January 31, 2008
Information, Market Growth
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The money magazine has made exclusive forecasts, with the generous help of the Moody’s economy.com and Fiserv Lending solutions, on 380 housing markets including New York, Las Vega, Los Angeles, Montgomery, Prescott, San Francisco, Honolulu, Cambridge and United States.
They say that there is a 3.5 percent increase in the prices of single-family houses from June 2006 to June 2007. David Stiff, the chief economist of Fiserv, stated that it is a decent increase though it is still less than the half of last year’s clip and it is under 10% of the annual rate in the past five years.
January 27, 2008
Information, Reference
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Leaders of the residential real estate industry can find useful, timely and trusted information from REAL Trends, which for twenty years, have been able to give answers to business and strategy questions, either from newsletters, e-mail updates and conferences they organized. These have been combined now and can be accessed in the website, with contents as far back as 7 years ago. These include conference presentations, research reports from REAL Trends and other sources. Be updated and read the news of the day. One of the most important responsibilities of REAL TRENDS is do the research but deliver only information that are relevant to their readers, a promise to their clients, customers and friends.
Find out more from realtrends.com
January 26, 2008
Reference
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It doesn’t really make a difference which survey you read, but similar to the annual poll done by Harris Interactive, real estate agents almost always find themselves at the bottom of the “most prestigious” occupations list.
The Ugly Truth
Why? It would seem that many of the best-paying jobs actually rank as the least prestigious -business executive, stockbroker and real estate agent - but to come in dead last with almost one-third of respondents rating real estate agents as having “hardly any prestige at all” is not good.
We need to collectively do something about it. And just changing our title from real estate agent to sales associates to Realtor(r) isn’t really going to make any meaningful difference.
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January 24, 2008
Information, Updates
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Commercial real estate in the United States is a billion dollar industry. Each day brokers and agents provide thousands of transactions to investors and buyers in a market that fluctuates as the economy does. In the United States, alone, property values have suffered as the rise and fall of the global economy does. With outsourcing to minimize expenses, property used for commercial development has taken a major hit and has some experts wondering if there will be a rebound.
Every city or town has zoning laws that dictate what can be used as residential property and what is considered commercial real estate in an area. These areas can differ by only a few feet but the taxes and property value are drastically different. Whereas a 1200 square foot housing property might lease for nine hundred dollars, the same equivalent in a commercial area might go upwards of fifteen hundred. Real estate investors take this into consideration when searching for commercial real estate properties.
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January 20, 2008
Trends
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The pace of groundbreaking for home construction in the U.S. fell in November after rebounding for the first time in four months in October, while building permits slid to the lowest level in 14 1/2 years.
Housing starts declined 3.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted 1.187 million annual rate in November, after rising 4.2 percent in the previous month to 1.232 million, the Commerce Department said this week. Year-to-year, housing starts during November were 24.2 percent below the level of construction in the same month of 2006.
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January 14, 2008
Information, Updates
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Realtors forecast for year sees the outlook worsening in 2008
WASHINGTON - Sales of existing homes in the U.S. are forecast to decline to a five-year low in 2007, a trade group for real estate agents said Tuesday, and the outlook for 2008 is worsening.
The ninth-straight downwardly revised monthly forecast from the National Association of Realtors calls for U.S. existing home sales to fall 12.7 percent this year to 5.66 million, down from 6.48 million last year.
Last month, the association predicted a 10.8 percent drop from a year ago.
This year’s sales would be the lowest since 2002, when sales hit 5.63 million. The Realtors group forecasts sales will rise slightly next year to 5.69 million, but that is down from last month’s prediction of 6.12 million.
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January 10, 2008
Updates
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The Federal Reserve has released the October 2007 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices which addresses changes in the supply of and demand for bank loans both to businesses and consumers over the previous three months which, we presume, corresponds to the third quarter of 2007. In this particular survey participating banks were questioned about changes in their lending policies for backup lines of credit for commercial paper and prime nonconforming residential mortgage loans. Banks were asked separately about changes in credit standards and demand for prime, nontraditional, and subprime residential mortgages. The report summarizes responses from 52 domestic banks and 22 foreign banking institutions, a respondent pool which accounts for the majority of the bank lending in the country.
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January 1, 2008
Trends
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SAN FRANCISCO (Map, News) - San Francisco ranks fifth in the nation as a location for real estate development and investment, according to a national study released Thursday in San Francisco.
The City lost out to top-rated New York City, which was deemed the most desirable metropolitan area to invest in development and real estate in the nation, according to the 2008 Emerging Trends study, an annual survey of real estate industry professionals put out by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the nonprofit Urban Land Institute. Seattle was the only West Coast city to rank higher than San Francisco on the annual list.
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