Florida Home Sales Higher in September ORLANDO, Fl, Oct. 20, 2011 – Florida’s existing home and existing condo sales continued their upswing in September, according to Florida Realtors®. Existing home sales increased 10 percent last month with a total of 15,036 homes sold statewide compared with 13,723 homes sold in September 2010.
“One of the most overlooked statistical trends in all of real estate is the growth in home sales, both single-family and condo, in the state of Florida,” said Florida Realtors Chief Economist Dr. John Tuccillo. “We’ve seen an upward trend in sales since January 2011, and September’s sales were a full 10 percent above September 2010. Even prices, which have been static over the past few months, are well above where they were in January 2011. One of the reasons for this is stabilization in the distressed property market. This is not a problem that’s going away, but there’s a degree of certainty that is helping the market.”
Fifteen of Florida’s metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) reported higher existing home sales in September; 11 MSAs had higher existing condo sales.
The statewide median sales price for existing homes last month was $133,900; a year ago, it was $135,000 for only a 1 percent decrease. According to analysts with the National Association of Realtors® (NAR), sales of foreclosures and other distressed properties continue to downwardly distort the median price because they generally sell at a discount relative to traditional homes. The median is the midpoint; half the homes sold for more, half for less.
The national median sales price for existing single-family homes in August 2011 was $168,400, down 5.4 percent from a year ago, according to NAR. In California, the August statewide median resales price was $297,060; in Maryland, it was $241,564; and in New York, it was $220,000.
In Florida’s year-to-year comparison for condos, 6,666 units sold statewide in September, a 10 percent gain over the 6,035 units sold in September 2010. The statewide existing condo median sales price last month was $87,200; a year earlier, it was $81,800 for a 7 percent increase.
“Historically low mortgage rates and stabilizing home prices all across Florida’s local housing markets continue to attract potential buyers – housing affordability conditions are very favorable right now,” said 2011 Florida Realtors President Patricia Fitzgerald, manager/broker-associate with Illustrated Properties in Hobe Sound. “However, financially qualified buyers are still being denied home loans because of overly restrictive lending requirements, and that’s a significant obstacle to the housing recovery.”
According to Freddie Mac, the interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 4.11 percent in September, down from the 4.35 percent average during the same month a year earlier. Florida Realtors’ sales figures reflect closings, which typically occur 30 to 90 days after sales contracts are written.
Florida Realtors®, formerly known as the Florida Association of Realtors®, serves as the voice for real estate in Florida. It provides programs, services, continuing education, research and legislative representation to its 115,000 members in 64 boards/associations. Florida Realtors® Media Center website is available at http://media.floridarealtors.org.
Compare Tax Rates FloridaTaxWatch has an interactive map and a report that shows municipal tax rates in Florida. See how Collier County stacks up.
Market Moving Up or Down?
Naples appraiser Cindy Carroll answers this question. [more]
Book Writers Add to Group
Lawrence De Maria adds his name to the list of widely popular authors who call Naples home.
Sound of Blood
Lawrence De Maria, author of "Sound of Blood: a Jake Scarne Thriller," is adding his name to the list of notable Naples authors. Among them are Robin Cook, whose medical mysteries including "Coma" captivate readers and movie goers, and Janet Evanovich, whose characters have brought laughter to hundreds of thousands of loyal fans. Her latest book, "Smokin' Seventeen," sold more than 200,000 copies on the first day it was published.
It was his hobnobbing with Wall Street bigwigs that was the perfect training ground for the fiction author he is now, De Maria said recently. [more]
A Very Good Value Click on photo for more information
MLS 21152052 Willow Brook in Pelican Bay 765 Willowbrook Dr., #1505
All the residents of the 65 neighborhoods in Pelican Bay enjoy the amenities of a world-class resort. The community parallels three miles of award-winning beach along the Gulf of Mexico sandwiched between the Naples Grande hotel on the south and the five-star Ritz-Carlton on the north. Prices of condos, villas and single-family houses range from $250,000 to $9.5 million. [more]
Communities | Royal Harbor
This boating community on the east side of Naples Bay was developed between 1956 and 1964 using a dredge-and-fill system. The canal-front lots have seawalls and docks or slips. While the earliest homes were one-story and of mid-century modern design, there are now a variety of two-story architectural styles including Cracker, Mediterranean, Baronial, Spanish and quirky. The lot sizes vary, with the "estate-sized" lots generally facing Haldeman Creek or Naples Bay. Prices range from $650,000 to more than $5 million for the homes facing Naples Bay. [more]
Amenities | Boating
One of the major sports passions in Naples is boating so there are lots of ways to enjoy it. In neighborhoods including Port Royal, Aqualane Shores, Royal Harbor and parts of Moorings and Park Shore, residents can moor their boats to private docks in their back yards. There are a number of clubs that provide boat storage and social activities. [more]
Naples and Collier County
“Naples” is used to describe anything in Collier County, but its 2025 square miles also includes Marco Island, Everglades City, Immokalee, Golden Gate Estates and countless miles of unincorporated areas. Most of the 200,000 residences hug the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. Inland there are hundreds of thousands of acres of farms growing vegetables, citrus, palm trees and flowers.
