Real Estate Blog

Last week, we released our Q2 2008 Real Estate Market Reports, in which we reported that, nationwide, 29.1% of homeowners who purchased in the past five years are currently underwater on their mortgages (i.e., owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth). We also reported that almost half (45%) of those that bought at the national market peak of 2006 currently have negative equity. The first chart below shows the number of homes with negative equity as a percentage of homes sold in each of the last five years (broken out by region). As you can see, homeowners buying in the West at the 2006 peak have been hit the hardest with almost 60% of purchasers in that year upside down currently on their mortgage.

After doing a bit more number-crunching, we’re able now to report these numbers as a percentage of all homes, not just homes sold in a given period. The numbers are even more startling than we expected with almost 14% of all single-family homes in the U.S., regardless of when they were bought, currently in negative equity. That’s one in seven single-family homes in the country underwater right now. The second chart below breaks these numbers out by region as well. Here, the impact of significant market declines in California, Las Vegas and Phoenix are evident in negative equity rates in the West which top 18 percent (almost one in five homes underwater). The lowest rates of negative equity are found in the Northeast with only about 6 percent of homes underwater.

In an earlier analysis at the beginning of this year, Moody’s Economy.com reported rates of negative equity at the time of about 10 percent with a projection for rates to near 14 percent by the end of Q2. Indeed, it does appear that we’ve hit those levels as indicated by our own numbers. With negative equity being a factor in foreclosure rates, these numbers are just one more reminder of the severe strain being felt by many homeowners right now.

Go here to read the rest:
Look Around: One in Seven is Underwater

If you visit Zillow today using your iPhone Safari, Blackberry, Opera Mobile or other mobile browser, you will notice something different. The mobile homepage. That’s because we just launched a mobile browser version of our popular home search feature making it easier and faster to search properties from your hand held device.

Our goal: To speed things up and improve the mobile user experience. To make this all possible we put together a lightweight search interface that should be easy to use on mobile devices. Built by myself and designer Adam Ebel, we intentionally kept it simple. Just enter the address and press “GO”. If we find an exact match for your search, you’ll see a home details page which will tell you:

• Zestimate
• Number of beds
• Number of baths
• Square footage
• Sale price
• Homes for sale/Recently Sold/Make Me Move status
• Photos
• Seller and owner added facts
• Zestimate history graphs
• An inline static Google Map of the home’s location
• Links to view the home details page on Zillow (and for iPhone users, on the built-in Google Maps)

During your visit, you’ll be able to use links to switch between the mobile site and the main site, so virtually all of Zillow is viewable, and finding homes using the address search feature is a snap.

Feedback and requests for future versions are much appreciated. Feel free to e-mail me at davidgo@zillow.com.

The rest is here:

In a magnanimous act, real estate developer Donald Trump is rescuing Ed McMahon from foreclosure by buying McMahon’s home and leasing it back to him, according to the L.A. Times. As The Donald put it,

Advertise Here

“When I was at the Wharton School of Business,” Trump said, “I’d watch him every night. How could this happen?”

Now that Ed is saved from foreclosure, what about other celebrities facing foreclosure?

Read more here:

After doing a post about the home in Detroit that is listed for $1, there were some challenges that I had the wrong home. While I was 99% confident it IS the home, I thought I’d verify it by going to Ron French of the Detroit News, the person who originally reported the story.

Ron, who has visited the house, took the time to describe it to me, but the real verification was in the photos he sent (below). The reason why there was a question as to whether this was the house was because it doesn’t look anything like it used to, due to the vultures that have swooped in and stripped it of nearly everything of value.

BEFORE: Traverse Street home before being stripped

AFTER: Traverse Street home with siding removed

AFTER: Another view of the Traverse Street home

AFTER: The rear of the home, with the back door entirely gone

Ron said it’s fairly typical to see this type of thing in bad neighborhoods in Detroit, but it’s becoming more common to see it happening to in nicer neighborhoods. “As soon as they know it’s empty, it’s like a gazelle limping in the Serengeti — they will take it down. You will see people pushing a wheelbarrow down the street, full of siding or copper. They take everything.”

