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I am in Reno today, Spokane tomorrow, but I spent much of last week in Chicago which is very much a melting pot of languages. One can walk down the street and hear similar words for the same thing: Hypothèque (French), hipoteca (Spanish), hipotēka (Latvian), hypotheek (Dutch), and hypothek (German). You’ll have to figure out the word on your own. Renovation there is indicative of what is happening in many other cities: Developers and city agencies in Chicago are working together on the LaSalle Street initiative, which seeks to bring 1,000 homes (including 300 affordable ones) to a mostly shuttered stretch of the city’s financial district. With plenty of people still content to work from home, living in a converted empty office may be the answer to the housing crisis in many areas. (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s is sponsored by the STRATMOR Group, the data-driven mortgage advisory. At STRATMOR, insights and knowledge are app ....
As noted in yesterday’s commentary, mergers and acquisitions of lenders are in the news across the nation. For curious lenders, it is good to have a general guide in how a buyer goes about valuing a lender. I happen to be in rainy Chicago now, but 1,700 miles away, there’s interesting news from the Phoenix area and the desert. How would you appraise a perfectly fine home that had no water? Rio Verde, aptly named Green River, a neighborhood outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, with some 2,000 homes, recently learned that there is not a stable water supply. The 1980s Groundwater Management Act required that in order for a development six lots or larger to proceed in Arizona, it had to secure a 100-year supply of water. The Rio Verde Foothills developers kept splitting parcels into four to five lots, putting them under the six-lot minimum that applied to the law and avoiding that requirement. About 30 percent of the residents now face a dramatic change in price as the city has cu ....
Fun with numbers! 1: the number of Chinese surveillance balloons over Montana. (That we know of.) Did you know that the last day of 2023 is 123123? (You heard it here first!) While we’re on random numbers, Atlanta has almost 25 thousand surveillance cameras, grabbing the honors as the most heavily surveilled city in the U.S. with 50 CCTV cameras for every 1,000 inhabitants. (“The research also suggests that there is little correlation between higher camera figures and lower crime indexes.”) Shifting to mortgage-related numbers, given the Fed news this week, overnight interest rates aren’t the same as 30-year mortgage rates, of course, but moves in interest rates impact a potential borrower’s ability to buy a home in a given price range. Here’s a handy-dandy chart for LOs to help borrowers to see how rates impact affordability. With generic rates in the 6’s for home loans, LOs are keenly interested in how that compares to, say, student lo ....