“Going Small: The virtues of the smaller
home attract home buyers again”
CyberHomes.com, 05.19.09
Misty Weaver and her family were living
the American dream in 2006: The family of four lived in a 3,000-square-foot,
four-bedroom, three-bath home in a beautiful Virginia suburb.
Each of her two sons had his own bedroom, and Weaver, an avowed “neat
freak,” never
had to see their toothbrushes on her bathroom sink because
they had separate bathrooms. With a kitchen, dining room, breakfast
nook, eat-in bar, playroom and large kitchen, the family had
room to spread out.
But it wasn’t long before Weaver felt
like the family was too spread out.
“We never saw each other,” said
Weaver, 32. “I’d be in my office and the kids would be watching
TV in their bedrooms. I’d be making dinner and the kids would be
in the playroom downstairs. We could never talk.”
Weaver’s
solution was home downsizing — moving
the family into an 800-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath home
on a rambling 10-acre property in the Virginia countryside.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Empty Homes, Worried Neighbors: When foreclosed
homes invade a neighborhood”
CyberHomes.com, 04.09
Jessica Gottlieb loves her Los Angeles neighborhood so much
that when it came time four years ago to buy a bigger home
for her growing family, she didn’t look far. The family simply moved
around the corner.
The neighborhood has everything she wants. She can park her
car on Friday and not get back into it until she goes to work Monday.
Shops and restaurants are in walking distance and, if her kids want ice
cream, the family walks together to the corner to get it.
But now when she looks out her front window, the feeling that
wells up is a combination of dismay, fear, disgust and anger.
Across the street, weeds as tall as five-foot-six Gottlieb surround a
modest two-bedroom house. It’s been vacant for a few months, a foreclosure.
When she walks out her front door, Gottlieb scans for signs of homeless
encampments.
And she worries about something deeper: that the decline in
home prices due to foreclosed homes will cause a cascade of bad news for
her neighborhood and her pocketbook. Homeowners are getting a reduction
in their property taxes to account for homes losing a fifth of their value
in the past year, due largely to foreclosures. But that means less money
for the school district. Less money for the school district could mean
failing schools. And if the schools fail, one of the main attractions
of her neighborhood will be gone.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“What Thriving Communities Teach Us: Knight
Foundation research examines prosperous hometowns”
CyberHomes.com, 03.09
Paula Jameson may have been born in Englewood, Calif., but
her heart belongs to Long Beach, a city of nearly half a million residents
near Los Angeles. After 10 years, she’s just as in love with Long
Beach as when she and her husband bought their home in the Belmont Shores
neighborhood in 1999.
“People were friendly there from the get-go,” said Jameson,
the director of a Long Beach-based senior housing non-profit. “We
moved in and three neighbors brought cookies over. It was kind of ...
Mayberry. We bought the house for-sale-by-owner. The people we bought
from couldn’t have been any better. We were sad in the end that
they had to leave. To this day we send Christmas cards to each other.
How many people do you know who do that?”
It turns out she isn’t just a civic booster. According to a recent
survey by Gallup Consulting, people who love their communities help them
thrive in down economies.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Let the Sun In, for Less: Homeowners capture
savings of solar power without the big investment”
CyberHomes.com, 12.08
Derek Sabori says it was just like calling for cable, with
a little more lag time. But instead of 500 channels, he has solar power.
No down payment. No maintenance fees. Just clean electricity,
and years of lower electric bills ahead.
“It was so painless and easy,” said Sabori, 36, a homeowner
in Costa Mesa, Calif. “For people like us, who don’t have
the sort of funds necessary to maintain and purchase a solar system, this
was the way to get in the solar game.”
“It” is plug-and-play solar, a new approach that allows homeowners
to install solar without the large initial investment. Instead, in exchange
for a multi-year contract, Sabori leases solar panels, an inverter box
to convert the energy to something grid-friendly and a breaker-box connection.
Solar leases provide all the benefits of going green, say analysts, without
the financial drawbacks.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“To Pick a Real Estate Agent, Become Your
Own Private Eye: Foolproof tips for separating the good agents
from the frauds”
CyberHomes.com, 12.08
If you’re choosing a real estate agent, you’ve probably heard
all the usual advice: Ask for referrals from friends, interview agents
at open houses and monitor who sells the most homes in your neighborhood.
