“If you run a bank,” says Toronto-Dominion Bank CEO Ed Clark, “you should be worried” about the rapid price appreciation seen in all types of Canadian real estate.
Toronto-Dominion Bank has had to say no to financing “a number of big, lucrative” deals Clark said at a bank conference in Toronto, The Globe and Mail’s Tim Kiladze reports. Other execs at the conference say there’s no cause for alarm — delinquencies remain in check, and supply and demand are balanced.
Source: theglobeandmail.com
The sluggish economy and slowly recovering housing market create the perfect environment for mortgage scams, with desperate homeowners as easy prey for scammers.
The crooks make the deal sound attractive and legit. Thousands of homeowners are duped in mortgage scams each year, and con artists don’t have to look far for victims, says Yolanda McGill, senior counsel for the Fair Housing & Fair Lending Project, an initiative by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C.
Most of the victims reach out to the scammers themselves through Internet searches, she says. She bases her conclusion on thousands of complaints that her organization has received from mortgage scam victims.
”The people showing up in our databases are people who are looking for help on the Internet,” she says.
— A theft in-‘deed’
Lured by promises of a better interest rates and lower mortgage payments, some borrowers end up signing away their houses.
Thieves pose as mortgage professionals or attorneys who pledge to modify or refinance the homeowner’s mortgage. The borrower is asked to sign the supposed modification papers. One of the pages in the stack of documents is a deed that, once signed, transfers ownership of the property to the perpetrators or a company related to them.
While many homeowners would be able to spot such an ingenious trick, others don’t bother to read or simply don’t understand the documents they sign, says Brian Sullivan, a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman.
A gradual decline of price growth rate in the residential real estate is to be expected in Ukraine in the near future with possible further decrease of the prices, said the director of SHM Smith Hodgkinson Dmitry Selivanov at a press-conference in Kiev, a REGNUM correspondent reports.
According to the expert, processes which are taking place in Ukraine now, have already taken place in the Baltic countries in due time, where real estate prices reached their ceiling, stopped, and then went down by 10-20%. “We will see the same processes in Ukraine within the following year too. It concerns both Kiev and other big cities, where real estate makes profit,” said the expert and added that everything would depend on stability of the macroeconomic situation in the country and on inflation rates.
The reason of the prices going down, the expert believes, is the too overstated price for real estate. “Because, now many apartments are used not on purpose, not as a residential place, but as an object for investing. Rather than investing in banks or bond-like papers, Ukrainians invest in the real estate,” Selivanov marked. He also expressed an opinion that most perspective for building in Kiev today is the territory of the left bank and in the suburbs, which is caused by a coming transport collapse on the right bank.
http://regnum.ru/english/1004619.html
Rendering via Porsche Design’s website.
The folks at exMiami report Gil Dezer has about 80 percent of the currently under construction Porsche Design Tower’s 132 units under contract, representing $624 million dollars in sales, should all those under contract to buy actually go through with it. Prices at Stuttgart-based Porsche Design’s first condo top out at $32.5 million. Dezer says there are at least two dozen billionaires under contract for units in his unapologetically car-crazy tower. Let’s see if he can snag a few more with those remaining units. · Porsche Design Tower: 80% Of Units Now Under Contract [exMiami] · Gil Dezer’s Life In The Fast Lane [The Real Deal] · Porsche Design Tower coverage [Curbed Miami]
Are you struggling to create a social media strategy for your business?
Lacking insight into the social behaviors of your customers?
No data, no problem!
Chances are your competitors have done all the hard work and all you need to do is look for it.
In this post, I’ll show you how to research the competition’s social game plan so you can build a solid social media strategy of your own.
When it comes to social media marketing, you need to answer a few fundamental questions:
Everyone must answer these questions, including business owners who want to create a strategy for their own business, marketing managers who need to convince their CEO to invest in social media and consultants who create strategies for clients in a wide variety of industries.
Fortunately, you can find answers through the process of competitor research.
Keep reading to discover how to get insight on your competitors.
While you shouldn’t obsess about how many fans or followers your competitors have, noting these numbers at the beginning of your campaign can help you answer the following important questions.
Noting the number of fans your competitors have can help you answer a few important questions relevant to your own business. Image source: iStockPhoto
1. Should your business be on social media?
If your competitors have an audience on social media, whether it is 100 people or 100,000, the answer should be yes. Otherwise, your competitors are tapping into a customer base that your business could be completely missing out on.
2. Which networks should your business focus on?
Do all of your competitors have strong presences on some networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but not others, such as Pinterest? If the answer is yes, then it means two things: 1) businesses in your industry do not do well on Pinterest or 2) with creativity, you have a chance to reach a group of customers with little competition.
