Last Blog Search
Categories
Best Blogers
We recomend!
Archives
Last Comments:
Statistics:
- 5 users online
- 64 maximum concurrent
- 150872 total visitors
Meta:
|
May 23rd, 2007 by babygirl
Some cities, mostly in places where the market has slowed significantly in the last year, are offering incentives in the form of tax abatements to help developers unload slow-selling condominiums.
The neighborhoods tend to be pre-gentrification, but the savings can be significant. For instance, the buyer of a two-bedroom condo in a 180-unit development in a former school in Grand Rapids, Mich., will save about $5,300 a year in taxes until 2018. The savings is transferable to a buyer.
Kansas City, Des Moines, Brooklyn, Harrisburg, Columbus, Tacoma, Wash. and Richmond, Va. have dangled similar tax holidays in front of buyers.
Anyone who is buying a condo for investment should read the fine print. In many new projects, developers limit the number of investors to as little as 10 percent of total available units. And that’s despite more lenient standards set by Fannie Mae, which buys many condo mortgages from lenders. Fannie Mae permits an investor-owned level as high as 30 percent.
Source: Forbes, Matthew Swibel (06/04/07)
Post this to:

Posted in Housing, Real Estate in USA, Mortgage Bankers, Mortgage Rates, Mortgage Loan, Real Estate Investment | No Comments »
May 23rd, 2007 by babygirl
This is the second installment in a several part series about Second Life, a fantasy web site that is attracting much attention from role players and in the media. Click here to read part one of this series on virtual real estate.
Second Life is an interesting concept if viewed solely as entertainment. Losing one’s Avatar’s ears and clothing is amusing; flying headlong into a Gothic column is painless and pretty funny, and reading the blogs and coming to grips with some Second Life residents’ total commitment to their secondary reality is, well it is massively creepy. But Second Life is also a living, breathing economic system and, for that reason, it is fascinating.
Some of the figures coming out of that economy are startling and the numbers are increasing quickly. In November, 2006 13,788 Second Life business owners earned one dollar or more. These were U.S. dollars (USD) not the Second Life Linden Dollar (L$). Last month that number had grown to 34,474. Granted most had a Positive Monthly Linden Dollar Flow (PMLF) of less than $10 USD but 810 business owners had a PMLF of over $1,000 and 129 made more than $5,000. Read more
Post this to:

Posted in Housing, Real Estate in USA | No Comments »
May 23rd, 2007 by babygirl
Builders pulled residential construction permits at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,429,000 units in April. This was an 8.9 percent decline from the seasonally adjusted March rate of 1,569,000 and is down 28.1 percent from the revised April 2006 rate of 1,987,000 according to the monthly report on new residential construction released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The April figure represents the slowest pace for permitting since June, 1997.
Housing starts, however, bumped up a bit to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,528,000, 2.5 percent higher than the revised March figure of 1,491,000. Starts, however, were still 16.1 percent below the 1,821,000 pace of one year ago.
As is only logical with starts up and permitting down, the number of outstanding permits under which construction has not yet started dropped from 214,100 units to 200,900 units from March to April, a decrease of 6.1 percent and 14.7 percent lower than the 235,600 permits outstanding in April, 2006.
The President of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), California-based builder Brian Catalde remarked on the association’s website that “Builders are adjusting to the adverse impacts of tighter lending standards on home sales and cancellations by cutting back on the number of new permits and working down their backlog of unused permits. NAHB’s single-family Housing Market Index has been declining since February and builders are bracing for the challenges ahead.” Read more
Post this to:

Posted in Housing, Building, construction, remodeling and technology, Housing market | No Comments »
May 21st, 2007 by babygirl
NEW YORK · Like the legions of aspiring poets, tap dancers and musicians who came before her, Nina Rubin, 29, a graduate of Wesleyan University, has struggled to find decent housing in New York. Earlier this year, she ended up in her most unusual home yet: an office.
After taking a job as an instructor at Outward Bound, Rubin, along with some of her co-workers, settled into the top floor of the organization’s Long Island City headquarters. She camped out in a bunk bed; others converted nearby office cubicles into sleeping spaces or pitched tents on the roof of the building. To create some privacy, they hung towels and sheets around their bunks.
Rubin, who has since moved to Vermont for a short while, was grateful for a free place, though Outward Bound officials emphasized they view these cubicles and tents as temporary housing solutions. Read more
Post this to:

Posted in Housing, Real Estate in USA | No Comments »
« Previous Entries
|