But you might want to take extra steps to ensure the real estate
agent is trustworthy. With the number of mortgage fraud claims made to
the FBI expected to increase six-fold in 2008, some deeper digging might
be necessary.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“The Great Bankruptcy Debate: Can you really
save your home from foreclosure by filing for protection
from creditors?”
CyberHomes.com, 12.08
Mounting debt. Lapsed mortgage payments. A tanking economy.
It can be enough to make you want to throw up your hands and
file for bankruptcy. But bankruptcy is more than a white flag
to wave at the stampede of irritated creditors. It’s a tool that,
in some cases, can help you keep your home.
Are you are among those for whom bankruptcy is a reasonable
tool to cope with a housing crisis? To find out, we asked attorneys, researchers
and real estate experts about the two types of bankruptcy, Chapter 7 and
Chapter 13. Because bankruptcy law is federally regulated, these suggestions
apply across all 50 states.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Prefab 2.0: Is prefab housing ready for primetime?”
Conscious Choice/New Life Times/Common Ground, 09.08
Judging by magazines, museums and word of mouth, you might
think we were in a prefab housing Golden Age.
You’d be wrong — but not by much. Yes, prefab housing is getting
more attention than it has for decades. And yes, beautiful prefab homes
are on display at museums and design exhibitions. But just because they’ve
built them doesn’t mean homeowners are coming in droves. Instead,
only about 100 homeowners live in prefab homes in the U.S., says Joseph
Tanney, architect with Resolution: 4 Architecture, the NYC firm which
designed the Dwell House, a custom prefab originally built for a Dwell
magazine design competition.
To find out just who’s living in prefab today, we talked to homeowners
Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York. All hoped prefab
would be the design, construction and green solution for them. Was it?
Read on.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Fear Factor for Buyers: Facts and Fictions about today’s
real-estate boogeymen.”
CyberHomes.com, 09.08
David Eigen is worried. A potential homebuyer after a few years
out of the market, Eigen suspects the 24-hour news channels predicting
real estate Armageddon could turn what seems like a great time to get
a lower-cost home into a disaster.
“I’m concerned that a home I’d buy now might drop substantially
in value if people don’t stop panicking,” said the 56-year-old
Boca Raton, Fla., resident. “We can make the economy go to hell
with our fears if we want to.”
There’s a reason so many people are panicked. The mortgage meltdown,
foreclosure crisis and gas prices are a few real-world reasons. But is
your fear based on your financial situation, or is the news getting to
you? To find out, we asked psychologists, mortgage brokers and financial
planners to assess the fears of the day.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“By the Numbers: Does it really make green
sense to move close to work?”
Cyberhomes.com, 07.16.08
When B.L. Lindstrom bought his Phoenix-area home in 2004, his
goal was simple. He wanted to walk to work and eliminate interminable
and frustrating hours on the road. That meant a $400,000 price tag in
Chandler instead of $200,000 to buy 30 miles away.
Now, with gas prices at all-time highs and house values plummeting
in some Phoenix suburbs, it may be one of the smartest financial decisions
Lindstrom has ever made.
“The increase in the price of gas and traffic, and the ability of
my home to hold its value when the outlying areas are seeing their home
values drop — all of it makes me look like a genius,” he said. “Today,
living near work makes extreme green sense in both the economic
and environment interpretations.”
If you’re feeling the pinch as gas prices approach $5 a gallon in
some regions and a lengthy commute has grown old, you may be
wondering if such a move might work for you.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“New House on the Block: How new urbanism
met one old neighborhood”
San Francisco Chronicle, 05.18.08
The four new homes on Oakland's 66th Street have everything
modern Bay Area houses are to have - three bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths, two
stories, 1,500 square feet, plenty of storage. The master bathrooms have
separate tubs and showers. The living rooms have large, elegant windows
and open floor plans. The houses share this midblock lot but have private
yards. There are solar panels on each roof.
What they don't yet have is a family.
