The House yesterday passed legislation that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of troubled home mortgages, overcoming fierce financial industry opposition.
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Homeowner Rescue Bill Passes House
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Tag: pollsI recently wrote a post about the average-sized U.S. home from our Q1 Home Value Reports. As I noted in that post, the “average” U.S. home is 1,500 square feet with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. With these dimensions in mind, I dove into Dueling Digs to look at average-sized homes, sorting through homes for each of the 6 categories (kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, living spaces, exteriors, and yards & gardens) that were between 1,201 and 1,900 square feet. What did I find? Very impressive homes that, although average in size, are far from average in appearance. Take a look:
Most popular average-sized exterior — Located at 1329 N Genesee Ave, Los Angeles, CA, this home has 1,680 square feet, 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, fitting the bill for an average-sized home. But, recently sold for more than $1.3 million, it is significantly above the Zindex for the average home across the U.S., which is a mere $190,000.
Most popular average-sized living space — This home at 250 Geoffroy Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, comes in just under 1,900 square feet, which is a bit larger than the “average” home and the Zestimate reflects that, coming in at just $1.5 million.
Most popular average-sized kitchen — The kitchen in this home at 4307 Babcock Ave, Studio City, CA, seems everything but “average.” Check out the stainless steel appliances, granite countertops and hardwood floors.
Most popular average-sized bedroom — This home at 883 Acapulco St, Laguna Beach, CA, recently sold for just under $1 million, again proving “average” is anything but.
Most popular average-sized bathroom — And who knew funky bathrooms were in? This Seattle powder room located at 1024 E Pike St, Seattle, WA, is in a condo building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Most popular average-sized yard — And last but not least, the yard of this home, located at 6 Linda Vista Ave, Belvedere Tiburon, CA, is the kicker. Can you imagine if the “average” person was able to wake up to this Belvedere-Tiburon, CA, view every morning?
Don’t forget to check out Zillow’s ultimate Top 10’s (no size involved):
- Top 10 Most Popular Bedrooms
- Top 10 Most Popular Kitchens
- Top 10 Most Popular Bathrooms
- Top 10 Most Popular Yards & Gardens
- Top 10 Most Popular Exteriors
- Top 10 Most Popular Living Spaces
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I’m not sure which recent real estate headline has me more transfixed: the real estate listing of Lenny Dykstra’s home for nearly $25 million or the dumping of 400,000 plastic balls into the Ivanhoe Reservoir.
Dykstra, the hard-sliding, former Major League Baseball player for the NY Mets and Philadelphia Phillies (“Nails” to longtime fans), is selling his Thousand Oaks, CA mansion for $24.95 million. A couple of reasons for my shock and awe: I had no idea Lenny parlayed his up-and-down sports career into a mostly “up” post-sports career. He is regarded as a stock-market savant even though he disdains reading, he has his own private jet, and now he’s flipping his Thousand Oaks home he previously purchased from Wayne Gretzky for $18.5 million. For the ultimate in voyeurism, check out this 164-slide show of Lenny’s home.
This next news item can be listed as “awe:” About 400,000 plastic balls, like the kind that fill kids’ ball pits at amusement parks, were dumped into the Ivanhoe Reservoir in Silver Lake, CA on Monday to block the sun from hitting the water’s surface. This was done to prevent growth of a deadly bacteria that could infect the drinking water for 600,000 residents in Los Angeles. Watch this video of workers dumping 400,000 plastic balls into the water. By the end of the year, 3 million balls will be floating in this reservoir. I wonder what kind of effect this will have on real estate prices for homes along the reservoir. Their sparkling water view has suddenly done dark.
Read more here:
Lenny Dykstra and 400,000 Plastic Balls
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Over the past three years, we’ve told a lot of potential partners that we are a patient bunch. We told them our goal was to become their most efficient marketing partner. We told them we weren’t competitors. Well, that patience has paid off. We are very excited to announce that Prudential is now participating in Zillow’s Listings Feed program, marketing all of their listings to Zillow’s millions of buyers.
Previously, we had a number of Prudential affiliates taking advantage of our free platform (Northern California and Southern California to name a few), but now all will have the same benefit.
Hats off to the leadership at Prudential who have announced a number of large online distribution deals recently. They clearly understand that buyers are researching homes on all these different sites and are helping their agents get listings in front of those buyers. We are proud to be a part of this strategic move.
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With high gas prices and a housing market still trying to break out of these doldrums, people are trying to save money wherever they can. One technique for achieving financial freedom is keeping a monthly budget and watching your income and spending closely. The first big check that homeowners will write will be the mortgage payment. Fortunately, we’ve recently launched the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace which allows you to find the best mortgage rates for free without any hassle. Just fill out the simple form and wait for the quotes to come in.
