Long Beach property joins the list of most-searched-for U.S. homes online
Los Angelas Times

A five-bedroom Long Beach house listed at $249,900 joined the list of most-searched-for homes nationwide at Realtor.com last week among homes priced within 20% of the median list price of $219,000.

Here are the top 5 in the order they ranked:

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By J.W. Elphinstone, Associated Press / Statesman.com

NEW YORK — Home prices across most of the country have started to rise from the depths of the housing slump, a crucial trend that might help stabilize the broader U.S. economy, according to figures released Tuesday.

Nationally, prices in the second quarter posted their first quarterly increase in three years, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index of 20 major cities.

Home prices are still 30 percent below their mid-2006 peak and 15 percent lower than in the second quarter of 2008, but their new direction could bring relief to lenders and homeowners.

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Foreclosures, REOs (Bank Owned Real Estate) and NODs (Notice of Defaults) were the headline news beginning in 2007 and for most of 2008. The number of foreclosures went through the roof, over extending housing supplies, creating blighted markets, and causing unheard of price reductions on existing and new housing inventory. Then in the first quarter 2009, things changed.

Presidents Obama’s administration asked for a moratorium on foreclosures while they enacted new programs to assist the struggling home owners and the foreclosure market slowed to more manageable levels. As a result, the housing inventory began to decrease, home prices stopped their steep decline, and buyers started making offers. Optimism around the housing market has slowly improved and news on foreclosures has slowly dwindled away.

Bruce Norris, a California Real Estate Analyst, in a TNG radio interview May 16th, said that the current low inventory levels are giving ‘a false indicator’. He said that the shadow inventory (foreclosed homes that the banks are sitting on) and new NODs are going to give us a second wave of high foreclosures sometime in 2009.

Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer

It’s not the Western Addition - it’s NoPa. It’s not the Financial District - it’s the Barbary Coast. The gritty Hells Angels enclave known as Dogpatch? Now one of America’s hottest ZIP codes, according to the current edition of Men’s Journal magazine.

San Franciscans love to microbrand their neighborhoods, and at last count Wikipedia listed 109 places to live in the city by the bay.

The continual turnover in names, boundaries and reputations is enough to make an old timer’s head spin.

“A confusing and inconsistent mess,” according to a 1977 attempt to list 144 distinct neighborhoods in California Living, the magazine of the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle.

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The Wall Street Journal
May 26, 2009

Like the economy, the housing market seems on the threshold of recovery. But it might not cross it soon.

This week brings a fresh slew of housing data. The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home-price index for March is due Tuesday, the National Association of Realtors releases April home-resale data Wednesday, and the Census Bureau releases new-home-sales numbers Thursday.

A consensus is forming that home sales and construction are at long last bottoming and may soon rise. Economists largely expect this week’s numbers to affirm that notion.

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Orange County Business Journal Staff

The price of an existing Orange County home dropped by $12,000 in April from a month earlier, the California Association of Realtors said on Thursday.The median price for an existing stand-alone OC home sold in April was $432,110, a 2.8% decrease from March and a 27% decrease from a year earlier.

While OC prices declined month-over-month, pricing in all of California inched up 1.4% in April, to $256,700. That’s still a 36.5% decline from a year earlier.

Economists for the Realtor association said it appears that the median price for a home in California is now at or near a bottom.

The Realtor association excludes condominiums from its figures.

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By Prashant Gopal

California was one of the first states to enter the housing downtown. Could it be one of the first to recover?

First-time home buyers and investors are jumping to take advantage of state and federal tax incentives, low interest rates, and prices that are more affordable than they have been in many years. California’s median home price climbed in April on a monthly basis for the second straight month. That hasn’t happened since August 2007, the California Association of Realtors reported on May 28. Home sales in April rose 49% compared with April 2008.

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BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

And so California’s seemingly endless budget battles resume, with no convenient end in sight. That’s one early result of the voters’ May 19 rejection of Proposition 1-A and several others intended to straighten out the state’s balance sheet.

Another possibility - slim, but still present - is that lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will finally give serious consideration to one change that could begin to spell the end of all the repeated budget crises. All they need to do is revise the regulations that now permit some real estate to change hands without being reassessed.

For sure, plenty of draconian tactics will be suggested in the coming days and weeks. Schwarzenegger has already called for selling off landmark state lands and buildings, and that might be a fine idea for properties which are useless now and show no promise of ever doing much for citizens. But you can only sell off land or buildings once. When you do it, you are in a sense selling off your patrimony. This makes it a desperation tactic that won’t solve the underlying spending and revenue problems behind the repeated budget crises.

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Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington — The Obama administration, stepping up efforts to stem foreclosures, will offer lenders and homeowners incentives to cut payments on second mortgages, write down balances on first mortgages that are underwater, and repay loans in a timely fashion.

The new measures announced Tuesday would especially help many distressed homeowners who have both first and second mortgages — and can’t afford either. The Treasury Department now wants lenders and their customer-service agents to agree to modify both loans as part of a comprehensive solution.

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Layoffs, tight credit and other fallout from the troubled economy have battered Southern California’s office market, leading to vacancy rates as high as 30% in some areas.

The pain is expected to continue for months, if not years, with vacancies rising even as the economy shows modest signs of recovery, according to industry observers tracking activity in the first quarter.

“We have a rough road ahead of us,” said Joe Vargas, senior managing director of real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. “It’s going to be a very challenging market for the remainder of the year.”

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