| Currently listed on LoftyFinds.com: 25 Lofts · 87 Condos · 350 Apartments · 100 Houses |
Toronto - Unique Loft In Cabbagetown for Sale
Toronto - Fashion House - Register For Vip Preview
Seattle - Pioneer Square Loft for Rent
Seattle - 2 Story Loft For Sale
Atlanta - Castleberry Hill Loft for Rent
Atlanta - Tribute Lofts Action
Daily Cool
360-degree Island Sink
Loft Kitchen
TOAST
My 3 Favorite Chairs
Glass Countertops
Times are tough.
Home prices across 20 major U.S. cities have dropped a record 15.3% in the past year and are now back to where they were in the summer of 2004, according to the Case-Shiller home price index released Tuesday by Standard & Poor’s.
Prices in the 20 cities are now down 17.8% from the peak two years ago.
Prices were lower in April than they were a year earlier in all 20 of the major metropolitan areas as tracked by the Case-Shiller index.
Henderson-based Slade Development filed for bankruptcy protection Friday on Vantage Lofts, a $160 million condominium complex at Gibson Road and Horizon Ridge Parkway.
Construction was halted in February and the sales office was closed after more than $17 million in mechanics’ liens were filed by subcontractors who hadn’t been paid for their work on the project.
“I’ve been in this town for 50 years, and we’ve never had a responsibility to subs that we couldn’t meet, so this is new,” Slade Development Chairman Stacy Slade said.
Slade said he’d been working with lenders over the past two weeks to come up with a definitive plan to move forward on the project and meet his obligations to subcontractors.
The primary lender is Bar-K/R.E. Loans of Lafayette, Calif., which is owed at least $35 million. Scripps Investments and Loans of La Jolla, Calif., is in second at $32.4 million. Slade listed debts of about $72 million and assets of about $45 million.
The 110-unit first phase of Vantage Lofts was originally scheduled to be completed in early 2007.
The project was delayed by a number of factors, including changes in the secondary lender, a labor shortage and issues with the city of Henderson over design and engineering, Slade said.
More than 20 buyers remain under contract, he said. Prices for the urban-style lofts ranged from $450,000 to $1.6 million, or about $450 a square foot.
“The lack of sales in the market, because of the downturn, it’s no surprise, especially in the condo market,” Slade said. “It’s been a real battle.”
About $67.4 million of the company’s debts are secured by liens on property valued at about $40 million, according to court papers. Vantage has fewer than 200 creditors and expects to have enough money to pay something to unsecured creditors, according to the bankruptcy petition.
Part of the deal to purchase 20 acres for Vantage Lofts involved funding construction for a new Four Square Church in the Calico Hills area of Henderson, Slade said. That work has also stopped because the company doesn’t have the funds to finish the interior of the church, including heating and air conditioning, and the landscaping, he said.
We’ve launched 2 more sites to continue the city specific blog theme. Welcome Atlanta and Seattle to the mix.
If your interest in writing for one of our blogs let us know.
Great News!
New-home construction increased 8.2 percent in April, offering signs of life in a deeply troubled sector, the Commerce Department reported on Friday. But most of the gain came in multifamily housing, masking further bad news on single-family homes, whose groundbreakings dropped to a 17-year low.
Housing starts rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.032 million. Construction of multifamily units surged 36 percent, compared with a 35 percent drop in March, a huge swing — and an average one in recent months, the agency said in a report.
While building permits were up 4 percent in both areas, ground was broken on 1.7 percent fewer single-family homes in April, from a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 704,000 to 692,000.
There were varied reactions to the new figures, with one analyst telling Reuters that “it’s a nice upside surprise” and another telling Bloomberg News that the trends remained “horrific.”
Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors offered a pragmatic assessment in comments to The Associated Press. “While we may not yet have absolutely hit bottom,” he said, “it is beginning to look as if the end may be near.”
The markets were down slightly in early trading.
“The bump in starts owes entirely to multifamily dwellings,” Michael T. Darda of MKM Partners said. While the single-family figure was certainly bad news, he also said that it “indicates that the builders are rapidly taking supply off the market, which ultimately will lay the foundation for stabilization in the sector.”
The month-to-month figures may have been mixed, but the year-to-year comparisons left no doubt that housing was far from a full recovery. Overall housing starts plunged 30.6 percent compared with those in the month a year earlier, and permits sank by 34.3 percent.
Looks like the New York celebrity real estate market is still strong.
New Yorkers are reminded fairly frequently that not everyone is hurting from the nation’s housing slump.
Attention-grabbing names like Madonna, Bono and Scarlett are still making multimillion-dollar real estate deals in the city and the media aren’t shy about reporting it.
“It’s certainly amazing how often, just going through city records, [you find] someone with a well-known name is selling an apartment that’s absurdly big and absurdly expensive,” said Max Abelson, who writes a real estate column for The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper.
Abelson’s latest celebrity reports include news that actress Scarlett Johansson sold her Tribeca loft for nearly $1.9 million and that U2 lead singer Bono sold his Central Park West apartment for $4.9 million.
Many Americans are anxious about the real estate market. But foreign investors see U.S. apartments, hotels, shopping centers, warehouses and offices as good investments, according to a new survey.
The weak dollar has made the American real estate market look attractive to foreign bargain hunters.
The U.S. rose to the top of lists of the “most stable and secure” countries for real estate investment and the countries with the best opportunity for appreciation, according to the 16th annual survey of the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate (AFIRE)released Jan. 28. New York City and Washington D.C. were the top two global “Cities for Foreign Investors’ Real Estate Dollars,” according to the survey.
China is also growing in popularity. Shanghai rose to No. 5 from No. 9 a year ago on the list of top cities for foreign investment. And China is now No. 2 on the list of countries with the best opportunity for appreciation.
The survey of 200 AFIRE members was conducted in the fourth quarter 2007. AFIRE members hold $700 billion of cross-border real estate, including $230 billion in the U.S.
It’s been that kind of year for the luxury sector in New York. While home prices slid around the country, Manhattan set a new apartment sales record with developer Harry Macklowe’s $60 million purchase of an entire Plaza Hotel floor (minus one rogue apartment), and a new price-per-square-foot benchmark ($6,287 per interior square foot) with former Citigroup chairman Sanford Weill’s $42.4 million splash into 15 Central Park West.
After two full years of depressed home sales, the internal advertising pendulums have begun to swing for real estate. Agents, who initially tried to appease home sellers by advertising more on traditional channels, this year systematically cut their print budgets and pushed more money into the Web. The result has been a slingshot effect for online advertising. While total ad spending on real estate has declined 3 percent this year, spending on the online segment has grown 25.8%, hitting $2.6 billion. We are projecting online real estate advertising to grow at a somewhat slower rate next year – 12.4%, while total real estate advertising continues to compress. In three years, agents and brokers will be spending more ad dollars with online media than with the newspaper.
By 2012, Borrell’s numbers show real estate advertising online growing by 34% to $3.45 billion. Newspaper’s real estate take will fall 32% to $3.3 billion. And the rest of real estate advertising will grow 10% to $4.46 billion. All told, the five-year outlook for real estate advertising — regardless of the platform — is down 2%. Flat marketing budgets are never a a very bullish signal for any industry.