And really, that's what new houses need. By themselves in a
neighborhood of established homes and families, they are lonely things.
What they really want is for the mud of the yard to be tracked onto their
clean hardwood and for stinky sneakers and Little League uniforms to be
thrown on now-pristine closet floors.
They long for the stampede of neighborhood kids who will crunch
through their careful landscaping and draw on their walls, and the owners
who will patiently guide the growth of trumpet vines and flowering elms
around them. Their garages ache for bikes or a car.
They long to belong—not only to the people who live in them but
also to the neighborhood.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Mortgage Meltdown, Inc.: Someone’s making money off this
market—the con men. Don’t get taken”
Cyberhomes.com, 05.12.08
The current real estate market seems scary for a good reason:
Con artists are using market confusion to steal homeowners’ property
and prosperity. This year, the FBI expects to receive 60,000 reports of
suspicious activity in the mortgage market, more than six times the complaints
it received in 2003. Many will turn out to be fraud.
“You don’t realize a predator is a predator until you feel the
teeth,” says Peter Ogilvie, president of the California Association
of Mortgage Brokers.
Are you at risk? Check out these four schemes and ways to protect
yourself.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“One-Stop Swapping: Swapping homes helps Bay Area people
see far-away places”
San Francisco Chronicle, 03.16.08
When Kate Pavao and Aaron Lazenby
moved into their three-bedroom condo in Bernal Heights two years
ago, they knew they were making sacrifices. One of them was that there would
be no long Hawaiian vacations anytime in the near future.
But then the couple
found themselves vacationing in Oahu for three weeks with their
4-year-old daughter, Coco.
They didn't hit the lottery. No rich relative
died and left them money. Instead, Pavao and Lazenby discovered
what hundreds of Bay Area residents already know. To take your dream vacation,
you don't have to pay an arm and a leg. You just have to be willing to share
your home.
Thanks to the Internet, home exchange programs have proliferated
over the past decade, offering Bay Area residents a way to leverage their
biggest investment into dream vacations. And, because they live in one of
the post popular places on Earth, they can easily swap their homes for the
best locales. Potrero Hill for Paris anyone?
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Paradise Found: David Sandow, along with 180 other low-income
seniors, finds a happy home in San Francisco’s newest high-tech
neighborhood”
San Francisco Chronicle, 12.23.07
In San Francisco’s most up-and-coming neighborhood—high-tech,
high-rent Mission Bay—180 senior citizens with very low incomes
have found paradise.
“I tell you—it’s not only a dream come true, but a
blessing and a prayer answered,” said Sondra Roland, 64. “To
ever have a one-bedroom apartment in this city, for an amount I could
afford—it’s amazing. I have a deck! Who would have thought
I could have that without paying $1,700 a month?”
Read the full article
here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Sticky Fingers: Open houses can be an open invitation
for theft”
San Francisco Chronicle, 11.16.07
Selling your house? Consider this
checklist: Alarm clock. Cuisinart. Glasswear. Wine collection.
Furniture. That Hummel collection. Area rugs. Leather jackets. Laptop. Jewelry.
Toiletries and towels.
A laundry list of items to pack up before you sell?
Nope.
For Bay Area thieves, these are some of the items they’ve nicked
from open houses. Stealing during the open house itself, breaking back
in to grab a few things later and even backing a moving van up to a vacant,
staged home, open house thieves take literally the hospitality axiom “My
home is your home.”
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“The In-The-Red Blues: Therapists see a surge in patients
stressing about their home value”
San Francisco Chronicle, 11.11.07
In the 37 years William Horstman
has been practicing in San Francisco as a therapist, he's never seen patients
spend more time worrying about their home values - and their personal sense
of wealth - than they do today. That includes the years after the 1989 Loma
Prieta earthquake that devastated the housing market.
"The market has risen dramatically in the past 10 years and, in
San Francisco, that remains true today. But people don't feel it," said
Horstman, who estimates that 10 to 15 percent of his clients'
therapy time is spent on the housing market.
"What they feel is a
sense of impending doom, especially in combination with world
events. People are not approaching the housing market in a logical fashion. It's
binge-purge. The binge was riding on high income, easy credit
and easy access to equity. When people suddenly have, in their minds, a catastrophe
that's not of their own making, it has a much larger impact
on their psyches. What develops is a sense of helplessness and being out of control."
