701 North Main, Elgin, Texas

Fabulous Historic Home! Many wonderful touches will draw you into the heart of this home. You’ll love the spacious rooms, high ceilings, & wood floors. Dine with the finest in the formal dining room graced by a wide arch, columns, & antique lighting. The plantation shutters, French doors, & crystal doorknobs will take you back to a gentler time. The lovely master fireplace and walls of windows will relax you beyond words. The detached garage & apartment above have been rehabbed with new windows & paint. Use as a rental, (many have asked), create a studio space, or have an office away from it all. Appreciate the outdoor space, the recently added deck, the tall pecan trees, & room for a pool, garden or a whopping big barbecue with friends and family! You will fall in love! Come see it today!

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Austin-area residential construction is up 11% over last year, and it looks like we’ll continue to see activity even though the federal tax credit for home buyer expired, based on an article by Shonda Novak in the Austin American-Statesman. Novak quotes Tommy Tucker of Residential Strategies, Inc., who says that “buyers are coming back to the market for reasons apart from the tax credit.” Area builders “have shown discipline by not creating an oversupply of housing,” so prices should remain stable. The Austin housing market’s health relative to other parts of the country reflects the strength of Austin’s job market. The article mentions, as an example, Samsung’s $3.6 billion expansion here.

Last Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives passed the FHA Reform Act, establishing some new Federal Housing Administration (FHA) regulations and authorities. The bill will strengthen FHA’s capital base by raising mortgage insurance premiums, and will crack down on FHA-approved lenders.

According to a statement released by House Democrats, the reforms outlined in the bill will “rebuild the American dream of homeownership,” while reducing federal spending by $2.5 billion over the next five years and holding FHA accountable.

The FHA Reform Act is supported by a wide coalition of organizations, including the National Association of Realtors, Mortgage Bankers Association, and National Association of Home Builders.

Robert E. Story, Jr., CMB, chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, commented, “The reforms contained in this bill will help stabilize FHA’s finances by allowing the agency to raise its annual premiums and better take corrective action against lenders who are putting the program at risk.

Artist's depiction of the proposed Kyle library

I’ve been working a lot in the rapidly-growing town Kyle, just south of Austin. Kyle’s population has increased almost fivefold since 2000, which means there’s been an increasing demand for services, especially library services, hence the strong local commitment to construction of a new 20,000 square foot library, four times the size of the older building. The library “is the most used city building in Kyle,” according to the Austin American-Statesman. The Kyle City Council gave the project a green light, even though it will cost $500K more than originally targeted. The City considers the library “a must-have,” according to Mayor Lucy Johnson. Construction will start in October and take around a year. According to the Statesman,

The building will feature community rooms to accommodate meetings, as well as special areas for teens and young children, city officials said. Its design will mirror that of the limestone City Hall building constructed four years ago.

A Brookings Institution analysis of 2000-2008 census data show interesting trends. [Link] See also Brookings: State of Metro America

Highlights:

• Suburbs are now more likely to be home to a poor, rapidly growing older population as younger, educated whites move to urban centers.
• A majority of all racial and ethnic groups in large metro areas live outside the city.
• Suburbs have the largest poor population in the U.S., and a majority of baby boomers age 55 to 64.
• “White flight” is turning into “bright flight” as aspiring young adults move to cities, seeking access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation, and a new city ambiance.
• Recommendations: “affordable housing and social services for older people in the suburbs; better transit systems to link cities and suburbs; and a new federal Office of New Americans to serve the education and citizenship needs of the rapidly growing immigrant community.”

I found this pretty fascinating: A cross-disciplinary team including a two Penn State researchers, an archaeologist, and a hydrologist found the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the new world in the Mayan city of Palenque, an aqueduct and tunnel system, probably used to power a fountain or wastewater system. This predated the arrival of Europeans. [Link]

“Under natural conditions it would have been difficult for the Maya to see examples of water pressure in their world,” said Christopher Duffy, professor of civil and environmental engineering. “They were apparently using engineering without knowing the tools around it. This does look like a feature that controls nature.”

Single women are buying more real estate than single men.

Per Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch,

Unmarried women accounted for 21% of home purchases in 2009, while unwed males were 10% of the buyers, according to a National Association of Realtors report in November. It’s a dramatic shift from 1981, the first year the numbers were tracked, when single women and men each accounted for 10% of home sales.

The article goes on to explain that this hasn’t quite sunk in with some industry professionals, who are having to learn to be “gender-friendly.” A case study is Sara Barger, a 26-year-old freelance video producer who “pursues buying homes as a way to safeguard her net worth.”

Earning roughly $90,000 a year, the American University graduate bought her third Washington property in three years in January when she closed on a four-bedroom $350,000 foreclosed townhouse in Columbia Heights. Barger rents out three of the bedrooms as well as her two condominiums to supplement her income and subsidize her monthly $5,866 mortgage, condo and tax expenses. After her rental income, she ends up owing about $625 a month, including utilities.

Could that be you?

From Lani Rosales at Agent Genius:

FHA Commissioner David Stevens spoke before the audience of Realtors and executives, calling the long term prospects for the real estate market “incredible,” according to NAR. Pointing to young households as a demographic that is growing larger than the baby boomer demographic, Stevens notes that their entry into the market will lead to “an incredible real estate market in the future.”

Lani asks “By ‘incredible,’ don’t you really mean ‘uncertain’?”

That had me laughing. I think we’d all like to see a merely-credible future for real estate right now!

Marc Davison envisions an ideal system for real estate searches – wouldn’t this be grand? He imagines “a Pandora for real estate. A system that allowed users to tailor a search by liking and disliking the listing results the system provides them based on their broad parameters. By crunching our responses along with those collected by all who came before us, search could be considerably more productive.”

The nuances of how this could be created are not lost on me. But if Amazon can do it with books and Pandora can do it with songs, I’m convinced real estate could do it with listings. Especially if we could find a way to suck in the user generated content – the things people are thinking, tweeting and facebooking about properties. Yes, a legal minefield – but one we should attempt to sweep.

What would you like to see in a real estate search engine?

Construction and manufacturing sectors lost 5,500 jobs from February 2009 to February 2010, according to Texas Workforce Commission statistics reported in the Austin American-Statesman. The leisure and hospitality sector gained 5,000 jobs over the same period. The statewide unemployment rate was 8.2 percent last month, holding steady, a sign that the labor market has bottomed out. Austin and Texas are starting to feel some of the economic pain of the recession.

Meanwhile the Obama Administration is revising its plan to prevent foreclosures. Borrowers will get help in three ways: Jobless homeowners can get a three- to six-month break on their mortgage payments. Banks will get financial incentives to reduce mortgage balances for underwater borrowers. And lenders can offer refinanced loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration to these borrowers.

There’s a specific program for unemployed homeowners:

Borrowers will have three to six months in which they’ll have to spend no more than 31 percent of their monthly income on their mortgages. If you do find a job during that time, you will be evaluated for a loan modification that could permanently reduce your payments.

The story links to the National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program.

If you are struggling to make your monthly mortgage payments you should contact a HUD-approved housing counseling agency for free advice and help working with your mortgage servicer. Trained professionals are available to help you explore loan modification or refinance options, including those offered through the Making Home Affordable program.

That site has a foreclosure counselor lookup.