Register Real Estate Advisors

If you are still confused about the $8,000 Tax Credit then you need to keep reading. The tax credit is still available, but will end on November 30, 2009. That means if you are a first time home buyer and have not found a home and negotiated a contract on it, you need to call me today to get started on your path to home ownership and the best thing your Uncle Sam is ever going to give you. Time is ticking away and you need atleast 30 days from the time of contract exection to the closing date. Not sure if you qualify? If you have never owned a home, you qualify. If you have not owned a principle residence in the last three years, you qualify.

What does the credit actually mean for you? The credit from Uncle Sam is 10% of the home’s purchase price up to $8,000. The only repayment required is if you sell the home within three years of the purchase. Are there any income restrictions? The limit on income is $75,000 for a single person or $150,000 for a married couple. Call me today to get started because time is ticking away and your free money from Uncle Sam will be gone!

DALLAS (Dallas Morning News) – Even with new home sales in North Texas continuing to slow, cutbacks in new home construction over the past couple of years could result in a new-home shortage come 2010.
Builders have sold almost 13,000 more houses than they have started over the last two years, causing inventory to drop below 5,000 units, which is about a three-month supply. Compare that with the more than seven-month supply of new homes for sale in the United States as a whole.
“For homebuilders to maintain their current sales pace, they are going to have to start 30 or maybe 40 percent more homes than they are starting today,” said David Brown, who heads the Dallas office of real estate analysis firm Metrostudy Inc.
Dr. Jim Gaines, research economist with the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, said he thinks prospects for builders to get funding for new-home construction are “severely limited, bordering on nonexistent.
“Some of the local regional banks that don’t have significant existing exposure may be willing,” Gaines said, “but what we’re hearing is that most of the major institutions don’t want to do anything.”
Sales of new homes in the DFW area fell 34 percent between third quarter 2008 and the same period in 2009, with 4,163 transactions, housing analyst firm Residential Strategies reported Wednesday.

AUSTIN (Austin American-Statesman http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/other/2009/10/02/1002homestarts.html ) – Central Texas’ new-home market might be bottoming out, according to Residential Strategies Inc. and its third-quarter starts and closings figures, released Thursday.  Third quarter home starts were down 5.4 percent from the same quarter last year to 2,239 but up 17 percent from second quarter 2009.  “This is a positive sign and perhaps a signal that the successive quarterly decline in activity may be coming to an end,” said Ted Wilson, a partner with Residential Stategies.

HOUSTON (Urban Land Institute Houston) – Urban Land Institute (ULI) Houston and the Real Estate Center will have their annual Economic Forecast Conference at the Hilton Americas Nov. 11.
The half-day conference delivers the most current intelligence about market forces driving investment and development in the greater Houston area.
Following a keynote address from Joe Griffith of JPMorgan Chase Bank, the Center’s Chief Economist Dr. Mark Dotzour will moderate an economist panel consisting of Angelos Angelou of Angelou Economics, Bill Gilmer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Jefferson Duarte of Rice University.
A local response panel moderated by Jones Lang LaSalle Houston President Dan Bellow will follow. The panel will include Dan Pickering of Tudor, Pickering & Holt; John Kajander of the Texas Medical Center; and Eric Potts, representing the Houston Airport System.
More information is available on ULI Houston’s website

If you are a regular on my  blog you know we just got our first Cheddar’s open in Spring, Texas and I like to eat there.  The Dallas Morning News announced that Cheddar’s Casual Café has leased a 103,000-sf building site at 1320 N. Peachtree Rd. from Megaplex Four Inc.  CB Richard Ellis negotiated the lease with HGA Holdings.  It’s a real estate tidbit.

From the Dallas Morning News:

Value of Dallas-Fort Worth area commercial properties have declined, and as a result, a rising number are facing foreclosure.  “Every commercial real estate building in the nation has lost 30 percent of its value,” said Dr. Mark Dotzour, chief economist for the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. “And the buildings in this town have been impacted.”   The number of commercial real estate deals posted for foreclosure has grown more than 10 percent so far this year. Industry leaders worry this is just a preview of what is to come.  “The vast majority of buildings bought after 2005 are absolutely not worth the debt,” said Paul Whitman, president of commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle’s Dallas office. “Don’t be shocked that there will be hundreds of millions of dollars in foreclosures in commercial real estate in 2010.”  Whitman and Dotzour said lenders are in many cases delaying commercial foreclosures and repricing properties.  Watch for “Bad for Business: Commercial Real Estate Faces Uphill Climb,” coming in the October issue of Tierra Grande http://recenter.tamu.edu/tgrande magazine, the Real Estate Center’s quarterly journal. It will be posted on the Center’s website in early November.