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Four signs you might be having a monetary meltdown”
San Francisco Chronicle, 11.11.07
In this housing market stress
is normal. But it doesn’t have to
impede your life, said San Francisco neuropsychologist William Horstman.
The first step is knowing the most common symptoms of mental stress. Consider
these and Horstman’s answer for dealing with them.
Download a PDF
of this article here.
“Death of the Ranch House: How task, economics, and trends
have changed the homes we want”
NewsMax Magazine, 11.07
When Derek Roberts, 32, and his family began
searching for their first home about a year ago, they knew exactly
the kind of place they wanted: the once-omnipresent ranch house.
Derek’s
wife, Gretchen, wanted a single story home so she could take
her young daughters to their bedrooms without having to climb stairs. She
imaged a house with all the bedrooms on one side of the home, and the public
space, including her home office, on the other.
But the more they looked
at ranch houses, the more they fell out of love with the design.
Now,
she jokingly compares ranch homes to that other innovation from the 1950s,
the TV dinner, which came in a colorful package but ended up being “bland
and plain.”
The Roberts family’s experience is part of a trend that has reduced
the once-sought-after ranch house from boom to bust, changing America’s
residential landscapes in the process.
Article available upon request.
“Timeless design makes Wurster house stand out”
San Francisco Chronicle, 09.23.07
The market may be tough right
now, but homes still sell quickly when buyers come across a gem.
Such is the case for the home at 210 Stonewall Road in Berkeley.
Keith Wilson
and Jessica Seaton put their vintage William Wurster-designed house on the
market at the end of August. Four days later, a deal went into escrow. Seaton
couldn't be more thrilled.
"We're so happy, especially given everything you read in the paper
about the state of the market right now," she said.
But to be fair,
their home comes with an exceptional pedigree, winning local and national
awards and featured in two museum exhibitions of modern architecture.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Good Bones: Unsatisfied
with quick flips and dated inventory, some home buyers are tearing down
to build the house of their dreams”
San Francisco Chronicle, 09.16.07
Prospecting and flipping houses
may be a cottage industry in San Francisco, where home prices
routinely buck national trends. But for some dedicated and visionary
homeowners, buying a house filled with someone else's labor is second
best. When they can afford it, they are willing to overhaul everything
to make their house fit them perfectly.
"What I've seen is that people pick a neighborhood where they want
to be, but those neighborhoods often have older, smaller homes than what
they want," said Derek Cavasian, president and general contractor
of Distinctive Builders, a San Rafael company that does new construction
and remodeling all over the Bay Area. "If they can't find the house
they want in that location to fit their requirements, they
remodel extensively to get that."
These aren't cash-strapped first-time
buyers who buy a fixer-upper in order to break into the
market. People who are attracted to teardowns and extreme remodels
can pay more than $1 million for a property and then pour an additional
half-million dollars into it.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Borrowing in a Tough Market”
San Francisco Chronicle, 09.16.07
Envisioning your dream home, complete
with architectural drawings, is one thing. Financing it is quite another
- especially in the current market.
"It's going to be tough," said Natasha Lovas of Triton Funding
Group in San Francisco. "A lender is going to lend on the current
value of the property. To find a lender willing to lend on
the future value, you need to get a construction loan, where the rates
are higher and the bank assumes a lot of control over the whole process."
Not
that long ago, a homeowner could get a loan for all the value of the property
without proof of income and with poor credit. Today that's not the case.
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Modular Homes: How they stack up”
San Francisco Chronicle,
08.05.07
Rachel Purcell is a determined type. An industrial
systems engineer by training, Purcell is attracted to complex
questions that require precise answers. So when she discovered during
the inspection of her new Alamo home that it was full of toxic mold and
asbestos - OK, yes, she flinched. But then she got to work.
The solution,
it turned out, came rolling in from a factory in Nebraska on
seven convoys of trucks. In less than three days, her new 6,000-square-foot
house was stacked and bolted together. Within three months, the final
work was completed - adding porches and other finish work. She and her
family have been living in it for four months.