And by the looks of these photos, not much is spared.

Read more from the original source:
The Remains of the $1 Detroit House

Detroit Home for Sale: $1

Desperation has hit Detroit. According to the Detroit News, several homes and a parcel were listed for sale for $1 in Detroit. One piece — at 8111 Traverse St, Detroit, MI (photo above) is close to a sale. And no, this is not a family member passing along a long-time property to another relative or some other insider deal, this is the ugly truth of how eager a bank is to unload a foreclosed property.

Not only is the bank owner losing any potential value in this property, but it will cost the bank an additional $10,000, “to pay $2,500 in sales commission and another $1,000 bonus for closing the $1 sale; the bank also will pay $500 of the buyer’s closing costs. Throw in back taxes and a water bill, and unloading the house will cost the bank about $10,000.”

In Zillow’s just released Q2 Real Estate Market Report, Detroit continues to slide with a decline of 12.9% year-over-year in Q2. The 5-year annualized is not quite so bad with a 3.2% decline. Detroit’s current Zillow Home Value Index is $124,126. The last time Detroit’s index was at these levels was Q4 of 1999.

Here is the original:
$1 Will Buy You a Home in Detroit

With Zillow’s Real Estate Market Reports for the second quarter of 2008, the U.S. housing market turned in another dismal quarter of performance with a year-over-year decline in the Zillow Home Value Index of 9.9 percent. This marks the sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year home value declines and, as in the previous five quarters, represents another record-breaking decline, the magnitude of which has not been seen in the previous twelve years of Zillow data stretching back to 1996.

The extent of the current housing woes is revealed not just in the magnitude of the annual depreciation but also in the widespread scope of the poor performance with 140 of the 165 markets (85%) covered this quarter experiencing year-over-year declines in the Home Value Index as of the second quarter. Since the peak of the national housing market in the second quarter of 2006, home values have fallen more than 13 percent, taking values back in time to levels last seen in the fourth quarter of 2004 (see chart below).

<!–[if !vml]–><!–[endif]–>

Market performance varied widely with parts of California’s Inland Empire again topping the list of weakest markets as seen in Merced and Stockton where year-over-year declines were 40 percent and 38 percent respectively. Other large metropolitan areas hit hard with market declines included Las Vegas (-27% year-over-year decline), Los Angeles (-21%), Miami (-21%), Orlando (-20%) and Phoenix (-19%). Those few bright spots out there still experiencing positive appreciation included several metro areas in the Midwest and Southeast such as Oklahoma City (1.1%), Austin (1.2%), Chattanooga (2.9%), Mobile (3.3%), Tulsa (3.9%) and, always in the list of top performers, Grand Junction, CO (4.9%) [Can somebody in Grand Junction tell us what the magic is out there?]. See the map below for home value changes across the country.

<!–[if !vml]–><!–[endif]–>

All of this real estate depreciation was translated predictably into high rates of negative equity across the nation with more than 29 percent of homeowners who purchased in the past five years currently owing more on their mortgage than their home is currently worth (leaving them “upside down” or “underwater” on their mortgages). Among those homeowners who purchased at the height of the market in 2006, almost half (45%) are currently underwater on their mortgages.

To get more insight into the difficulties in these various markets, we began reporting this quarter on a variety of Distress Signals such as percentage of homes with declining values, percentage of homes selling for a loss, and rates of foreclosures. Nationwide, 77 percent of homes declined in value over the past year (although only 38 percent of homeowners in a recent Zillow/Harris Interactive survey believed their homes had declined in value which is a whole other story). In Q2, about a third of homes (32.7%) actually sold for less than the value for which they were purchased. In Los Angeles, more than half the homes sold in the second quarter were sold for a loss (51.1%) and in Las Vegas the percentage of homes selling for a loss reached almost 70 percent. For the nation at large, more than 18 percent of sales transactions in the second quarter were foreclosures, up markedly from just 7 percent in the second quarter of 2007. Commensurate with the large home value declines and high rates of negative equity, the metro areas of Stockton and Merced both saw foreclosure rates in excess of 50 percent for the second quarter (and percentages of homes selling for a loss of greater than 70 percent).

