New Rental Townhome Development in Santa Clarita
SANTA CLARITA, Calif., Apr 05, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Archstone, a leader in apartment investment and operations, today announced that it has begun construction on a brand-new rental townhome development in Santa Clarita in a joint venture with Resmark Apartment Living, a division of The Resmark Companies, a full-service real estate investment advisor.
A groundbreaking ceremony was held on site today to unveil the plans for the 157-unit townhome community located at the corner of Lost Canyon Rd. and Via Princessa on the 12.49 acre site. The site is situated within a short commute of major employment centers in the San Fernando Valley and the greater Los Angeles Area. Archstone expects first units to be available in spring 2013.
“We are excited to partner with Resmark, a well-respected organization, to begin the development of another high-quality community in our largest market — Southern California,” said Neil Brown, Archstone’s chief development officer. “As one of the largest owners and operators in the market, we believe Archstone Santa Clarita will be an excellent addition to the 55 communities and 18,570 units we already own and/or operate there.”
Ziv Cohen, Chief Operating Officer at Resmark Apartment Living, added: “Resmark is pleased to partner with a developer as highly regarded as Archstone on this unique community, which will be an attractive addition to the Santa Clarita market. We look forward to working with Archstone in creating what we believe will become one of the area’s premier apartment destinations.”
Archstone Santa Clarita offers direct access to State Route 14, which connects to Interstate 5, for a short commute to Los Angeles. Within a mile of the community is the Via Princessa Metrolink Station, which provides service to the San Fernando Valley and Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.
In addition to its proximity to the greater Los Angeles area, Archstone Santa Clarita will offer easy access to one of the strongest job markets in Los Angeles County, the Santa Clarita Valley. The area is home to professional employers in film production, aerospace, manufacturing, biomedical research and high tech.
“The strong job market in the Valley and in the Los Angeles area has helped create greater demand for quality rental housing in Santa Clarita,” said Richard E. Lamprecht, Archstone’s executive vice president of development for the West Region. “We expect Archstone Santa Clarita to be perfectly positioned to capture that demand because of its access to commuter-friendly transportation options and the many thriving employers in the city.”
The community will also be within a short drive of popular shopping options at the recently developed Plaza Country at Golden Valley shopping center, which features Target, Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Staples and Bed Bath & Beyond. It is also within two miles of Ralphs, Albertsons, Stater Bros. and Costco, in addition to numerous restaurants and local shops.
While at home, residents will have access to a number of unique amenities, including a resort-style pool, spa and Yoga lawn. Also available to residents will be a club lounge, business center, fitness room, barbecue area and playgrounds.
Each of the 3-bed, 2.5 bath townhomes will feature 2-car garages and high-end finishes. The kitchens will feature European-style, flat panel cabinets, stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. Select townhomes will offer mountain views, an over-sized patio with outdoor fireplace and a second private patio.
About Archstone
Archstone is a recognized leader in apartment investment and operations. The company’s portfolio is concentrated in many of the most desirable neighborhoods in and around Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Boston. Archstone strives to provide great apartment rentals and great service to its customers—backed by service guarantees. As of December 31, 2011, the company owned or had an ownership position in 432 communities located in the United States and Europe, representing 72,996 units, including units under construction.
About Resmark
Founded in 1995, Resmark is a leading national private equity firm focused on real estate and powered by core foundational discipline and focus. A fully integrated real estate investment group, The Resmark Companies’ divisions—Resmark Land and Housing, Resmark Apartment Living and Resmark Shopping Centers—finance, acquire, develop and manage real estate in California and the Western United States and other select major metropolitan markets nationwide. Headquartered in Los Angeles, Resmark also maintains corporate offices in San Diego and La Jolla. For additional information, please visit www.resmark.com .
SOURCE: Archstone
Copyright Business Wire 2012
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/archstone-breaks-ground-on-rental-townhome-development-in-santa-clarita-2012-04-05
do NOT buy a short sale!!
http://www.SuessSays.com
Do NOT buy a short sale until you’ve watched this first!
There is so much conflicting information floating around out there about short sales. It’s time to separate fact from fiction.
Fiction: You’ll get an incredible deal.
Fact: Think again. Unless the home has some serious issues, you’ll more than likely pay fair market value or close to it, just as you would with a standard sale. Of course, there are exceptions - but every short sale has a BPO (Broker Price Opinion) completed, which determines fair market value for that particular home. Banks typically want as much for the property as possible and usually won’t settle for much less than this appraised value. It’s not uncommon to see a BPO come back at a price even higher than fair market value. Buyers are always shocked to receive a counter offer back for tens of thousands of dollars higher than their original offering price and higher than the listing price - after six months or more of waiting for a response! If you are waiting for months or even years hoping for a short sale to get approved at an incredibly low price, you may be missing out on the real deals that exist in the marketplace.
Fiction: You can handle the process.
Fact: You will be emotionally exhausted. A short sale transaction without the right agent will involve many emotional peaks and valleys. The thing to remember is that the bank calls the shots, not anyone else. With months of waiting with no updates and no responses from the bank, the process often becomes too overwhelming for most to bear - and causes the value of the home to diminish. Couple that with the uncertainty of the questions you most likely have: Will you get the home at a fair price? When will you move in? What happens if another six months passes by and you still have no answer?