Read the full story here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Modular home loan lenders hard to find”
San Francisco Chronicle, 08.05.07
Rachel and Bill Purcell were lucky.
After taking out a mortgage on their Alamo property, they were
able to pay for the construction of their prefabricated home
without taking out another loan. For the rest of us, the normally
arduous process of navigating home finance is more complicated
when it comes to prefabs.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Sleeping Separately”
NewsMax Magazine, 07.07
Apryl Chapman Thomas, 33, loves her husband and has two children
to prove it. But when she snuggles into bed most nights, she does it alone.
“We’re about as normal as you can get,” says Thomas,
who lives in Watkinsville, Ga., with husband Chris and daughters Shay,
5, and Anna, 11 months. “But sleeping apart is actually better for
our marriage. I snore and talk in my sleep. We’re not fighting about
it anymore. I don’t see the big deal.”
A growing number of Americans are choosing to sleep in bedrooms
separate from their spouses, according to a recent survey
by the National Association of Home Builders. Survey respondents—most of them home
builders—say two out of every three custom houses will have dual
master suites by 2015. One in four new-construction houses
already does.
Article available upon request.
“Taking it for Granite: Gen Y asks for luxury
and technology”
San Francisco Chronicle, 07.15.07
The first shock to Kealoha Yoshioka's system after he signed
the papers to buy his first house last month was that he'd have to cut
back on buying Xbox games.
The 27-year-old Apple employee is a computer and gaming buff,
with a large flat-screen TV and a lot of high-definition media components.
He admits that limiting his purchases after a young adulthood where he
could have -- and did get -- everything he wanted is hard. Since he and
his fiancée, Christine Migita, 25, bought the two-bedroom condo,
Migita and her accountant mother put him on an allowance and took away
his credit cards.
But he says it was worth it to get a house with granite countertops,
his-and-hers sinks in the master bath, a home near restaurants and bars
and, new for him, an in-home washer and dryer. It even has crown moulding. "I
had no idea what crown molding was 'til we bought this place," he
chuckled. Living in Silicon Valley, he said he wants to be "in the
know about all the latest and greatest."
Yoshioka and his contemporaries often insist on a new home
with all the designer details, and are willing to spend to get them. This
is a generation that, according to demographers and market researchers,
spends more on itself than any other generation; that expects all the
high-end finishes and appliances that equip their parents' houses; and
that expects a few tech bells and whistles thrown in besides.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Do Gen Y’s desires merely reflect society?”
San Francisco Chronicle, 07.15.07
The stereotype may be that people in their 20s are more selfish
than other generations, but not everyone fits that mold. And certainly
not all of them can afford to buy the high-end products demographers expect
them to.
Both Kealoha Yoshioka, 27, and fiancée Christine Migita, 25, say
they grew up in homes without some modern amenities. For Migita, that
means she's thrilled to have a dishwasher.
And most in their 20s can't afford to buy anything, let alone
a home with high-end finishes.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Green in the Marina”
San Francisco Chronicle, 06.10.07
When Regina Callan began to remodel the house in the Marina
District, she wasn't aiming to create a model of ecological design. She
just wanted to give the future buyer everything he or she might want.
In San Francisco, that includes sustainably harvested, recyclable
and recycled building materials; air purification systems; and nontoxic
paints. Because of her dedication to renovating this 1932 home from the
ground up, the house at 1771 North Point was selected as Home Magazine
and Remodeling Magazine's show home, to be included in Home Magazine's
November/December issue.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Riding into the Valley of Debt: Equity investing requires
saving, sacrifice, lots of patience”
San Francisco Chronicle, 05.20.07
Jessica Lanning has a radical
idea: Don't pay off your mortgage. Don't pay a down payment if
you can avoid it. Carry as much debt as you can comfortably pay, even if
you could get a smaller mortgage, and put that debt -- that extra money
-- to work for you in the stock market, in savings or in high-yield investments
that can earn you more over the long run than simply buying and paying off
your home.
