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Toronto Real Estate Board: 2007-11-20 00:47:33 “Best Year Ever With Six Weeks to Go!” With six weeks remaining, 2007 has already become the best year on record for resale homes in the Greater Toronto Area, Toronto Real Estate Board President Maureen O’Neill announced today. “As I predicted last month, 2007 will indeed be a banner year for home sales in our city,” said Ms. O’Neill. “So far this year, 84,994 properties have changed hands, as compared to 84,145 sales in 2005, our previous best year.” With 3,544 transactions to mid-month, November sales are also up five per cent compared the same timeframe last year. The current average price is $393,084, a nine per cent increase over the first half of November 2006. The year-to-date average price stands at $374,678, up six per cent over the $352,807 recorded during the first 11 1/2 months of 2006. In West Agincourt (E05), transactions were up 39 per cent as compared to the same timeframe a year ago, driven by a significant increase in ...

A match made in heaven 2007-11-19 21:02:47 In a brilliant move, HGTV has parlayed their well-known brand of home-and-garden based television and moved into online homes sales. In beta stage and not yet cross-linked from their site or promoted on the channel, Front Door has the potential to attract a huge amount of traffic from homebuyers and sellers already familiar with the brand. HGTV benefits from a 24-hour a day “infomercial” from not only HGTV, but the Fine Living Channel and the Food Channel too. It’s a round-the-clock love fest of beautiful homes, fabulous remodels, great recipes, and cheerful hosts and hostesses making home repair, gardening, decorating, scrapbooking and crafts look exciting. They’re scraping from several sites and not offering links back to individual agents, but inquiries DO go to individual agents representing the properties, so they’re not selling leads (yet). Coldwell Banker and CitiCard seem to be the largest advertisers so far, with banner ads on every page. ...

Poor (in Tours) No More 2007-11-19 19:10:09 Changes at Redfin have made all sorts of headlines this year, but the only change our customers really want from us is more home tours. Historically, the first four-hour home tour has been free, and the rest cost $250 up front. One isn’t enough. We’ve never had a focus group where customers didn’t bay for more tours, while the interns heedlessly wolfed the catered sushi. So in yet another mutation from the dainty little web company we originally imagined ourselves to be, we’ve now got a new proposal to run by you: quadrupling the number of home tours customers can get from us before paying any money. Of course there’s a catch. In fact there’re three: You have to be pre-approved to buy the places we’re touring: it’s ok to look, but let’s at least make sure we’re in the right ballpark. The home tours last two hours, not four: most people want to see three or four homes in one go, not eight or ten. For home tours #3 and #4, we ...

New Contributors to Blown Mortgage 2007-11-19 18:39:16 Hey Gang, Exciting news - we’re going to be adding a couple of contributors here to help up the ante in terms of value and content provided by Blown Mortgage.  We’ll be having a bunch of different voices offer their opinion over the next several weeks.  Let me know what you think of them and give them feedback in the comments. My plate is getting extremely full and I am ever-grateful that people are willing to contribute to make Blown Mortgage better than it’s ever been.  Please give them your support and honest, unvarnished feedback to help them make your daily dose even more effective. We’ll have a bunch of folks chiming in but to start we have Chris and Justin a bit on them: Chris Johnson specializes in working with Realtors on emergency loans that need to close within ten days or sooner.  He does owner occupied A paper and FHA loans in several states.  More information on Chris’s business can be found at tendayteam.com. Justin is choosing to lay l ...

Goldman: Citi Exposed to $15 Billion in Write Downs 2007-11-19 09:27:30 Goldman Sachs analysts are anticipating that Citi is exposed to an additional $8 - $11 billion in mortgage-related write downs in the 4th quarter and an additional $4 billion above and beyond the $1.83 billion in charges already taken by the banking giant.  The losses are of course tied to subprime mortgage bets and collateralized debt obligations. Goldman has become increasingly bearish in its analysis of the banking and housing sector, releasing a report on California properties calling for a 35% drop in prices, a research note on the elimination of $2 trillion in global lending and now the Citi write down woes. From the article: The projected $8 billion to $11 billion write-down is on top of a top of a $1.83 billion mortgage-related loss that Citigroup took in the third quarter. The New York-based bank on November 4 said it had no plans to cut its dividend. Citigroup also provided $7.6 billion of financing as of October 31 to so-called structured investment vehicles after they were ...

