Category Archives: North Salem

Fannie Mae: Homebuilding jobs far from normal | North Salem Real Estate

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Residential construction jobs faced a 41% drop between 2006 and 2011. With homebuilding predicted to return to normal by 2016, housing starts may double over the next four years,Fannie Mae said.

This return to normalcy also implies an improvement in residential construction employment. But many are wondering how many jobs will come out of this homebuilding rebound.

In its latest edition of Housing Insights, Fannie Mae studies the historical relationship between housing starts and residential construction employment coupled with Economic and Strategic Research’s housing starts forecast, to project future homebuilding employment.

If housing starts keep up with expectations and return to normal levels in 2016, it is predicted that residential construction employment will rise to nearly 2.5 million jobs.

Fannie Mae predicts housing construction will recover to a “normal” level of about 1.6 million units in 2016. But what does this mean for homebuilding employment?

Fannie’s forecast predicts that residential construction employment will increase by 412,000 jobs between 2012 and 2016. This 20% rise in homebuilding employment will nearly triple the forecasted pace of total job growth during this time period.

However, the pace of growth will not be quick enough to bring back all homebuilding jobs lost during the housing bust. In 2016, the number of residential construction jobs is expected to remain nearly 1 million jobs below peaks established during the housing boom.

 

 

http://www.housingwire.com/news

Housing Market Improvements: How Will You Adjust? | North Salem Real Estate

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Wade Corbett

A very wise man named Obi Wan once said: “I feel a great disturbance in the Force.” OK sure, it’s a Star Wars quote, and I’m talking about the housing market and not a metaphysical power, but the overall message still applies! If you pay close attention, you’ll notice the market has begun to shift. Depending on your area, you may be seeing a little change, or you may be seeing a lot of change already. The latest numbers reflect this positive upturn and show that real estate is drastically improving.

If you’ve been in this industry for the last six or seven years, you know that selling real estate takes a certain amount of hustle. When the market is less than stellar, you’ve got to work harder in order to keep business alive. Maybe you’ve had to hold your transactions together with duct tape to prevent them from falling apart. Or maybe you’ve been working 60 hours to do what 40 hours used to accomplish. Either way, kudos to you! But with the market springing back to life, does this mean an end to the “hustle era”?

Two weeks ago, I had the immense pleasure of addressing a class full of aspiring new REALTORS®. If I had given my speech in 2009, this class would have had 25-30 students in attendance. In 2013, the class consisted of 50-70 eager students, all scheduled to take their licensing exam the following week. As I addressed the students, I began to notice that a large majority of these future REALTORS® were very young! Why are these young people hoping to join the real estate sales force? I believe they know about the shift! They know the real estate marketing is going to gather steam, and they want to get in before things really start to pick up.

As the stock market, jobs, and overall economy continue to improve, the real estate market will inevitably follow suit. But is your business model prepared to handle the improving market demands? Do you have your systems in place to take on a larger work load while still trying to hold those difficult transactions together? You may want to consider tweaking the way you run your business to accommodate for the changes that are to come. Foresight is essential to success.

 

 

http://ypnlounge.blogs.realtor.org

US home prices up 9.3 pct., most in nearly 7 years | North Salem Homes

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U.S. home prices rose 9.3 percent in February compared with a year ago, the most in nearly seven years. The gains were driven by a growing number of buyers who bid on a limited supply of homes.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index increased from an 8.1 percent year-over-year gain in January. And annual prices rose in February in all 20 cities for the second month in a row.

Phoenix led all cities with an annual gain of 23 percent in February. Prices jumped nearly 19 percent in San Francisco. In Las Vegas, home prices increased 17.6 percent and in Atlanta they rose 16.5 percent.

Eleven of the 20 cities reported price gains in February compared with January. Those monthly numbers are not seasonally adjusted and reflect the slower winter buying period.

The index covers roughly half of U.S. homes. It measures prices compared with those in January 2000 and creates a three-month moving average. The February figures are the latest available.

Steady hiring and near-record low mortgage rates are driving up demand, helping sustain the housing recovery that began last year. Buyer traffic was 25 percent higher in March than it was a year ago, according to the National Association of Realtors.

 

 

http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com

Construction Spending, ISM Index, ADP Payroll, Mortgage Purchase Applications | North Salem Real Estate

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In each Economic Update, the Research staff analyzes recently released economic indicators and addresses what these indicators mean for REALTORS® and their clients. Today’s update discusses construction spending, the ISM index, ADP payroll figures, and mortgage purchase applications.