Lanning, a San Francisco certified mortgage consultant and financial
strategist, has spread this new debt gospel to more than 1,000
Bay Area residents, mortgage brokers, certified financial planners and real
estate agents over the past 10 years, and she expects to share it with 1,000
more before the end of June.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Picking Up Steam”
San Francisco Chronicle, 04.22.07
If indeed the Bay Area's real
estate market is made up of microclimates, as some have suggested,
then it's always sunny in the Castro. The Castro is one of the most desirable
neighborhoods in San Francisco. It's full of renovated homes,
like the upper unit of the Casselli Avenue property, with chef's kitchens
and skylights to show off all that stone and stainless steel. It's located
within walking distance of three gyms, two grocery stores, a hardware store,
and a boutique that sells only exotic door knobs and cabinet pulls. These
are homes that sell for a pretty penny no matter the real estate climate.
In
these microclimates, the agents are the weather vanes. They can tell you
with complete accuracy what's happening where they stand, though they don't
always have a sense of what's happening to the overall market. Every agent
will give you a different time period for when the market cooled. For Cuneo,
the fog rolled in in September and hunkered down until the beginning of
the year. She recalls one property she sold -- it languished on the market
for 90 days before finally selling for $629,000. In January, the unit next
door sold empty and in less time for more money.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“SF sales prices don’t always tell the whole story”
San Francisco Chronicle, 04.27.07
Even though the market is picking
up steam as spring warms up -- recently, Zephyr had 18 new listings, a sign
that the increase in inventory for spring is finally getting under way --
there are always homes that sell for under asking, he said. Over the past
12 weeks, Zephyr statistics show that an average of 1 in 4 of their properties
sell for under the asking price. Meanwhile, about half of their properties
sell for more than asking.
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Risky Business: If you play with bridge loans, you just
might get trumped”
San Francisco Chronicle Real Estate section, 03.11.07
For
Van Boughner and Phillip Gomez, the countdown has begun. The
Los Gatos couple closed escrow on their new Santa Cruz home Feb. 15, and
figure they have about five months before paying for both their new mortgage
and their old home equity line of credit will be too expensive for them.
At six months, Boughner jokes, he'll start calling friends for personal
loans.
And every day between now and then, Boughner said, he'll know
how much this gamble is costing him.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“How to make sure your bridge doesn’t collapse”
San Francisco Chronicle, 03.11.07
When Mary McIntyre, 47,
started looking to trade up from her Daly City condo last year,
she found a house she thought would be perfect. But her condo
hadn't sold yet. So she let the perfect house pass her by. Then, late last
year, she found a house near her nursing job and bought it.
For one day,
she owned no property as her old condo sold and she put 50 percent
down (the entire equity in her condo) on her new single-family
home. But if she hadn't sold her house, McIntyre, a single woman,
said she would have walked away from her new four-bedroom house, too.
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Ready, Unwilling and Able: Many buyers qualified for mortgages
are taking their time as they consider all their options.”
San Francisco Chronicle, 01.14.07
Fence-sitters are more than a group salivating for a weakening
in the market: they’re home buyers who are taking advantage of this balanced market to take their time and really consider whether they’re
getting what they want in a home.
After years of being told by mortgage brokers that they can
get a mortgage, however exotic, to afford the house of their
dreams right now -- instead of working their way up to a dream
home -- few fence-sitters are disposed to buying small. Instead,
they’re counting on the slowing of the market to make
it possible to buy their dream home at a reasonable price.
“A lot of people are chit-chatting with friends and the general consensus is that they should wait,” said Mary Ellen Dudum of the Alain Pinel office in Walnut Creek. “I’d
say maybe as many as 40 percent of buyers are waiting right now. But while people
are waiting, real estate is happening, and you never know until you look back
whether it was a good time to wait.”
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Why his tenants Praise the ‘lord”
San Francisco Chronicle, 11.26.06
Indeed, Hallinan is
a tenant's dream: a landlord who is actively involved in the
health of his building, who attends annual Christmas parties,
keeps rents low, responds to complaints promptly, and pays union
employees higher wages and health benefits. And he's committed
to not raising rents during this boom time.
"When I took over the buildings, I thought about, 'What
would I be willing to pay for this space?' " said Hallinan,
a former tenants rights organizer. "What's fair?"