Impac to Report Larger-than-Expected Quarterly Loss 2007-11-19 06:53:55 Impac Mortgage company, the Irvine-based Alt-A lender who specialized in near-prime loans to people with limited income documentation, reported that it would need additional time to file its quarterly reports with the SEC due to the cessation of business activities in the mortgage origination segments of its business. From Market Watch: The company also said it would be late to file its Securities and Exchange Commission Form 10-Q for the quarter because it needs more time “to properly record and disclose its recently discontinued warehouse lending operations, commercial operations and the cessation of the origination and purchase of non-prime mortgage loans.” Impac was one of the first Alt-A lenders to take a hit after it became clear that loan losses were widening outside of the subprime mortgage market. Share This ...

Who’s buying, who’s selling? 2007-11-19 02:30:27 LAS VEGAS — The first rule of business is to know your market and in real estate that means paying attention to things like the annual survey of home buyers and sellers released by the National Association of Realtors this week. Some of the more interesting takeaways from this year’s survey, which measured consumer habits from mid-2006 to mid-2007 (so before the deep credit crunch that unfolded over the summer), were: –For-sale-by-owners, or FSBOs, were little changed at about 12 percent of the sellers surveyed. –Forty-five percent of first-time home buyers bought with no money down. –Ninety-percent of sellers who used an agent said their home was listed in the MLS. (Five percent said they didn’t know whether their home was listed.) –Nine percent of sellers using an agent went with a limited set of services, while an additional 9 percent said they used an MLS-listing-only service and the remaining 81 percent chose a full range of services. ...

Morgan will be speaking at Real Estate Connect in NYC 2007-11-18 18:53:22 Hey gang, Yours truly has been invited to speak at the upcoming Real Estate Connect conference in New York City. The conference starts on January 9th and runs through the 11th. You can see the full schedule at the Real Estate Connect Web site. I will be speaking on Wednesday January 9th at 9:45 am as part of a panel titled: Beyond the Written Word: Videoblogging and Podcasting. You can learn more about the panel here, but I have the pleasure of sharing the stage with some truly innovative people in the world of taking blogging to the next level. The conference itself promises to be an amazing experience and I am particularly excited to hear Dr. Nouriel Roubini, author of RGE Monitor and former White House Economist, and Barry Ritholtz author of The Big Picture speak.  As a daily reader of both I am looking forward to hearing them in person. I recommend attending if you’re attached to the real estate market in any way.  You can register here - and be sure to get in on tim ...

Goldman: Subprime May Wipe Out $2 Trillion in Lending 2007-11-18 07:50:08 So much for containment. Remember the simpler days when Ben Bernanke told us that the subprime meltdown was an isolated incident, one which would be contained and not affect the rest of the credit markets?  Well, throw that out the window (if you’ve been inexplicably clinging to it for some reason) now that Goldman Sachs has said that disruptions caused by subprime mortgage lending may take more than $2 TRILLION off of the global lending table.  And for kicks, throw in the ‘R’ word with that decrease. Losses related to record home foreclosures using a “back- of-the-envelope” calculation may be as high as $400 billion for financial companies, Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist at Goldman in New York wrote in a report dated yesterday. The effects may be amplified tenfold as companies that borrowed to finance their investments scale back lending, the report said. “The likely mortgage credit losses pose a significantly bigger macroeconomic risk than ge ...

Give Your Credit Score A Boost 2007-11-17 18:54:44 I was planning on writing an in-depth post of how to boost your credit, but I also believe in efficiency, and a colleague of mine, Ben Miller, at Mortgage and Realty Professionals in San Diego, forwarded me this article from the Novemeber 2007 edition of “YOU Magazine”. I found some great tips on how to increase your credit score to get a loan for that perfect San Francisco home you’ve had your eye on. Read on for some awesome advice! Give Yourself Some Credit: Easy Ways to Score Points with Underwriters (YOU Magazine) - We all know the phrase “buy low, sell high.” Many of you may be wondering if now is the time to “buy low” in the real estate market. Prices are down, inventories are up, and interest rates are near historic lows. This month YOU Magazine looks at how a smart investor or homeowner can become loan ready, and prepare his or her credit profile to take advantage of the buyers’ market. Whether you are looking to invest, b ...

