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California Foreclosure laws go into effect | Katonah Real Estate

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Hundreds of new laws take effect Tuesday

•  From high-speed rail to pipeline safety to foreclosure protections

•  “Will give Californians a fair opportunity to stay in their homes”

The fruits of a year of work by legislators are harvested by constituents beginning Tuesday with some 800 new laws kicking in as the New Year rings in.

Among the new laws that could have immediate impact on the Central Valley, epicenter of the nation’s foreclosure crisis, is the package of legislation that extends key mortgage and foreclosure protections to California homeowners and borrowers.

Dubbed the California Homeowner Bill of Rights, the new laws restrict dual-track foreclosures, guarantee struggling homeowners a reliable point of contact at their lender and impose civil penalties on fraudulently signed mortgage documents. In addition, homeowners may require loan servicers to document their right to foreclose.

“For too long, struggling homeowners in California have been denied fairness and transparency when dealing with their lending institutions,” says Attorney General Kamala Harris, who pushed for the new laws. “These laws give homeowners new rights as they work through the foreclosure process and will give Californians a fair opportunity to stay in their homes.”

Other new laws include:

• Another new law impacts the California High-Speed Rail project, due to start construction first in the Central Valley.

It requires the High-Speed Rail Authority to encourage purchasing high-speed train rolling stock and equipment made in California consistent with federal and state law and continued investment in California businesses.

• Natural-gas pipeline safety upgrades are required by several new laws. One requires disclosure of gas transmission lines when a home is sold, another forces the Public Utilities Commission to finally answer the recommendations of the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the San Bruno pipeline blast that killed eight people and leveled a residential neighborhood.

• Women who breast-feed their children will be protected from harassment by their employers. A new law puts breast-feeding under the scope of the Fair Employment and Housing Act.

• Another business-related law says that employees and former employees have the right to obtain copies of their personnel records. Businesses will have to provide them within 30 days.

• Employers and higher-education officials will now be banned from asking for applicants’ social-media user names and passwords.

• Another law lurches California into step with much of the rest of the world by allowing juveniles who have been sentenced to life without parole the opportunity to petition for a new sentence of 25 years to life. The United States is the only country in the world that sentences children to life in prison without the possibility of parole. According to state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, the author of the new law, California has over 300 youth serving this sentence and who without SB 9 would have died in prison without any chance to earn release.

• SB 1001 increases fees required of registered lobbyists, ballot measure committees, and independent expenditure committees, in order to finance the maintenance of the state campaign and lobbying database known as Cal-Access, which keeps the public informed as to who is influencing their elected officials.

via centralvalleybusinesstimes.com

Housing recovery crosses halfway mark: Trulia | Katonah NY Realtor

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The housing industry is 51% back to normal, according to a Trulia assessment of key housing statistics.

Trulia’s November Housing Barometer compares three key indicators — construction starts, existing-home sales, and delinquencies combined with foreclosures — to their worst point during the housing crisis and their pre-crisis levels.

In its journey toward normalcy, some markets experienced some headwinds after Hurricane Sandy tore through the Northeast recently, lowering construction and, to a lesser extent, sales in the area.

The nation as a whole saw a 14% rise in construction starts in October and November (the months affected by Sandy), while the Northeast fell 5% in those same months. Likewise, national home sales increased by 7% in the past two months, but the Northeast only saw a 3% rise.

Year-over-year, November housing starts were up 22% nationwide. According to the Trulia barometer, housing starts are 37% of the way back to normal.

Existing-home sales hit 5.04 million in November, the highest level since the same month in 2009. Trulia said sales are 73% back to normal. Additionally, distressed sales are continuing to become a smaller and smaller portion of overall sales.

The combined delinquency and foreclosure rate dropped to 10.63%, the lowest level in four years and 41% back to normal.

Last month, the barometer revealed the housing market was 47% back to normal.

via housingwire.com

Biggest technology flops of 2012 | Katonah Realtor

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Blackberry 10 / Photo: Aman Firdaus - FlickrBlackberry 10 / Photo: Aman Firdaus – Flickr

They can’t all be winners.
This is especially true when it comes to technology and gadgets.

Consumers can be a fickle bunch and even the best minds come up with the occasional loser.

