Free Republic

In one of the most agonizing disconnects of the Bay Area's surging economy, far more people want to buy a home than want to sell one, making this the tightest housing market in the nation. Would-be homebuyers are crowding into scarce open houses and battling for the few available, leading to rising prices, rapid sales -- many homes sell within a week -- and frustrated house hunters. "This is the most sustained period of low inventory I've seen in 20 to 24 years," said Chris Trapani, head of the Sereno Group in Silicon Valley.

A couple of recent reports will help put the bifurcated US home "recovery" in perspective. Priced Out First, please consider Many Seek New Homes Near Cities but are Priced Out The average price of a newly built home nationwide has reached $320,100 — a 20.5 percent jump since 2012 began. That puts a typical new home out of reach for two-thirds of Americans, according to government data. Yet many builders have made a calculated bet: Better to sell fewer new homes at higher prices than build more and charge less. Their calculation is partly a consequence of the growing...

Yes, neighbor, but what do YOU think? Among the many findings of a new Pew Research Center survey is this data about neighborhoods, and how Americans want them to look: more conservatives than liberals want to live in a place where most people share their political views. The survey found that, among the consistently conservative, 50% believe it’s important to live in a place where most think the way they do about politics. For consistent liberals, it’s 35%. Check out the Pew poll. The divide over neighborhoods doesn’t end there. Many more liberals than conservatives want communities where the houses...

As the housing market slowly recovers, a majority of homeowners and renters are finding it hard to meet rising rents and mortgage payments, new research finds. Over half of Americans (52%) have had to make at least one major sacrifice in order to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years, according to the “How Housing Matters Survey,” which was commissioned by the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and carried out by Hart Research Associates. These sacrifices include getting a second job, deferring saving for retirement, cutting back on health care, running up credit card...

Black Knight's April Mortgage Monitor shows almost 2 million modifications face interest rate resets, and 40 percent of those resets are underwater. Email News Release "We have seen a continual reduction in the number of underwater borrowers at the national level for some time now, but modified loans show a different picture," said Kostya Gradushy, Black Knight's manager of Loan Data and Customer Analytics. "While the national negative equity rate as of April stands at 9.4 percent of active mortgages, the share of underwater modified loans facing interest rate resets is much higher -- over 40 percent. In addition, another...

Have you always wanted to try your hand at 3D-printing a building? Are you jealous of the Chinese architect who 3D-printed 10 houses in 24 hours? Well, you might be interested in buying the world's first commercial house 3D-printer for £9,800 (€12,000, $16,000). Slovenian firm BetAbram have designed a 3D printer capable of printing a house, and they plan to release it in August under the name BetAbram P3. This 3D printer can print buildings measuring 12 sq m, and so far, the company has only produced miniature houses and sculptures with the printer. BetAbram is also planning to release...

While houses of varying quality have been 3D-printed before, one contractor in Minnesota wants to build one such home by using a specially designed 3D printer that uses cement as a filament, without compromising on build quality or design, 3DPrint reports. Furthermore, the contractor’s aim isn’t to finish the house as fast as possible, but rather to 3D print it efficiently and securely. “A cheap house built in 24 hours is not my goal,” Andrey Rudenko said. “My current focus is building well-insulated small or medium-sized homes of a contemporary design, definitely onsite. As an experienced builder, I know that...

I wrote here and here about the Obama administration’s proposed rule on “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH), an attempt to dictate how we shall live. In essence, President Obama seeks to use the power of the national government to create communities of a certain kind, each having what the federal government deems an appropriate mix of economic, racial, and ethnic diversity. The proposed AFFH rule, issued last July, was expected to be finalized by the end of last year. But the year ended with no further action. 2014 was supposed to be the year Obama’s “year of action” — the...

Mamta BadkarMay 27, 2014 We just got March S&P Case-Shiller home prices that beat expectations. The numbers showed home prices were cooling, but they nevertheless reflected increases on month-over-month and year-over-year bases. However, Ian Shepherdson chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics says "this report makes no sense." This is because "every indicator" of the house market he watches is slowing or falling. "We don't know if the March problem is Easter seasonal adjustments or the long-standing issue of fully adjusting for changes in the proportion of foreclosure sales in the sample, but we think the real trend in existing home prices...

Billy Gasparino and Jenna Dillon-Gasparino were savvy enough to wait out the housing boom of a decade ago as renters. Not until 2010, well into the bust, did they buy a house in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, less than a mile from the beach, for $810,000. Only four years later, the couple see new signs of excess in the housing market and have decided to go back to renting. They are close to a deal to sell their house – for $1.35 million, a cool 67 percent gain. “It just seems like the housing market came back so...