After you’ve found those great rates, you’ll be looking at a monthly payment that is proportional to the home value. A very quick rule of thumb I like to use to estimate a monthly mortgage payment is to take the loan amount and divide it by 140. So, a $140,000 loan would have roughly a $1000 monthly mortgage payment. Of course, this is a rough estimate and if you’re looking to get a much more accurate picture of your payment, use our mortgage calculators.
Just as banks look at your income and home price to decide if you are eligible for a loan, you can use the same comparison to see how much money you’ll have left over each month after your mortgage. Here’s a look at what’s left over in the top 30 markets each month. The calculation is simply monthly income (from US census data) – monthly mortgage:
The money leftover after paying the mortgage varies widely across markets. It might come as a surprise that Detroit is high on the list. This probably arises from a combination of factors. First, home prices are very low, so mortgage payments are low as well. The other factor is that Detroit’s high unemployment rate can make the average household income look higher.
As far as general trends, living in California metro areas for the most part leaves you with much less after paying your mortgage. There are many places across the country where people have a lot left over after the mortgage. Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and Washington DC all have a combination of relatively high wages when compared with housing costs and mortgage payments. Don’t be surprised if you see a lot of nice cars around these cities, because people have money to spend on some big ticket items.
Now, let’s take a look at the Median Zestimate compared with dollars after mortgage (click for the larger image):
It’s easy to see the relationship between Zestimates and monthly dollars left after paying the mortgage. Los Angeles and San Diego have high house prices that appear to be out of proportion with income. In the opposite corner we see the southern metro areas that have more affordable housing and plenty of income left over after paying the mortgage bill. It will be interesting to see how this distribution changes over the coming years. Will people start to move back East? Is the California sunshine and beach too nice to leave even with the high house prices? Time will tell.
If you want the raw data for all metro areas here’s the excel file.
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This week’s 94th edition of the Carnival of Real Estate is posted at Mike’s Corner. In addition to the honorable mentions, Mike Price highlighted three posts he thought were above the rest in terms of quality — take a look to see the winners!
The carnival will make its next appearance on Monday, June 16 at Maureen Francis’ MIOakland County Blog. Please submit your best post by Sunday, June 15, to be considered. Are you a real estate blogger and would you like to host a future edition? If so, get instructions on how to do so here. Please check the complete FAQ list if you have other questions as to how to participate.
If you’d like to follow the Carnival via RSS, here’s the RSS feed to add to your reader – http://feeds.feedburner.com/CarnivalOfRealEstate
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Carnival Of Real Estate #94
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(Photo courtesy Dayton Daily News)
You might not be at risk of foreclosure, but your neighbors might be, and their neighbors, and theirs, and so on. That is the story of ground zero for foreclosures in Dayton, Ohio, as reported in today’s Dayton Daily News: In a four-block area of Dayton, Ohio, 45 homes foreclosed and were sold at a sheriff’s auction. On one block alone, 15 of 28 properties were sold at auction. Some homes are abandoned, boarded up, burned out or now occupied by drug dealers.
Dayton’s dwindling population and high amount of abandoned residences, buildings and vacant lots is costing the city $12.4 million in lost tax revenue and city services. Maybe Dayton should follow Youngstown’s plan of razing thinly populated blocks. Watch this a riveting video of those affected by Dayton’s foreclosure crisis. It’s a grim reminder that once things start to tumble, it affects us all.
Are you at risk of foreclosure? Check out these Six Steps in Avoiding Foreclosure.
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We can’t ignore it any longer: celebrities are taking the foreclosure hit, too. The latest celebrity is former heavyweight boxing champion Evander Holyfield. A legal notice that appeared in a local newspaper shows his Fayette County, GA estate is under foreclosure. The 104-room, 54,000-square-foot home worth an estimated $10 million and is to be auctioned by a bank on July 1.
Luxist has even created a celebrity foreclosure list with a great little foreclosure slideshow of the affected celebs, which includes Jose Canseco, Aretha Franklin, Latrell Sprewell, Michael Jackson, and others. L.A. Land has their own list of celebrity foreclosures, too. Earlier this week, Johnny Carson’s sidekick, Ed McMahon commanded the headlines. Who’s next?
Read more here:
Celebrity Foreclosures
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The weeks leading up to and the weeks since we launched our Q1 Home Value Reports, I’ve found myself staring at the spreadsheets more than I’d like to admit. Whether walking a reporter through one of the local reports for their market or pulling some key stats from the national report to find trends, you’d think I’d be sick of them. In reality, however, every time I dive in I seem to find something new that I missed the last time around. What caught my attention last week was the average home section.