While predicting the bottom of the market is difficult, it’s clear that with year-over-year depreciation currently in the near double-digit range, we’re going to remain in negative territory in most of the hardest hit markets for the next several quarters (even were the market to bottom out now). And stabilization of home values must be preceded by a substantial clearing of the glut of unsold homes that is clogging a lot of these metro areas, an event which is made all the harder given the large numbers of foreclosures flooding into these same markets right now. And while negative equity is a contributing factor to foreclosure rates even in normal times, there’s anecdotal evidence that the high rates of negative equity currently seen in the market are having an independent effect on foreclosure rates by inducing homeowners who haven’t experienced an acute financial hardship that typically leads to foreclosure (e.g., job loss, death, mortgage resets making payments untenable) to walk away from their homes –  frustrated with making payments on an asset than is now worth substantially less than it was originally. All in all, not a cheery picture in this quarter’s numbers.

We offer up this data in all 165 metro markets (the most comprehensive set of real estate data you’ll find anywhere) with the hope that knowledge will set you free. Even in bad times (especially in bad times), knowledge of the local real estate market is a consumer’s best friend and it’s Zillow’s mission to provide consumers with the most detailed and up-to-date information on what’s happening in the real estate market around them.

Here is the original:

(Photo courtesy Boston Globe)

Who says you have to move to the suburbs if you want a spacious home? In Boston’s Back Bay area, neighbors are currently watching as a 24,000-square-foot mansion — the biggest in Boston — is being assembled before their eyes.

You might think this is a case of raze and rebuild, but it’s not. The owner, Ofer Nemirovsky, a managing director of an international private equity firm, is actually combining two historic buildings to create a single-family structure. According to the Boston Globe article, this is only the latest example in a wave of wealthy owners who are moving back to the city, and choosing to preserve historical buildings by making expensive repairs and renovations. It’s quite refreshing to hear, given the teardown boom that’s been happening across the country.

Since 1997, Nemirovsky has been aquiring the properties that will make up the home, including these condos in the 25 Exter St. building and a townhouse at 196 Commonwealth Ave., costing about $13.5 million in total.

While the interiors are being gutted, Nemirovsky will be making very minimal changes to the exteriors. Once the $10 million renovations are complete, the home will feature 15 bathrooms, six parking spaces, an atrium, a “ball-playing court,” and a master suite with “his” and “hers” studies, dressing rooms, and bathrooms.

Read the original:

As we noted yesterday, the Zillow Q2 Real Estate Market Reports are now live on our site. These reports discuss the latest home value data in 165 markets (down to the zip code level), as well as negative equity stats, information on the percentage of homes that sold for a loss, and some glossy graphics that make it all come to life.

For more information, please join Dr. Stan Humphries, Zillow’s VP of data & analytics, for a web-based conference call to discuss Q2 data and the trends we are seeing in the housing market. The call will begin today at 11 a.m. PDT/2 p.m. EDT. To register, visit www.events.acttel.com/zillowmarketreports. If you won’t be at your computer at this time, you may download and print the presentation (available an hour before the call) and dial in directly at 800-240-2430.     

In the meantime, stay tuned to the Zillow Blog for more commentary from Dr. Stan Humphries.

Read the original:
Live-Q2 Real Estate Market Reports

Shaq's Miami Home

When sellers trim a few thousand off their homes in hopes of attracting a whole new set of buyers, does it work that way with multi-million dollar homes of the rich and famous? NBA star Shaquille O’Neal did just that when he reduced his Star Island property in Miami from $35 million to $29 million recently, according to the Hartford Courant. Who knows if $6 million makes it more affordable for some.

In looking at photos of Shaq’s home, everything appears to be big and roomy — the kitchen, the swervey staircase to the second floor, the tennis court, and the lush grounds. When it’s a home for a guy who stands 7-feet-1 and weighs 340 lbs., it better be built on the scale of a giant.

Also, no word whether Shaq is still interested in helping foreclosure victims in Orlando, as previously reported, but Shaq’s development group (Boraie O’Neal Urban Development) is going to build a 25-story condo tower in his hometown of Newark, NJ.