In March of 2006 an article titled Sellers Who Skip Brokerage May Be Losing Their Edge was published by Lew Sichelman, United Feature Syndicate.  I think the content is not only still relevant, but more necessary in today’s real estate market.  Below I will explain the article and add my own comments about it.  There are a lot of do-it-yourselfers out there, but there are great reasons why you should not sell your home yourself.  It should be handled by a professional full service real estate agent who knows the current market and can set your house apart from the competition. 

Some homeowners feel that they can save a 6% commission fee and sell their house themselves.  In a rich and lucrative market, it happens rarely.  In our current market, I never hear of being successful.  The 6% is usually made up for in the fact that a Realtor can negotiate for you, save you lawyer and document fees, and get more for the house than you would selling it yourself.  The reason Realtors can sell the house much faster is because they have access to a buyer pool.  Even if their buyers are not interested in your home, any Realtor can show the home and sell it.  So Realtors not only market to consumers, they market to other Realtors who have buyers with housing needs. Realtors also absorb the advertising costs.  On average, for my selling clients, I pay for Ads, Open Houses, Fliers, web traffic, multiple listing service fees, efliers, signs - that’s just the basics.  If you do for sale by owner (FSBO), you have to incur marketing costs and then try to get what you are asking for the house.  Usually only your immediate neighbors know you have your house for sale, unless you happen to have a house on a busy street.  Buying tiny newspaper ads rarely help a house sell.  Did you know that according to the National Association of Realtors FSBOs sell for an average of 16% below that of comparable properties who use experienced agents?  A poll of 7,813 buyers and sellers through county deed records found that the median price achieved by sellers with agents was $230,000 versus $198,200 for sellers without agents. 
(more…)

CARY, N.C. (Local Market Monitor) – Five large Texas cities and ten smaller ones are among the nation’s top markets when it comes to expected home price performance, according to Local Market Monitor’s latest Home Price Forecast.

Among the largest markets — those with populations exceeding 600,000 — Dallas-Plano-Irving, Fort Worth–Arlington, Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown, San Antonio and Wichita Falls filled five spaces on the ten-slot list of cities with the best expected performance in home price over the next year.

The same survey of the smallest U.S. markets revealed ten Texas cities were tops, tied with other cities across the country. These were Abilene, Amarillo, Brownsville-Harlingen, College Station–Bryan, Corpus Christi, Killeen–Temple–Fort Hood, Laredo, Lubbock, Texarkana and Waco.

The study predicts local market behavior over the upcoming 12 months in over 300 markets, identifying those that are stable and have opportunity for growth.

SAN ANTONIO (San Antonio Business Journal) – The four major Texas metros will be among the first in the nation to recover from the recession, according to a nationwide forecast by IHS Global Insight.

San Antonio and Austin will lead the way, bouncing back to their prerecession job levels sometime next year, predicts the Lexington, Mass.–based economic forecasting firm.

Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth are among eight other metropolitan areas predicted to recover by 2011.

I hope you and your family are enjoying the long Labor Day weekend.  Here is a little history of the holiday that I pulled from History.com.  Sometime we get so busy on our days off that we forget about the meaning behind the holiday.  Enjoy! 

As the Industrial Revolution took hold of the nation, the average American in the late 1800s worked 12-hour days, seven days a week in order to make a basic living. Children were also working, as they provided cheap labor to employers and laws against child labor were not strongly enforced.

With the long hours and terrible working conditions, American unions became more prominent and voiced their demands for a better way of life. On Tuesday September 5, 1882, 10,000 workers marched from city hall to Union Square in New York City, holding the first-ever Labor Day parade. Participants took an upaid day-off to honor the workers of America, as well as vocalize issues they had with employers. As years passed, more states began to hold these parades, but Congress would not legalize the holiday until 12 years later.

On May 11, 1894, workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago struck to protest wage cuts and the firing of union representatives. They sought support from their union led by Eugene V. Debs and on June 26 the American Railroad Union called a boycott of all Pullman railway cars. Within days, 50,000 rail workers complied and railroad traffic out of Chicago came to a halt. On July 4, President Grover Cleveland dispatched troops to Chicago. Much rioting and bloodshed ensued, but the government’s actions broke the strike and the boycott soon collapsed. Debs and three other union officials were jailed for disobeying the injunction. The strike brought worker’s rights to the public eye and Congress declared, in 1894, that the first Monday in September would be the holiday for workers, known as Labor Day.

The founder of Labor Day remains unclear, but some credit either Peter McGuire, co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, or Matthew Maguire, a secretary of the Central Labor Union, for proposing the holiday.

Although Labor Day is meant as a celebration of the labor movement and its achievements, it has come to be celebrated as the last, long summer weekend before Autumn.