Articles

3Q10 Hamptons Home Prices Fall as Buyers Avoid Luxury, BB

“What it suggests to me is not that there was a sharp drop-off in pricing, because there wasn’t,” said Jonathan Miller, the president of Miller Samuel. “It’s a shift in the mix. We had a drop in upper-end sales activity....

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Home prices in New York’s Hamptons, the beachside resort towns in Long Island swelled by summering Manhattanites, dropped 14 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier as buyers opted for less-expensive properties.The median price of homes that sold in the quarter fell to $696,000 from $810,000 a year earlier, according to a report today by New York appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and broker Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. It was the second-lowest price in the firms’ six years of keeping the data, behind only the $675,000 median in the first quarter of 2009.New York City’s financial industry, whose executives fuel high-end Hamptons demand, lost 1,600 jobs in September from August, the state Department of Labor said today. Professional and business services -- a sector that includes lawyers, accountants and architects -- lost 9,000 jobs, the most for September since at least 1990. Wall Street firms may cut 80,000 jobs in the next 18 months and year-end bonuses could be the lowest since 2008, Meredith Whitney, founder of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, said in a Sept. 30 Bloomberg Radio interview.Eleven Hamptons homes sold for $5 million or more in the third quarter, compared with 20 a year earlier, Miller said. The median price for luxury properties, defined as the top 10 percent by price, dropped 14 percent in the Hamptons and Long Island’s North Fork to $3.7 million“I see the East End as joined at the hip with Wall Street,” Miller said. “Going forward, that’s a concern. The next couple of quarters are not quite clear at the moment.”

By Oshrat Carmiel, October 21, 2010 Business Week/Bloomberg

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The Elusive Small-House Utopia, NYT

The most salient specification of the house was its modest proportions. At around 1,700 square feet, it was the size of the average American home built in 1980.

Every year, in conjunction with a big trade show, the magazine Builder creates something it calls its “concept home.” The house is an exhibition on a theme — the 2004 edition, for example, was called the Ultimate Family Home — but also a commercial venture. ...During the last decade’s real estate boom, the annual demonstration kept up with the times: designs abounded with baronial features like colonnades, cathedral ceilings and observation towers, and they sometimes topped 6,000 square feet. But then the crash came, wiping out credit lines and shaking the industry’s confidence. For this year’s show, Boyce Thompson, the editorial director of Builder, wanted a look more attuned to curtailed appetites, so he came up with a concept that he called a Home for the New Economy.
By Andrew Rice, October 15, 2010 NYT

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After Bust, Using ’60s Law to Get Out of Condo Deals, NYT

Lawyers for the buyers are finding fault in wording that technically violates the law in contracts or other paperwork — language that few developers or lawyers paid much attention to during the long real estate boom.

In May 2008, a few months before the financial industry’s meltdown, the shipping executive Vasilis Bacolitsas signed up to buy a $3.4 million apartment at the Brompton, a luxury condominium tower being built on the Upper East Side.
The building went up as the real estate market went down, and Mr. Bacolitsas and his wife sought a $600,000 reduction in the purchase price. When they did not get it, they decided they did not want the apartment anymore. Their contract, like virtually all real estate contracts, required that they surrender the $510,000 deposit. But last month, a judge ruled that the couple could walk away with their money. It was one of a series of recent rulings in New York and other states that have enraged developers and given an escape hatch to buyers who signed contracts at the worst possible time, before one of the biggest real estate meltdowns in decades.
By Christine Haughney, Oct 20, 2010 NYT

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Mortgage Rate on 30-Year Loan Falls to Record 4.19%, BB

U.S. mortgage rates fell for a third straight week to the lowest level on record, extending a slide in borrowing costs as housing demand slumps. Rates for 30-year fixed loans declined to 4.19 percent in the week ended today from 4.27 percent, Freddie Mac said in a statement. It is the lowest rate since the McLean, Virginia- based company began tracking the data in 1971.
By Danielle Kucera, Oct 14, 2010 Bloomberg

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Source: www.theapplepeeled.com  09/10/10