Collier County’s population spurted 25 percent, to 315,000, in the past decade. Seasonal renters and tourists add another third in season – January through April.
The magnets? Spectacular subtropical weather; exotic animals and plants; Everglades National Park; sports including golf, tennis, boating, fishing (not to mention genteel croquet to boisterous ice hockey), arts and entertainment from street fairs to Broadway’s best; pizza parlors to gourmet dining; neighborhood boutiques to internationally acclaimed retailers.
Builder Confidence Up
Oct. 18, 2011 - Builder confidence in the market for newly built, single-family homes rose four points to 18 on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) for October.This is the largest one-month gain the index has seen since the home buyer tax credit program helped spur the market in April of 2010.
"Builder confidence regained some ground in October due to modest improvements in buyer interest in select markets where economic recovery is starting to take hold and where foreclosure activity has remained comparatively subdued," said NAHB Chairman Bob Nielsen, a home builder from Reno, Nev. "That said, confidence remains quite low as builders continue to confront overly restrictive lending policies that are discouraging prospective buyers, problems with new-home appraisals and widespread uncertainty regarding federal support for homeownership."
"This latest boost in builder confidence is a good sign that some pockets of recovery are starting to emerge across the country as extremely favorable interest rates and prices catch consumers' attention," said NAHB Chief Economist David Crowe. "However, it's worth noting that while some builders have shifted their assessment of market conditions from 'poor' to 'fair,' relatively few have shifted their assessments from 'fair' to 'good.' One reason is that builders are facing downward pricing pressures from foreclosed homes at the same time that building materials costs are rising, and this is further squeezing already tight margins."
Derived from a monthly survey that NAHB has been conducting for more than 20 years, the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index gauges builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and sales expectations for the next six months as "good," "fair" or "poor." The survey also asks builders to rate traffic of prospective buyers as "high to very high," "average" or "low to very low." Scores from each component are then used to calculate a seasonally adjusted index where any number over 50 indicates that more builders view conditions as good than poor.
Each of the HMI's three component indexes recorded substantial gains in October. The component gauging current sales conditions rose four points to 18, the component gauging sales expectations in the next six months rose seven points to 24, and the component gauging traffic of prospective buyers rose three points to 14.
Regionally, the West led all other areas of the country with its nine-point gain to 21 – the highest HMI score for that region since August of 2007. The Midwest and South each recorded four-point gains, to 15 and 19, respectively, while the Northeast held unchanged at 15.
Editor's Note: The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index is strictly the product of NAHB Economics, and is not seen or influenced by any outside party prior to being released to the public. HMI tables can be found at www.nahb.org/hmi. More information on housing statistics is also available at www.housingeconomics.com.
Realtors to Washington: 'Do No Harm' Washington, DC, Oct. 05, 2011 - The federal government can help the housing market self-correct by adopting a housing policy that resolves servicing issues, gets underwater home owners back on their feet, removes uncertainty about financing, and sets out how the federal government will backstop housing for the long-term, lawmakers and housing leaders said in Washington yesterday at a meeting on housing crisis solutions.
The Progressive Policy Institute and Economic Policies for the 21st Century, two policy institutions, hosted key members of Congress, NAR, and other housing industry leaders and policy strategists at the New Solutions for America’s Housing Crisis event in Washington, D.C., yesterday to devise ways to spur the housing market and in turn get the U.S. economy back on a solid growth path.
The government is sending contradictory messages, housing leaders from throughout the industry said. On the one hand, the government is intervening in the mortgage modification process for troubled home owners and in other ways, while on the other hand it’s failing to take obvious steps that the market needs, like extending the loan limits.
“The damage has been done,” said Richard Smith, president and CEO of the national diversified real estate company Realogy, referring to the expiration of the 2008 loan limits. “In anticipation of the change, housing started reflecting this two or three months ago, so it’s now built into the marketplace. Here we are trying to figure out how to stimulate housing while the lack of a national housing policy is letting it deteriorate.”
Smith and Dave Stevens, president and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association, estimated that the drop in loan limits from 125 percent to 115 percent of area median home price and in the high-end limits from $729,750 to $625,500 will push about 5 percent of buyers out of the market.
Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) called the failure to extend the loan limits a missed opportunity and warned the Obama administration about moving forward with the 20 percent down payment requirement in the proposed qualified residential mortgage rule. “If they [publish the final rule after the 2012 elections, as some are saying], you’re going to have another housing conference in 2013 talking about the same things we’re talking about today because the housing market cannot stand the QRM rule as it’s written today,” he said.
The participants offered up a number of steps for the government to put the housing market into a position to self-correct. These include starting with a clear, comprehensive housing policy under which all government efforts, from loan modifications to mortgage servicing standards, mortgage financing standards, and long-term federal mortgage market backstopping, flow from the same strategy.
“Government needs to refine what its involvement will be, make cohesive policy, and stick with that,” said Smith.
From there the government can put into place a number of market-building and confidence-producing programs:
Appraisal-free refis for underwater borrowers. “We already know they’re underwater,” said Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.). “The government guarantees these mortgages. We can establish a new floor and allow people to refinance at current interest rates. Extend the terms to 20, 30, or even 40 years.” Cardoza said that, for little cost to the federal government, the refinancings will have a significant stimulus effect on the broader economy as households’ cash position improves. Stan Humphries, Zillow chief economist, agreed the idea made sense from a stimulus standpoint. “It is a great economic stimulus if it [generates] about $70 billion [a year],” he said.
Shared-equity refis. Encourage lenders to allow underwater borrowers to refinance and write down the balance to the market rate in exchange for the lender taking an equity position in the home and imposing some resale restrictions in the early years of the new mortgage term.
Assumable government-backed loans. Allowing government-backed loans to be assumable would increase the attractiveness of buying today because buyers would know their mortgages would be attractive to buyers five or 10 years down the road, when interest rates are likely to be back up to 7, 8, or 9 percent. “That would be a very good asset to carry into the next decade,” said Smith.
Bulk investor foreclosure purchases. Keep priority purchase of foreclosures to owner-occupant buyers and communities but also pave the way for more investor participation. One possibility, said Dave Stevens of the MBA, is to open Sec. 204(k) FHA single-family property disposition loans to broader participation.
National servicing standards. Right now different federal regulators are getting involved in servicing issues, and lenders are negotiating with attorneys general in the 50 states separately over issues arising from servicing problems. This piecemeal approach is holding back lenders’ ability to move forward with new efforts to help borrowers, Stevens said.
Looking over the long term, participants widely agreed the federal government must stay in the mortgage finance market and provide an explicit guarantee. “I spent a lot of time in my last job [as FHA commissioner during the first two years of the Obama administration] talking to banks in China and around the world and the bottom line was, most investors internationally would not invest unless [the security] was Triple A and, in the United States, unless it had an explicit guarantee,” said Stevens.
Isakson, Smith, and others entertained the idea of rolling all of the existing federal entities guaranteeing mortgages into a single entity. That would mean some form of consolidation of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, the VA, and the Rural Housing Service to enable the government to benefit from “economies of scale,” said Isakson.
Isakson also likes the idea of paying for the federal guarantee taking a sinking-fund approach in which the entity charges “fees in return for government sponsorship,” said Isakson. “Put the fees in a sinking fund ... large enough to absorb the shock waves, build up cash reserves sufficient over time, so the insurance on the paper dissipates 10 percent a year.”
Participants said the market is slowly starting to recover on its own, with many investors and first-time buyers coming in with all cash to get around the stymied lending market. Investors are turning the properties into rentals, and slowly but surely foreclosure inventories are easing. But the mixed signals from the government and lack of a comprehensive federal policy is keeping the market from recovering in a solid, steady way, and until that happens, the broader economy can’t get out of the doldrums.
“Conversations about increasing down payments, the mortgage interest deduction, the loan limits continue to eat away at the average consumer’s ability to purchase a house in confidence,” said Phipps.
By Robert Freedman, REALTOR® Magazine Daily News
Millionaires in Naples Catch Kiplinger's Eye Kiplinger, the company that keeps its eye on financial statistics for the rest of us, has been counting millionaires around the country and has found an unusual concentration in Naples and Marco Island.
The website says we have a population of 321,520 with a median income of $58,133. Okay.
It goes on to count 12,277 millionare households, or 9.1 percent of the population.
A much smaller group has $5 million or more of "investable assets."
Of course, being small helps. The community that has the highest concentration of millionaires is Los Alamos, NM. Naples is second. The New York bedroom communities in Connecticut come in third: Bridgeport, Stamford, Norwalk.
Kiplinger didn't report this statistic: unemployment in Collier County has hovered between 9.7 and 11.7 percent this year, considerably above the national figures.
CEO Debuts at The Phil
Myra Daniels
Kathleen Van Bergen
Kathleen van Bergen, an accomplished violinist and former executive at the Schubert Club in St. Paul, Mn., has joined the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts, following Myra Janco Daniels as the chief executive officer. [more]