Shaq's pool and veranda

Originally posted here:
Shaq Trims Miami Pad to $29 Million

If the Playboy Mansion (click on the Birds Eye View radio button) didn’t have its share of squabbles equivalent to a girls’ silly 10th grade cat fight, you’re about to see the roof blown off when Hugh Hefner invites Ukrainian model Dasha Astafieva to move in with him and The Girls Next Door: Holly, Kendra, and Bridget.

True or not? Who knows. But, it continues to blow us away here at Zillow to see crazy traffic numbers continually hitting the Playboy Mansion. See more mega-historical mansions: Go visit the Beverly Hillbillies Mansion and others, in our Famous Homes list.

Go here to see the original:
Prepare for Playboy Mansion Cat Fight

This 103rd edition of the Carnival of Real Estate is posted over at Home Staging, Rants & Ravings! Craig Schiller got “punchy” for this week’s CoRE and highlighted 5 informative posts, including one by Zillow Director of Communications, Amy Bohutinsky, for her post, “Every House’s Value is Dropping Except Mine!” Craig writes, “Amy, I can only say “from your blog to seller’s ears!” Nice job.” Five great posts worth a read when you have time — head on over and take a look!

The carnival will make its next appearance on Monday, Aug. 18, at RE Agent in CT. Please submit your best post by Sunday Aug. 17, 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.

Excerpt from:
Carnival of Real Estate #103

Tomorrow we’ll be releasing the Zillow Real Estate Market Reports for Q2 2008.  These reports cover 165 U.S. real estate markets, and include data on home value changes over time, homeowner equity stats, and (new this quarter) what we’re calling “distress signals” - data on foreclosures and homes selling at a loss.

Zillow’s VP of data and analytics, Dr. Stan Humphries, will be hosting a Web-based conference call at 11 a.m. PDT tomorrow, August 12 to provide perspective on the data and discuss the trends we’re seeing in these reports.  He will also touch on the results of the Homeowner Confidence Survey we released last week, which highlighted the disconnect between consumer perception and reality when it comes to home values.

Anyone is welcome to join in the conference call.  Simply register at www.events.acttel.com/zillowmarketreports any time between now and then.  Alternatively, participants can dial in at 800-240-2430.

We hope you’ll join us.  Be sure to check back first thing tomorrow morning for a blog post on our Q2 Real Estate Market Reports as well.

Original post:
Q2 Real Estate Market Reports - conference call tomorrow

July was a great month for us at Zillow, as we logged more than 5.3 million unique visitors in July (5,312,644 to be exact). This was a 22% increase versus July 07. The source for this data is our internal logs via Omniture.

In terms of public sources, we’re very pleased to have been the third-most visited real estate website in July, according to Hitwise.com. For July 2008, here are the top real estate websites according to Hitwise:

Thanks to our community of visitors for making this happen.

Read the rest here:
Top Real Estate Websites

Living like a celeb (or at least close to one) has never been easier. Check out the real estate bargains for less than $300K in some of the famous celebrity neighborhoods we highlighted in last week’s Famous Celebrity Neighborhoods blog post. I don’t know about you, but I’ll do pretty much whatever it takes to share a fence with Oprah…or Jen…or the Beckhams!

Aspen, Colorado

For Sale: 400 E Dean St. #34, Aspen, CO, condo: $185,000

Malibu, California
For Sale: 2121 Baja Malibu, Baja, CA: $239,000

Miami Beach, Florida

For Sale: 2301 Collins Ave., Apt. 1114, Miami Beach: $299,000

Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia

For Sale: 1174 Eggleston St. SW, Atlanta, GA: $169,900

Original post:
Bargain Home Values in Celebrity Neighborhoods

La Paz County, AZ, which borders California on its western border and is also home to the Colorado River Indian Reservation, has the oldest population in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau in a report released today. A demographic chart of Quartzsite, AZ, which is one of the biggest cities in La Paz, bears out this report.

Which county has the youngest population? That’s Webb County, Texas, where this demographic chart of Laredo, TX, which happens to be the biggest city in this county, tells the story.

Read more here:
La Paz County, Arizona, has Oldest Population in U.S.