Although 2012 wasn’t a huge year for gadget flops, those that flopped did so in magnificent fashion.

Facebook’s poor IPO showing was daily news. (As for IPOs, Zynga didn’t do much better.) But Facebook’s Reach Generator flopped as well. A product that would have filled your news feed with more ads, it was killed after six months.

On the marketing side of technology, we saw Oprah use Apple’s iPad to Tweet praise for the Microsoft Surface:

“Gotta say love that SURFACE! Have bought 12 already for Christmas gifts.

It would have been a hell of an endorsement if she didn’t post it “via Twitter for iPad.”

Here’s some more of 2012’s biggest tech flops.

1. BlackBerry 10
We used to call them “CrackBerrys.”

They were everywhere and people couldn’t put them down. Even President Barack Obama was seen obsessing over his Blackberry during his first campaign.
But those days are over.

The Blackberry 10 is one of the year’s biggest tech flops because it never released in 2012 as promised. This was supposed to be a comeback year for the Blackberry brand. The promise of a new line of Blackberry was exciting. Now that it’s nearing its newest release date — Jan. 30, 2013 — the Blackberry faithful are getting their hopes up again. But have the rest of us — and, more importantly, the development community — lost interest?

We’ll see when the Blackberry 10 allegedly releases next year, which should totally help them not capitalize on the 2012 Christmas shopping season.

AirtimeAirtime

2. Sean Parker’s AirTime
This turned out to be a whole lot of nothing.

Airtime was Sean Parker’s response to Chatroulette, a place to meet new people via text-chat, webcam and mic.

As a social video network, AirTime suffered from a stagnant user base despite its $33 million in funding and a somewhat infamous June opening press conference with stars such as Jim Carrey and Alicia Keys — not to mention the blessing of cool comics Jimmy Fallon and Julia Louis Dreyfus.

Parker later said the site was getting only 10,000 active users per day. Despite that anemic performance, he maintains the product will transform how we communicate.
Not yet.

PS VitaPS Vita

3. PlayStation Vita
This is a hard one for me because I truly want the Vita to succeed. It has a ton of cool things going for it: amazing graphics, excellent design and build quality, the promise of a robust online community, and cross-play with the PS3. Still, mine gathers dust.

It was well received at launch but it has yet to get the killer app it needs to become a “must have” platform. “Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified” for the Vita could have easily been that title. Instead, it was an absolute mess.

One or two blockbuster games could change this momentum, but I don’t see any on the immediate horizon.

As of now, the PlayStation Vita has become a chilling answer to the question about the viability of handheld gaming consoles in a world filled with game-capable smartphones.

Nokia LumiaNokia Lumia

4. Nokia Lumia 900
At the beginning of 2012 Nokia and Microsoft launched their first major phone together in the United States. This may be news to you because almost no one bought the Lumia 900.

More people probably have a Zune, which is dreadful news for Microsoft as they try to stop Apple from eating their lunch in the smartphone market.

That’s too bad, because it was actually a good phone — certainly the best Windows phone available when it launched. The unibody design was smart looking and it came with a beautiful 4.3-inch screen and 8-magapixel camera.

But no one cared.

3D HDTV3D HDTV

5. 3D televisions
The 3D HDTV was not introduced in 2012, but this is the year it became irrelevant. It was a hot product when seen at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. And it was easy to see why. Who wouldn’t want the “Avatar” experience in their living room?
The answer: Most of us.

Despite an estimated 3% adoption rate in American homes, the industry hasn’t given up on 3D HDTVs yet. You’ll still see them on the shelves of most major retailers. But the glasses can be bulky, awkward and (for some folks) can induce headaches. Picture quality varies greatly and their initial price points were too high for most. Expect to see less and less 3D content coming out while these TVs — which are completely capable of excellent 2D performance — decrease in price and profile.

Apple mapsApple maps

6. Apple Maps
The company Steve Jobs built may be a juggernaut, but even the mighty Apple makes mistakes. Apple Maps was such a fantastic disaster that CEO Tim Cook publicly apologized for it.

