At 9 A.M. on any given Monday morning, new-home sales associates across America are picking through trays of bagels and drinking lukewarm coffee before their weekly sales meeting. The sales manager might come in at 9:10, look hopefully at everyone and say, “So, how's traffic?”
Emaar signs are everywhere in Dubai, the now legendary city/state of only 1,500-square-miles with roughly 1.4 million people (about the size of San Antonio). Huge plasma displays touting Emaar communities greet visitors at airport customs. Blue-and-yellow flags and billboards carry the company's name along the highway. Emaar's name hangs from cranes on its projects throughout town, where an incredible 350 buildings of 30 stories or more are under construction.
It's 113 degrees on one mid-July afternoon in Phoenix, and Eric Brown is outside landscaping a 1961 vintage home he recently purchased and is renovating. A year after leaving Artisan Homes, a company he founded in 1998 and sold to Engle Homes in 2004, Brown is ready to come in from the swelter and get his career going again. But he's not desperate enough yet to take just any job that comes down the pike.
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For most people, losing one's job can seem like the end of the world. To be discarded after spending years in dedicated service to a company can be extremely demoralizing. And the job market can be a very uninviting place for those in their late 40s or early 50s.
DEBATES OVER DENSITY USUALLY OCCUR IN urban and suburban locales where land is scarce and tensions over traffic are high—not in zip codes where greenfields stretch out as far as the eye can see. So at first it seems odd that the small town of Fowlerville, Mich. (population 2,800) would put issues related to units per acre before its town council. Land has never been in short supply in this stretch of farmland between Detroit and Lansing, Mich. But affordable homes for workforce buyers (including farmers) have been hard to come by.
When Christopher Homes developed plans for the first two mid-rise buildings to be unveiled as C2 Lofts, the thought was to stick its toe in the water and see how buyers would react to a vertical housing type not indigenous to Las Vegas. Let's just say that since then, the builder has taken the plunge, with 20 more loft buildings in the works for what is now to become a 36-acre, urban-style neighborhood in the larger master planned community of Summerlin.
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The housing market is hurting everyone, and 2007 will surely go down as the year many builders crashed and burned. But there are a few Teflon ventures that have managed to defy the odds and rack up healthy sales in an otherwise weary landscape. And they aren't necessarily using incentives or gimmicks to move inventory. In many cases, savvy design is what's helping these beacons outshine the competition and snap buyers out of their inertia.
When the June 2007 Angora Fire burned its way into the residential streets of South Lake Tahoe, Calif., firefighters were ready. The neighborhoods, unfortunately, were not.
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AS THE HOUSING INDUSTRY REELED THIS summer, several retirement and active adult communities seemed to flourish. Pulte Homes' Sun City neighborhood in Carolina Lakes, N.C., for one, closed more than 600 homes during the 12 months ended June 30, according to the Charlotte Observer. And two of Shea Homes' Trilogy active adult subdivisions near Phoenix enjoyed a 210 percent increase in sales during May and June, compared to the same months a year earlier, reported local radio station KTAR-FM and confirmed by the builder.
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SO, WHAT'S YOUR WALK SCORE? It's a question that home buyers could start asking, thanks to a new application on the popular Google Maps Web site. The score measures the walkability of an address on a scale of one to 100, with 100 being a perfect score. A high score means it's close enough to walk to a host of necessary and desirable services. The farther residents have to drive to school or to pick up a gallon of milk, the lower the score will be.
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IT HAS GOTTEN A LITTLE EASIER FOR DEVELOPERS and builders to borrow money for green building projects thanks to a recent launch by Second Angel Bancorp (SAB) of a lending program aimed at such projects.
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THE AVERAGE AMERICAN FAMILY devotes more than half of its income (52 percent) to housing and transportation combined, according to a study put out by the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership and the Center for Neighborhood Technology, two nonprofit research groups that crunch Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But the proportion a family allocates to one versus the other varies by market, and research suggests that the amount a family spends on transportation may be in many cases inversely proportional to what it spends on housing.
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- Actor Brad Pitt along with real estate developer and philanthropist Steve Bing announce plans to build 150 affordable and sustainable homes in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.
- Efforts to keep homes affordable and satisfy buyer demand for low-maintenance living have affected builders' choices in cladding materials.
- Law firms are developing niche practices to work with borrowers, regulators, and lenders looking to sue mortgage lenders.
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The NAHB, along with a coalition of building-oriented trade groups, has serious questions about the energy-saving goals and administrative provisions included in the House version of energy legislation passed last August.
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Facing Fire
When the June 2007 Angora Fire burned its way into the residential streets of South Lake Tahoe, Calif., firefighters were ready. The neighborhoods, unfortunately, were not.