3. Have you reached all of your target audience?
Competitor research isn’t just limited to businesses starting their social media strategy. If you have been using social media for a while, but not getting results, take a look at the size of your competitors’ social media audiences to help you gauge whether you are reaching as many of your potential customers as possible, or whether you still have room to grow your network.
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-strategy-competitor-research/
Home buyer demand witnessed a steep decline in November, with the number of Redfin customers requesting tours and signing offers dropping 1.2% and 10.6%, respectively, following seasonal trends.
However, the drop was not as drastic as the same month in 2012, which saw tours and offers falling 11% and 13.6%, respectively.
Few buyers tend to shop for homes as the holidays start to loom closer. However, “with October’s budget and debt-ceiling mess in the rear-view mirror and the prospect for higher mortgage rates in 2014, many buyers felt like November was a window of opportunity,” Redfin agent Paul Reid said.
Additionally, Thanksgiving fell on the fourth week of November instead of the third week, giving buyers extra time to shop for houses and offset reduced demand during the holiday week.
Looking ahead, Redfin said, “In December, house hunting generally takes a back seat to retail shopping and holiday preparations for most buyers. We expect demand to drop off dramatically as Christmas nears.”
http://www.housingwire.com/articles/28223
Every few weeks, our friends at StreetEasy run the numbers on apartments that are listed for both sale and rent in New York to compares the monthly costs for apartment hunters searching for the best deal. The tool doesn’t take into account every single thing (tax deductions are not factored in), but it’s one way to try to answer the eternal “rent or buy” question. Here now, we compare the data on five downtown studios, all of which are members of the Six Digit Club. These numbers assume a 20 percent downpayment and a 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 4.406 percent.
Address: 40 Broad Street, #28C, in FiDi (above) The Skinny: 590-square-foot unit in the amenity-laden Setai Wall Street Sale Price: $699,000 Maintenance/Taxes: $759/month Total monthly costs when buying: $4,047 Rental price: $3,000/month
Address: 23 Waverly Place, #3A (above) The Skinny: A co-op studio with a sleeping loft in a building with a shared courtyard and rooftop deck Sale Price: $529,000 Maintenance/Taxes: $755 Total monthly costs when buying: $2,876 Rental price: $2,795/month
Address: 317 East 18th Street, #SE (above) The Skinny: Near Gramercy Park, a co-op unit with a half-sized kitchen Sale Price: $290,000 Maintenance/Taxes: $890 Total monthly costs when buying: $2,053 Rental price: $2,000/month
Address: 99 John Street, #813 (above) The Skinny: 671-square-foot studio with a home office in the Financial District Sale Price: $775,000 Maintenance/Taxes: $425 Total monthly costs when buying: $3,907 Rental price: $3,650/month
The revival of development projects in Manhattan and Brooklyn resulted in a 12 percent year-over-year drop in the number of stalled construction sites in New York City, according to the latest report from the New York Building Congress. There were 610 stalled construction sites citywide in November 2013, compared to 690 in November 2012 and a peak of 709 in November 2010, according to data from the New York City Department of Buildings.
The number of stalled sites in Manhattan dropped 26 percent over the past 12 months – from 122 in November 2012 to 90 in November of this year. Reignited projects in Manhattan include the Alexico Group’s 56 Leonard Street , Silverstein Properties’ 30 Park Place and Elad Group’s 5 Franklin Place in Tribeca
Brooklyn leads the city with 267 suspended projects, though it too has seen a 17 percent year-over-year decline, according to the report.
“In our annual construction forecast report released in October, we estimated that residential construction spending will double between 2012 and 2015,” said New York Building Congress president Richard Anderson in a statement today. “That rosy outlook was based largely on the fact that a number of luxury developments, which were shelved during the great recession, have come roaring back to life.”
http://therealdeal.com/blog/2013/11/25/nycs-stalled-construction-sites-drop-12-percent-report/
After 18 straight months of declines, U.S. foreclosure inventory is now at its lowest point since the end of 2008, according to a monthly report from Lender Processing Services.
Foreclosure inventory fell nearly 30 percent year over year in October, to 1.28 million loans, or 2.54 percent of currently active mortgages.
Delinquencies (loans that are 30 or more days past due but not in foreclosure) fell 2.8 percent from September, to 3.15 million loans, or 6.28 percent of mortgages. The delinquency rate fell 10.7 percent on an annual basis.
All in all, 4.4 million properties were either delinquent or in foreclosure in October. Mississippi had the highest percentage of noncurrent loans among states last month, eclipsing Florida for the first time since 2008.“Except for the period after Katrina, Mississippi has held the dubious distinction of having the highest noncurrent inventory for virtually all of the history LPS tracks. So, unfortunately for Mississippians, this is more indication that things are getting back to ‘normal,’ ” LPS said. Source: LPS
– See more at: http://www.inman.com/wire/foreclosure-inventory-down-to-lowest-level-since-2008/#sthash.bpSlaKht.dpuf