Fiction: The short sale process is entirely predictable.
Fact: Even the most seasoned agent has not seen it all when it comes to short sales. It really boils down to who the listing agent (agent representing the seller) is, how experienced they are with handling short sales, and who the lenders (banks) are behind the short sale. Although it’s never 100 percent predictable, an experienced agent will help ensure a more predictable, streamlined process with a much better result. If you are thinking of submitting an offer on a short sale where the listing agent is inexperienced, get ready for many unexpected surprises!
Fiction: Thinking you are ready to take this on.
Fact: If this hasn’t completely scared you away from wanting to purchase a short sale, then maybe you are ready! You’ve come this far so make sure you sit down and form a solid plan of action with an experienced real estate agent who can properly guide you away from the pitfalls of the process. Many short sales get rejected by the banks due to the seller not qualifying because of a lack of financial hardship, or because of incomplete short sale package paperwork from the listing agent. A savvy agent working on your behalf will know to do their preliminary homework by qualifying the short sale to ensure there is a valid hardship with the seller and that the listing agent knows what they’re doing.
My advice to you is buckle in for the ride and stay 100% committed to the process.
Joshua Suess is with Suess Real Estate Experts II 661.251.8900 II http://www.SuessTeam.com
Crunch the numbers for your home at http://www.ShortSaleOnAHome.com
Having trouble paying your mortgage?
Courtesy of Joshua Suess with RE/MAX Olson - CA Lic.# 01334330 - 661.251.8900
Home Prices Ready to Rebound
After falling 34% over the past six years, U.S. home prices will soon bottom. They could turn back up by spring 2013.
It hit with the ferocity of an Old Testament plague, wiping out large populations of homeowners in the U.S. Five million of the country’s 76 million mortgage holders have lost their homes to foreclosure or lender-ordered short sales since 2006, and an estimated 14 million more owe more on their homes than their properties are currently worth. In all, some $7.4 trillion in homeowners’ equity has been destroyed, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, and more than two million jobs in the home-building industry disappeared.
At year end 2011, the S&P/Case-Shiller National U.S. Home Price Index fell to a record low, 33.8% below the boom peak level, recorded in 2006’s second quarter. The descent has been all the more hideous in such once-manic markets as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Miami, which, according to the Case-Shiller 20-City Composite Index, have fallen 61%, 55% and 51%, respectively, from their high-water marks.
Everyone has shared the pain. The negative wealth effect from the price decline both contributed to the virulence of the Great Recession and crimped the subsequent recovery.
Everyone has shared the pain. The negative wealth effect from the home-price decline contributed to the virulence of the Great Recession.
Yet as grim as these year-end readings appear to be, there are signs that the long nightmare for American homeowners is in its terminal stage, and that, maybe, just maybe, home prices will bottom and begin to turn by the spring of 2013—if not before. Certainly, the economy is doing better these days—the sine qua non for improved demand for housing. Jobs numbers have been up sharply three months in a row, leading to a jump in consumer confidence of late.
The near-record low in mortgage rates and concomitant slide in home prices has made houses and condos stunningly affordable (although stiff underwriting standards have made getting home loans more difficult). This is captured in the National Association of Realtors Housing Affordability Index, which measures how much purchasing power a median-income family needs in order to buy a median-priced home, using conventional mortgage financing.
This measure stood at 206 in January, which meant that the typical family has more than double the income needed to purchase an average home. That reading is more than twice the 102.7 at the peak of the bubble in July 2006.
MUCH OF THE HOME-PRICE DECLINE in the past six years has been fueled by the distress sales of foreclosed properties, which typically sell at discounts of 30% or more to dwellings in the conventional sales market. Distressed sales, along with vacant houses and condos awaiting a sale, trash property values for all the other homes in the immediate area.
These forced sales have weighed heavily on overall market prices that are typically reported on a metropolitan-area basis that includes cities, surrounding communities and exurbs, which are a good distance from downtown. Within many metropolitan statistical areas, a bifurcated market has developed in which a pricing recovery already is under way in communities and neighborhoods far from the areas still reeling from past excesses of subprime mortgages and predatory lending.
This phenomenon is showing up in the statistical service CoreLogic’s Home Price Index, which nicely separates distressed from nondistressed sales. Indeed, for all of 2011, prices fell 4.7% nationally from the previous year’s level. Excluding distressed sales, however, home prices dropped just 0.9%.
Absolutely, in the opinion of Karl Case, professor emeritus at Wellesley College and one of the progenitors of the Case-Shiller indexes, launched in 2002. “If you drill down in the numbers by zip code in the Boston area, as I have done, you find that more desirable, affluent neighborhoods like Back Bay and Beacon Hill are doing just fine now—while, say, Fall River is still in the dumps and dragging down the entire Boston Metro area,” he asserts.