We define the “average” home as 1500 square feet with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, as this is the size of the average home across the U.S. It gets pretty interesting when start you comparing the values of an “average” home between various MSAs. Some examples:
- The “average” home with the lowest value can be found in Flint, MI, at just $41,500. Here’s an example of a home for sale in the area that fits that bill. The Zindex for Flint is $77,000, which indicates that homes in the area are, for the most part, larger than average.
- Santa Barbara, CA on the other hand, boasts the most expensive average home, at $720,500. Check it out. The Zindex for Santa Barbara, however, is $531,000, indicating the opposite– that most homes in that area are actually smaller than average.
- California, the state with some of the greatest depreciating MSAs year-over-year, has 11 of the top 13 most expensive average homes in the U.S. Could this have something to do with home values in the state dropping more significantly than much of the nation?
- The average home across the U.S. is valued at $191,000. Tuscon, AZ; Bakersfield, CA; Richmond, VA; Springfield, MA and Longview, WA are the MSAs with most average “average” homes, as they come closest in value to this national number.
I’ve included an abbreviated list below to give you a sense of just how much this varies across different markets. You can find the list for all 180 markets in our national report, which you can find by clicking the Home Value Reports link at the bottom of any page on Zillow.
See the original post:
Q1 Average Home Value
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July will be the anniversary of the Zillow Polls feature, created by Software Design Engineer Jarret Falkner. Since that time, 1,116 polls have been submitted with 324,368 votes cast. The poll that has received the most votes is “How long will it take for the housing prices to begin appreciating again?” (click the link to see the poll in lower, right-hand column.)
Obviously, since all real estate is local, this poll is not a true reflection for everyone’s homes in the U.S. As a matter of fact, 30 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) actually appreciated in real estate value, according to our Q1 Home Value Report, while 130 MSAs lost value. The answers in the poll are almost evenly split, which shows that no one knows the answer. When the foreclosure market slows down and the mortgage industry stabilizes — that’s when the mood will lift and housing prices will start going back up. They usually do.
The poll with the second-most votes (1,499 at this writing) is “What is the longest amount of time you’ve spent in one home (as a child or adult)?” which is not super-riveting or a reflection of the times — it’s just a whimsical little question. Back to reality with the third-most votes: “In 2008, US home prices will…” The answers there are a bit more optimistic even though nationally, the market slumped by 7.7%.
Do you have a poll in mind? Create a poll here and see what kind of votes come in. It’s easy!
Read the original:
Zillow Poll Reflects Mood
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Today, Zillow launched comprehensive, interactive mortgage rate charts with information on the most current mortgage rates being offered on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace. These aren’t your typical rate tables or charts — they are pretty unique for a number of reasons.
The rates are based on real quotes borrowers are receiving from lenders. They are not just the typical “marketing rates” that are frequently published in newspapers and on many Web sites — these are actual rates to real people. And, most importantly, they display the most up-to-date rates possible as each chart factors in rates from mortgage quotes submitted just seconds before the chart was created.
As you can see in the image below, these interactive mortgage rate charts illustrate how mortgage rates are changing by day, week, month, or over the past three months. The charts can be filtered by state and various loan types, credit rating or down payment. These filters allow borrowers to see specific rates for situations similar to their own, for example, California mortgage rates for 30-year fixed loansfor those with good credit and a down payment of 20% of more.
The Flash animation interface makes playing with these charts a lot of fun: as you select different mortgage types, terms or time periods, the charts immediately morph to display the new results. It’s super sexy, as the title of this post notes (many thanks to the mortgage product development team who cranked out this new feature)! These dynamically changing charts make it incredibly easy for potential borrowers researching a home loan to get a sense of a rate they may be able to lock in.
Below the rate charts, borrowers see a list of real-time mortgage quotes from lenders. The quotes match the rate specifications selected in the chart above. If you change the filters, the lenders’ quotes will change to match, too. To see the full quote details, just click on any quote for an expanded view.
When borrowers are ready to request their own personalized loan quotes, they simply enter their ZIP code in the box directly below the rate chart and click the orange “Get Quotes” button. They will then will be taken to the loan request form on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.
To find these interactive mortgage rates, visitors can click on the GO button in the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace module found on Zillow’s home page, along with various other locations throughout the site.
So what are you waiting for? Check it out, and be sure to give us any feedback you have on this new feature — we love to hear from you!
Read the rest here:
New! Super-Sexy Mortgage Rate Charts
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Tough times call for drastic measures. A friend of mine in Bothell, WA is trying something new to build interest in his house. He is having an auction… sort of. The “Bothell Countdown” is the brainchild of Justin Wilcox and is something like a reverse auction where instead of the price going up over time, it goes down. He is starting the price around market value and will work the price down in $10k – $5k increments each week, building publicity around the house’s Web site and sending out email updates to prospective buyers along the way. Ultimately he plans to sell the house the same way anyone would (solicit bids, accept or reject them, etc.), the only difference being prospective buyers can pick the price they think the house is worth and wait until the price falls within that range. I have to give him credit for his ingenuity and balls of steel.