Bank of America Thinks It’ll be a Long Way Down 2007-11-17 05:58:30 A big hat tip to Housing Wire for sharing data of a leaked BofA analyst report on the housing market yesterday.  The report shows that Bank of America is bearish on housing through the end of this decade and in to the start of the next.  Bank of America sees housing pain continuing through 2011; which is the most distant of the ‘recovery’ dates I’ve heard.  Every day it seems to get pushed further and further out as people digest information about what is really going on with all of these loans.  The latest media darling, the Option ARM reset, seems to be pushing people out past the wave of likely foreclosures caused by those loans resetting and declaring stability after those move through the system. Some points of interest from the excerpts that Housing Wire published: Cumulative housing price drop nationwide is estimated at 15%  We’ll not see a housing recovery until 2011 This report comes on the heels of a Goldman Sachs report on California housing (h ... America

Toronto’s Rosedale: Sold. 2007-11-17 02:27:26 If you are thinking of buying a nice Rosedale mansion in time for Christmas, you might be out of luck. Real estate sales in Toronto’s toniest neighbourhood - home to corporate titans, socialites and the odd rock star or two - has slowed to a trickle. Why? All of the good properties have been sold. "All of Rosedale is sold-out in the $2.3-million-to-$5-million range," declares Sasha Josipowicz, a partner in Pyramid Architecture, a Toronto-based company specializing in buying, renovating and then selling high-end homes. "All that’s left are oversized, overpriced properties. The well has run dry," he says. But don’t move to Willowdale just yet. Real estate, as Chestnut Park’s Jimmy Molloy sees it, is cyclical. "It comes and goes in flurries. We may not see a crop of magnificent Rosedale properties until after the holidays. But I can assure you that by Jan. 15, the bloom will be back on the rose of Rosedale." For James Strathy Warren, ...

October 2007 Sales Data is Here! 2007-11-16 15:48:47 The latest market report is here. Prices are still UP from last year, and on par with last month. And “days of market” is STILL lower than last year, albeit not by much. I’m not the type of REALTOR that’s out there trying to paint a rosy picture for you. But, I’d like to point out that it’s not all as bleak as it appears in the “doom and gloom” articles. A client of mine, after reading about the “gloom and doom” to come stated that: “we have our eyes open for a realistic deal but we expect it to be April at the earliest before the market has adjusted. There is a guy down the street from us trying to sell a light-starved, ground floor condo directly across from the firestation. He listed it in early August at $750K. It has been open every weekend Sat and Sun since then. And he still has it listed at $750K. I’ll make a prediction. By April of next year he will be struggling to get $500K for it.” My r ...

Oil Spills Suck (and ways to help out) 2007-11-16 14:45:54 Ocean Beach, originally uploaded by thegirlinthecurl. I’ve been out of it a bit this week. A few health issues I had needed to be taken care of, nothing major… I’m back and getting into the swing of things but, meanwhile, all around our local Bay and beyond, we’ve had our own health crisis in our local waters. By now, you know all about the Cosco Busan Oil Spill and the damage it has caused and is still causing. And I know that you, like many others want to help. You can get updated information on training, the status of the oil spill, etc at SanFrancisco.about.com In addition to the updates, you can find a list of ways to help. Below, you’ll also find a summar of some ways you can participate: SAN FRANCISCO TRAINING TO CLEAN UP OIL The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will provide training to certify volunteers for participation in San Francisco and Bay Area beach cleanups. The training will include instruction and safet ...

Canada’s home sales setting records 2007-11-16 02:21:35 Canadian existing home sales had their strongest October showing on record, and are on track to hit an annual record as well, the Canadian Real Estate Association said on Thursday. Sales were up 1.3 percent from September to 28,966 units. That followed three consecutive months of declines, said CREA, an industry trade organization representing over 92,000 realtors. CREA’s records go back to 1980. October sales were up 7.6 percent from the same month a year earlier. Sales in 2007 have risen year-over-year every month except September. “The trend in new listings shows there is no panic selling in Canada’s housing market,” CREA president Ann Bosley said in a release. The unadjusted average resale home price rose 10.6 per cent to C$333,544 in October from a year earlier, the sixth consecutive month that the increase exceeded 10 percent. The strong numbers highlight the difference between the housing markets in Canada and the U.S., said Gregory Klump, the Canadian R ...