This bifurcated market is seen all across the country. While the Nob Hill neighborhood in San Francisco never saw values drop drastically and is now recovering nicely, Stockton, Calif., remains in the dumps. It’s a tale of two cities elsewhere, too. The Santa Monica real-estate market is doing fine, while the desert towns to the east are still suffering. And, in the Miami environs, South Beach is strengthening; Hialeah, Fla., isn’t.
Then there are areas that have been so depressed that the only direction now seems to be up.
In fact, woebegone Detroit was the only place in the latest Case-Shiller National Index to show an annual increase for December. True, the price increase was a skimpy 0.5%, but that was lots better than the 12.8% slide notched by the Atlanta area for 2011. And the only two metro areas that showed month-over-month gains in December were Miami, up 0.2%, and Phoenix, up 0.8%.
TO BE SURE, PLENTY OF headwinds remain for home sales. Unlike the stock market, home prices display much long-term momentum and inertia. Prices, all other factors being equal, tend to move in their past direction, and lenders, chastened by recent experience, remain tight with mortgage credit. Going through the home-loan application process these days is like undergoing a financial colonoscopy. In contrast, during the salad years of the housing boom, banks were shoving money at borrowers, with few questions asked.
The biggest impediment to a turn in the home market remains the so-called shadow inventory of some 3.671 million homes, according to estimates by Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics: those that remain somewhere in the foreclosure pipeline. Payments on some are 90-plus days delinquent; others are already lender-owned properties, known as REOs (real estate owned), that haven’t yet been listed for sale.
Source: Barron’s Cover - By JONATHAN R. LAING
Please take a moment out of your day to try out the Short or Stay Calculator.
Being able to see the current market value of your home and projecting when your investment will break-even and become an asset again is invaluable to your decision making process. With the Short or Stay Calculator you’ll be able to do so in a matter of minutes.
When you go to the above URL you will see the following:
- Step 1: Your Property Information – enter your property’s address information.
- Step 2: Your Mortgage – provide some basic mortgage information such as your balance and interest rate. NOTE: Your information is closely guarded and never sold.
- Step 3: Your Information – supply your email address to receive an email that has your Short or Stay Calculator results.
That’s it. It’s that simple!
Which Line is for the $2,000 Payment?
Which Line is for the $2,000 Payment?
In February, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced the unprecedented $25 billion national mortgage settlement with the five largest banks in the US. One of the provisions of the settlement is a $2,000 payment to homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure.
A month later, people are asking, “When am I going to get my check?”
The answer is, “It depends.”
One thing is for certain. It won’t be this week or this month. It will take up to two months to select an administrator and six to nine months to actually get the ball rolling.
Then you have to meet a few other requirements.
- Did Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo or Ally Financial service your loan? If so, good, because the settlement only applies to them. But even then, you’ll only qualify if your loan was NOT a government-backed mortgage (such as FHA, VA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans), and which account for over half of home mortgages.
- Did you lose your house between Jan 1, 2008 and Dec 31, 2011? If so, good, because the settlement only covers those four years. (This period is for when the house went back to the bank or an investor, not the loan origination date, as some reports indicate.)
- Are you feeling lucky? The $1.5 billion set aside for these payments will cover 750,000 borrowers. We have no numbers on how many foreclosures these five lenders completed from 2008 to 2011, but there were roughly 3.8 million foreclosure sales during that period, over five times as many as will receive payments.
According to the national mortgage settlement site, eligible borrowers will be contacted. Given that everyone who is entitled to these checks has lost their home and have now moved, it will be interesting to see if they can actually find you. Hopefully you filled out a Change of Address with the US Postal Service.
Other provisions of the settlement include:
- $3 billion for refinancing lower interest rates for homeowners who are current on their payments but are underwater on their loan.
- $17 billion for principal reduction and short sale assistance for homeowners who are in default.
While this “unprecedented” settlement will certainly help a few individuals, it is, as we’ve said before, an absolutely meaningless amount of money when compared to the $4 Trillion in excess mortgage debt that created during the credit bubble.
Source: ForeclosureTruth.com By Michelle Lenahan
Short Sale Your Home or Stay?
Thinking of a Short Sale? Or Tough it Out?
Many homeowners are asking themselves a very difficult question, “Do I short sale my home or stay and tough it out?” To make the best decision for you, your family, and your future, it is important to have all of the information in front of you. Because the consequences of this decision are very often unknown, we’ve created a tool to give a glimpse at the potential future based on your decision to short sale or stay and tough it out. Please, check out our Short or Stay Calculator. Click on the start button below to get started!
It’s a short, easy process to give you an idea when your home will become an asset again. Simply enter the following information…
- Your Property Information
- Mortgage Information
- Your e-Mail Address.
The results are emailed to you almost instantly! That’s it! It’s that simple! It’s such a relief to be able to see the current market value of your home. Plus, being able to project when your investment will break-even to become an asset again is invaluable to your decision making process.
If this basic information is leading you to consider a short sale, please contact us today at 661-251-8900. We can discuss all of your options and even refer you to other resources. Thank you.
National Housing Report provided as a courtesy by Suess Real Estate Experts. Selling Santa Clarita homes.
Can you guess the final sales price on this luxury Santa Clarita estate home?
Click the play button below and turn your volume up to enjoy the tour!
