter last year. Nevada is by far the worst off, with 63 percent of mortgaged homes underwater; Arizona, Florida, Michigan, and California round out the top five. So the question is this: If you owe $500,000 on a home that

Is Now the Time to Buy a Home?

Back in June 2006, when the housing market peaked, the prospect of a five-year national housing bust seemed unimaginable to most people. And yet here we are, with the latest Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller index showing that prices hit new bear-market lows, falling back to 2002 levels nationally and to 1990s levels in some battered regions. Despite all the gloom, however, there are growing indications that it is a good time to buy. Mortgage rates, which fell to 4.55% for the week ending June 2, according to Freddie Mac, are near 50-year lows. Homes have become more affordable than they

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