When Apple revamped its mapping software to replace Google’s maps in iOS 6, it looked good and early reviews were positive. Users, however, quickly discovered it was broken. The Internet buzzed with stories of Apple Maps suggesting routes that would intersect with a 747 at Dulles Airport or send a car careening off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Apparently the years it took Google to assemble and fine tune their product could not be replicated on the fly by Apple’s cleverness and hubris. Fancy new features such as 3D imagery and spoken turn-by-turn directions couldn’t save what was a product riddled with errors.

via shopping.yahoo.com

Asians Lead Ultra Luxury Foreign Invasion | Katonah NY Real Estate

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Nearly twice as many homes priced over $10 million were sold to Asians as Western Europeans in the US last year, while buyers from the Americas dominate a far greater share of the international sales for all price tiers than either Asians or Western Europeans.

Of the 28 percent of international buyers measured by a recent Coldwell Banker International Previews survey of its agents, 39 percent come from Asia and only 20 percent come from Western Europe.  Coldwell Banker did not break down its data by country of origin.

Asians have been gaining in their share of all price ranges but are not nearly as dominant as the lower tiers as they are in the ultra luxury category, as reported by last June by the National Association of Realtors in its annual Profile of International Home Buying Activity.  According to the NAR report of all price ranges, market share of purchases by buyers from China, Japan and India have increased from 12 to 18 percent since 2007.  Chinese purchases alone have risen from 5 to 11 percent of all foreign sales in the last five years.  During the same period, purchases by Europeans have increased from 19 percent to 14 percent.

Buyers from North, South and Central America continue to dominate all international purchases, account for 35 percent of all international sales in 2011.  But for homes priced over $1 million, buyers from the Americas trail Asians and Europeans, except in Miami. According to Helen Jeanne Nicastri, a Coldwell Banker International Previews specialist in Coral Gables: “At least half of the buyers in Miami are international, and are specifically coming from Latin America-including Brazil,Venezuela, Mexico and Argentina.”

Coldwell Banker Previews International also released rankings of top luxury zip codes.

Top Ten Markets by Zip Code: Listings Over $10 Million

ZIP codeCity/ State

Number of Listings

90210Beverly Hills, CA19
81611Aspen, CO13
93108Santa Barbara, CA13
90077Los Angeles, CA9
33139Miami Beach, FL7
94027Atherton, CA7
06830Greenwich, CT6
90265Malibu, CA5
90049Los Angeles, CA5
94115San Francisco, CA5

Coldwell Banker Previews International 2012

via realestateeconomywatch.com

End Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Now: Menendez–Boxer Bill Not the Solution | Katonah Realtor

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It is time to end Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For over four years, Congress has failed to start the process of phasing out the two failed mortgage finance giants and replace them with a private-sector mortgage finance system. Most of the time, opponents used the excuse that housing markets were just too weak to do anything that might delay the housing recovery, leaving both entities to languish under the control of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

Instead, some in Congress and the Obama Administration have focused on a series of generally unsuccessful efforts to enable borrowers whose homes are now worth less than they owe to refinance the loans.[1] Undeterred by the underperformance of these programs, several Senators have decided to try again. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) is expected to schedule Senate consideration in the lame-duck session of another refinancing bill by Senators Robert Menendez (D–NJ) and Barbara Boxer (D–CA).

As with past efforts, their approach would be a policy mistake. Congress should skip the sideshow and move instead to the main event of ending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Rationale for Mass Refinancing Is Ending

Driven by housing activists, Congress, and the executive branch, government agencies have focused on encouraging lenders to refinance underwater mortgages since mid-2007. Supporters justified their approach by noting that falling housing prices made it virtually impossible for borrowers to reduce the loans to a point where the worth of their houses would equal the amount that they owed. This has led many homeowners to simply walk away from their obligations, leaving their houses to be repossessed and further lowering property values in the area.

However, most of these programs have actually helped only a relatively small number of borrowers.[2] A recovering market with gradually rising prices will do much more to enable underwater borrowers to return to building equity. And there are firm signs that the long-awaited housing recovery is well underway, which would further obviate the need for mass refinancing.

In the third quarter, median sales prices increased over those of last year in 120 of 149 metropolitan areas,[3] with prices increasing an average of 5 percent over those of a year ago, the largest 12-month gain since July 2006. In addition, inventories are shrinking, with only 2.32 million existing homes available, a 20 percent drop from the same period in 2011, while the national median price of a single-family home has risen by 7.6 percent over the past 12 months.

via heritage.org