 

  • A stream of fresh economic data appears on the first day of every month. Here is a quick summary of today’s data and what it may mean to you.
  • Construction spending on residential buildings rose, but activities on new commercial buildings and government-funded projects declined. This means there is and will be more construction job opportunities for homebuilding.
  • The manufacturing sector is barely holding on. The ISM index, which measure activity in this sector, fell for the second consecutive month. The latest reading of 50.7 is only marginally above the critical 50 mark, which separates expansion and contraction. This means job gains in the manufacturing sector will slow or even possibly reverse in a few months.
  • ADP, a company that processes payroll checks for many firms, revealed 119,000 net new jobs in April in the private sector. This data has smaller coverage than the official employment data from the government, which is scheduled to come out this Friday. This likely means that official job gains will be comfortably positive, but the job creation pace is still not strong enough to meaningfully bring the unemployment rate down.
  • Mortgage applications for a home purchase fell slightly, though are up by 13 percent from one year ago. Applications for refi rose and are up 31 percent from one year ago. This means that home buying demand remains strong, but mortgage brokers need to prepare for a potentially sharp decline in mortgage refi activity in 2014.
  • Finally, the big cities are creating jobs. The L.A.-Santa Ana region added 116,000 net new jobs in the past 12 months. The Greater New York City area put 106,800 new people to work. However, La-La land and the Big Apple have huge populations so the job growth rates were only in line with the national pace. Dallas and Houston are the true stars. Dallas added 101,000 net new jobs in the past 12 months, while Houston put 102,300 more people to work. These Texas job growth rates were triple the national job growth rate. This means there will be greater housing demand per each REALTOR® in Texas versus other parts of the country.

 

 

 

http://economistsoutlook.blogs.realtor.org/2013/05/01

How to Herd Cats on Twitter | North Salem Realtor

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If there is one thing you have to love about Twitter is that sometimes it seems like the “Wild West”. Untamed but with many opportunities.How to herd cats on Twitter

At other moments it feels like you are herding cats.

A chaotic stream of tweets that have no apparent organisation, theme or filters.

Wikipedia says this on herding cats:

“An idiomatic saying that refers to an attempt to control or organize a class of entities which are uncontrollable or chaotic. Implies a task that is extremely difficult or impossible to do, primarily due to chaotic factors.”

Now doesn’t that sound like Twitter?

It is trying to make sense of its chaos, embracing a jumble of jellyfish or throwing a net over a swarm of bees.

Always fun, sometimes dangerous but with a lot of potential.

Twitter has its own rhythm

Facebook is filtered for family and friend fun. Google+ is like Twitter on intelligence steroids…. Long form content preferred, geeky and very visual….with an overdose of males from Silicon Valley.

Well… what about Pinterest?…..It needs no explaining, just pin your image and let it speak its thousand words.

And Instagram?
Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/#fdqVDq4OumJ51rAX.99

Investors face new housing era obstacles | North Salem Real Estate

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In this new era, trading mortgages has been challenging over the past year for investors due to a number of reasons. 

In particular, massive mortgage-backed securities purchases by the Federal Reserve have impaired liquidity and market depth while policy changes have made prepayments difficult to forecast because of changes to the Home Affordable Refinance Program and Federal Housing Finance Agency leadership remain uncertainties, JPMorgan Chase said in its latest report. 

Additionally, short rates have been anchored, rendering traditional measures of duration such as parallel rate shifts irrelevant, particularly for higher coupons, the banking giant noted.

“As a result of these factors, many inter-coupon relationships are no longer mean-reverting with the same frequency they exhibited in previous environments, and money managers therefore struggle to generate alpha using age-old methodologies such as regression analysis,” said analysts of JPMorgan ($48.86 -0.0179%).

Investors expect the 2-year note on higher coupons to remain anchored for some time, as the central bank continues to open-ended third round of quantitative easing, making the correlation between price and rate moves anemic. 

via housingwire.com

The most rewarding problems require collaboration | Pound Ridge NY Real Estate

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There are lots of tools for collaborating online.

Google Docs is perhaps the go-to standby for sharing text and spreadsheet documents. Evernote shared notebooks are another way of sharing files and text documents. And of course there’s Dropbox as a sort of shared hard drive in the sky.

In practice, the amount of actual collaboration that occurs on these platforms varies.

More often I find myself using Dropbox, Google Docs and Evernote to share stuff with other people. But there’s rarely much collaboration.

These applications are great at solving the problem of access to documents, but they don’t do much for collaboratively working with others.

I suspect this has something to do with the way the documents and relationships with potential collaborators are structured. Once a word processing document has been started, the next people along might feel less like creating anything than editing. Perhaps go in and make a couple quick cleanups.

via inman.com