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Waiting lists common for Hallinan buildings”
San Francisco Chronicle, 11.26.06
Interested in getting
into one of the Hallinan buildings? Get in line. Because tenants
stay for years, there's often a waiting list.
Read
the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Finding a Home for Gay Retirees”
San
Francisco Chronicle, 10.29.06
Right now, Elaine Womack
would have to leave the Bay Area to find a retirement community
designed for her and other lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender
Baby Boomers. But two developments scheduled to start construction
next year seek to change that.
Fountaingrove Lodge in Santa
Rosa would be the first gay retirement community for Aegis
Senior Living, one of the largest assisted-living companies
in the country. The other, Openhouse in San Francisco, is planning
a mixed-income apartment and gay senior services in the heart
of the city. Both are opening a world of options for seniors
who, like Womack, don't want to give up their gay community
and want to age in style.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“A Healthy Give and Take”
San Francisco Chronicle, 09.24.06
When Van Torma
put his Alameda home on the market in April, he was expecting
packed open houses, multiple offers and a quick sale. Five months
later, his house is still on the market and Torma is perplexed.
Torma,
44, is one of a growing legion of "motivated sellers" populating
classifieds, open houses and real estate offices around the
Bay Area. He has slashed the price of his home, paid for
staging, made upgrades and done a marketing blitz. The original
listing price was $930,000. Now it's $845,000, a fair amount
less than the $875,000 Torma turned down in April.
Read
the
full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“A Fortunate Few”
San Francisco Chronicle, 08.27.06
For the price
of a bed and bath addition or a major remodeling project, a handful
of lucky families are becoming homeowners in the ultra-expensive
Bay Area. They owe their good fortune to three words: Habitat
for Humanity.
Read
the
full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Habitats Come in All Shapes and Sizes”
San Francisco Chronicle, 08.27.06
Never let
it be said that it’s too late to own your
own home in the Bay Area. Don Dibble, 64, never thought it
would happen for him. The Santa Cruz County resident earned
decent money as a union electrician, but with rising rents
and child support, Dibble said, he was always just “reading
water financially.”
Dibble took ownership of a new studio home in Santa Cruz where
he’ll pay a staggeringly small mortgage. He’s buying
the studio, located behind a single-family home near Highway
1, for between $60,000 and $75,000.
Read the
full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Exodus Starts at Clearview Court”
Santa Cruz Sentinel,
02.13.04
By the time you read this, all evidence of Deborah Turner’s existence at Clear View Court will be gone.
After six years, Turner’s single-wide mobile home was removed Thursday, on its way to storage as Turner looks for a new place to live.
It was the only solution Turner could find to the tripled
rents she and about 28 other residents of the low-income
park faced starting next month. Turner and the others in
the approximately 62-space park across the street from the
Coast Santa Cruz Hotel were the only residents not on rent
control.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Getting Legal: Tiny Garage Became Part of a
Neighborhood”
Santa Cruz Sentinel,
09.01.02
For more than 20 years, Norman Hartnett has lived in the little converted garage on Benito Avenue.
In that time, he’s seen a homeless man die of exposure next door and had his little patch of lawn turned into a junk yard.
But now Hartnett’s little converted garage is a one-bedroom
apartment. It is large enough that he’s taken the full-sized
bed out of storage, where it had been since he moved in.
And he has an actual closet instead of a box against the
wall.
And it’s all because one landlord took it upon himself
to fix the house, legalize the garage and improve the block.
Read the full article here.
Download a PDF of this article here.
“Million-Dollar Mania: More Local Homes Than
Ever Selling for Seven Figures”
Santa Cruz Sentinel,
08.25.02
This is not a story of numbers — though those numbers can be staggering. It is a story of how a quirky beach town changed because of a worldwide tech economy centered 20 miles away, because people realized the house they bought a half-century ago for $40,000 was now a gold mine, and because longtime residents put a few hundred thousand dollars into remodeling their homes and scored a $1 million profit.
And it’s a story of how these factors changed everything
in Santa Cruz, from who could afford to rent here to what
a starter home sells for.
Download a PDF of this article here.
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