The NY Times Rent or Buy Calculator compares the cost of renting versus buying a home. Enter your monthly rent, projected price of buying a house, mortgage rate, and property tax and the calculator will spit out the number of years after which buying is better than renting.
An extremely useful tool especially in today’s sliding housing market where some homeowners are experiencing negative equity. But as with any online tool, don’t replace it with the experience of a human. Trust but verify.
The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index released last week determines the percentage of residents who can afford a median priced home in a given area. Predictably, homes in the Midwest with the rising foreclosures and falling housing prices have the most affordable housing markets and least affordable homes are concentrated on the coast, mostly West. Only 10.5% who earn the median household income of $59,800 can afford a median priced home in Los Angeles – Long Beach/ Glendale where the median home price is $412,000.
Bruce E. Breunig Jr., broker at Century 21 Alliance in Margate, admitted that “we Realtors remain part of the problem. We blame the media for fueling the downturn and try to counterbalance it with our own positive spin.”
Meanwhile realtors are divided over the accuracy of their own numbers even to the extent of admitting to blame for the downturn in the market.
Looking to finding a perfect suburbia for your family? Businessweek lists the 50 most kid-friendly small towns and suburbs in the U.S.
At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in.
Are today’s suburbs going to be tomorrow’s slums as consumer preferences move back toward city center living?
Is this penthouse located at One Hyde Park, London priced at 100 million pounds, the most expensive apartment in the world?
Prices will probably drop some more but personally I don’t expect to ever again see index values around 110. Do you? If we don’t see the massive drop back to “normal” levels then the run up in prices should be described as a shift to a new equilibrium – much as happened during World War II.
Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution uses the oft-quoted Robert Shiller’s chart on home values and concludes that fundamentally there was no housing bubble.
Update: As expected, Paul Krugman has a response.
Quick calculations showed that, given construction costs in the 1990s, profits made from the market-rate sale of 560 apartments would finance 1,000 free homes for slum-dwellers. So, to give away 160,000 homes, developers would have to sell almost 90,000 full-price homes. In total, they would have to build 250,000 each year.
In an insightful article, Dilip D’Souza, writing for the Outlook section in the Washington Post explains the futility of the current slum redevelopment schemes in Mumbai.
I will always welcome the transfer of public property into private hands, and even the most left-liberal activist will agree that it is more preferable to hand over property rights to the “little guy” transparently than to big evil builders after intense backroom dealings.
Gaurav Sabnis, an Indian blogger takes the argument further and advocates transferring property rights to slum dwellers thus giving them a better say in negotiations with the builders.
My uncle, a builder and developer in the Mumbai suburbs runs his construction business through the model that Dilip suggests i.e. by redeveloping properties which have surplus FSI (Floor Space Index) and effectively giving free homes to the original residents while making the profit off the additional housing units that he sells at market rate. More on the impact of that strategy for the housing condition in Mumbai later.
In the times of declining home sales, houses modeled as Martha Stewart Homes are selling well. I guess consumers simply want more specialization and the unique factor is way up in their buying list. Or is it simply effective marketing and assumption of quality through well recognized brands? You tell me.
If you are one of those people looking to sell your home quickly, these simple tips by Rod Thomas will also help you get a better price for your house. Problogger, Darren Rowse relates lessons for blogging from his house-selling experiences. It is all about marketing.
Drag your mouse up or down along this image and see the effect of sunlight on the skyline of the city at various times in the day.