When I talked to Justin about his idea, he said he used Zillow and his Zestimate to help him pick the starting price. In fact, he even built a spreadsheet using the Zillow comparables data to get a better feel for the price per sqare foot averages in his neighborhood. I took a look at his calculations and am impressed that he is going to start at such a reasonable price when the auction has nowhere to go but down!
I will definitely be keeping my eye on the house… 19833 95th Ave NE, Bothell, WA 98011.
Good luck Justin!
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Today’s Wiki Wednesday Feature: Who Will Take Care of Abandoned Foreclosure Pets?
(Photo courtesy EForeclosureMagazine.com)
In the past few months, we’ve blogged about some unimaginable stories that have emerged from the foreclosure crisis, from a family forced to live in a camper to people who’ve lost their homes and all of their possessions. Add another heartbreaking story to this list: pet abandonment.
This week’s featured wiki article, Who Will Take Care of Abandoned Foreclosure Pets submitted by user “lets03,” brought this sad story to my attention. As more and more people lose their homes to foreclosure, there has been a rise in cases of pets being left behind in foreclosed homes, or even just set free to fend for themselves. It’s become so rampant that a new term has been coined: foreclosure pets.
A clip from this California pet foreclosure article shows just how common it’s become:
“Leo Nordine, a Hermosa Beach, Calif., broker who specializes in selling repossessed homes, said he finds abandoned dogs at least once a month these days. Sometimes they’re chained in a yard, sometimes locked in the house. They’re often emaciated, if they’re alive at all.”
What can you do to help? This abandoned foreclosure pets article offers some things you can do if you suspect a pet might be in danger in a foreclosed home:
- If you know that a home in your neighborhood is being foreclosed upon, why not ask the occupants if they have made plans for their pets?
- Some home owners might willingly turn over their pets to an animal welfare agency that specializes in rescuing stray and abandoned pets, if they knew where to take their pets.
- Leave animal rescue literature with the owners; it’s better to offend and apologize than to do nothing.
- After the owners have moved, check on the home to see if any pets were left behind or tied up in the back yard.
- Call your local humane society to find out how you can help to rescue abandoned pets.
- Call a local real estate agent and ask the neighborhood specialist to inspect the home for abandoned pets. Most will gladly oblige at no obligation.
- In some states, animal cruelty is against the law. If you suspect animal cruelty, call the police.
According to a recent USA Today article, the number of pets being released to animal shelters is also increasing by alarming rates in places where foreclosures are high. These pets are the “luckier” ones – at least they have a chance of being adopted. Some shelters are even creating special programs to help foreclosure victims and their pets. The Pennsylvania SPCA, for instance, offers their “good-home guarantee” program, which promises the shelter will keep the pet as long as it takes to find a new home, free of charge for foreclosure victims.
Ed: Wiki Wednesdays is a weekly feature that highlights helpful or interesting articles from the Real Estate Guide.
Read more from the original source:
Foreclosures Hurt Pets, Too
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It’s not news to anyone that in much of the country, the housing market has seen better days. We’ve written on this blog a few times about some of the more creative things sellers are doing to help market their homes to potential buyers, adding various incentives along the way. But this is a first.
A developer in the San Diego area recently offered home buyers a free, 2,000 square foot home in Escondido if they purchased a home in the Royal View Estates development in the San Pasqual Valley of San Diego. These homes start at $1.6 million. Check out more details on San Diego Channel 10 site, including a news clip.
Interested? Sorry, but we’re a little late to the game as the deal ended on May 31st. I have a feeling, however, that this isn’t the last deal of this type we’ll be seeing.
Thanks to the LA Land blog for bringing this story to our attention!
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Wow, Jay Thompson knocked it out of the park with the 93rd edition of the Carnival of Real Estate, posted at Phoenix Real Estate Guy. As a result of feedback he received from Kelley Koehler on Twitter, this week’s theme was Mexican food. There are 10 posts (or should we say Mexican meals?) highlighted with the pick of the week, dubbed “The Big Enchilada,” going to Dan Melson at Searchlight Crusade for his post “Is The Good Faith Deposit At Risk?” Jay even delivers his notes on the runners-up. Check out the rest!
The carnival will make its next appearance on Monday, June 9 at Mike’s Corner. Please submit your best post by Sunday June 8, to be considered. Are you a real estate blogger and would like to host a future edition? If so, get instructions on how to do so here. Please check the complete FAQ list if you have other questions as to how to participate in the Carnival of Real Estate.
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Carnival Of Real Estate #93
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Style My House