In the wake of reports that teachers are being dramatically priced out of the San Francisco area and that 45% of Manhattan homes are purchased in cash, sometimes you just have to wonder: Who can actually afford to buy a home? Mortgage website HSH.com analyzed median home prices and interest rates for common 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages, as well as property taxes and insurance costs, to figure out how much money it would take to pay a home's mortgage principal, taxes, and insurance — and how much you would have to earn to afford it. You can check out its website...

For $37,000 you can live in what used to serve as a shipping container. Steve Harrigan reported today on a new out-of-the-box idea that could solve several problems at once. Florida-based New Generation Builders is taking old cargo shipping containers and retrofitting them into dwellings. To look at one, you might think of a mobile home, but the company’s owner, Steven Sawyer, resents the comparison. He notes that when a hurricane comes through, it levels mobile homes. But Sawyer says by using corrugated steel and concrete pilings to anchor down each side, his homes will be totally undamaged. …

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Weave your way to the top covered-floor of a parking garage in Midtown Atlanta, shielded from heavy rain and direct sunlight, and you won't find cars filling the spaces between the yellow lines. Instead, you'll find three micro homes and a handful of outdoor patios, all part of a micro-housing experiment the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) calls SCADPads. As city populations boom — the World Health Organization says 6 out of 10 people will live in a city by 2030 — urban planners are pressured to seek out wise housing methods. "If you look at where parking...

Each quarter, when we perform our regular update on trends in US homeownership and rents using Census Bureau data, we say that "The American Homeownership Dream is officially dead. Long live the New Normal American Dream: Renting." One thing we added in 2013 is that the American Dream has now officially became a full-blown nightmare after mortgage rates exploded, even if declining modestly afterward, and in the process pummeling the affordability of housing as well as grounding any new mortgage-funded transactions to a complete halt (don't believe us - just ask the tens of thousands of mortgage brokers let...

Scientists claim to have developed a revolutionary new giant 3D concrete printer that can build a 2,500-square-foot house in just 24 hours. The 3D printer, developed by Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis from the University of Southern California, could be used to build a whole house, layer by layer, in a single day. The giant robot replaces construction workers with a nozzle on a gantry, which squirts out concrete and can quickly build a home based on a computer pattern, MSN News reported. It is "basically scaling up 3D printing to the scale of building," said Khoshnevis. 'Contour Crafting' is a...

US Housing Market Is Down For The CountHousing-Market / US Housing Apr 27, 2014 - 10:55 PM GMTRaul I Meijer Recent news, graphs and data confirm what we have long said would inevitably become clear: the entire global economy appears to have “functioned” through an orgy of refinancing, LBO and M&A lately. That is to say, zombie money has been enthusiastically slushed and re-slushed around to provide commissions, bonuses etc. to bankers and brokers, a process enabled by central bank and government policies in which large amounts of credit were thrown against the wall like so much Jello, hoping –...

Six years ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid celebrated what he called a "love fest" of government support for the construction of a proposed 150,000-home community in the Nevada desert and the lobbyist-turned-developer behind it, Harvey Whittemore. Last week, a federal grand jury charged Mr. Whittemore with making illegal political contributions to Mr. Reid, a Democrat. Even before the indictment, Mr. Reid and other politicians had begun to distance themselves from Mr. Whittemore—long one of Nevada's most powerful lobbyists—by pledging to charity money to offset donations they had gotten from him. ~~snip~~ The allegations against Mr. Whittemore stem from a...

The Census Bureau report New Residential Sales Report shows sales of new single-family houses in March 2014 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 384,000. Sales are 14.5 percent below the revised February rate of 449,000 Sales are 13.3 percent below the March 2013 estimate of 443,000 Median sales price was $290,000 vs. $260,900 in February, $257,500 in March of 2013 Average sales price was $334,200 vs. $318,900 in February, $300,200 in March of 2013 Median sales price was up 11.5% from last month, 12.6% from year ago Average sales price was up 4.8% from last month, 11.3% from...

Most people include home ownership as one of the basic elements of the American Dream. It stands not just for independence, but also in most minds an investment in tangible and significant property. It’s not a universally-held goal — some people prefer to rent even with the means to own — but home ownership is usually seen as one of the building blocks to middle-class wealth.As I noted, some people prefer to avoid home ownership, but not usually on the basis of it being a lousy investment. See if you can pick out the huge, gaping flaw that the Washington...

Liberals advocate many wonderful things. In fact, I suspect that most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world envisioned by liberals, rather than in the kind of world envisioned by conservatives. Unfortunately, the only kind of world that any of us can live in is the world that actually exists. Trying to live in the kind of world that liberals envision has costs that will not go away just because these costs are often ignored by liberals. One of those costs appeared in an announcement of a house for sale in Palo Alto, the community adjacent to...