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Lansner on Real Estate ~ The latest news about the housing market from Orange County Register columnist Jon Lansner.

Archive for the 'Top tale' Category

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Apartment owner’s pitch before collapse questioned

November 22nd, 2009, 1:00 pm by Jeff Collins
ppa-oppfund

Jebb Harris/The Register

An Irvine-based apartment investor offered to pay up to 30% in interest to investors just weeks before it suspended monthly payments on about $90 million.

Pacific Property Assets, which owns nearly 50 small to medium apartment buildings, ultimately ended up seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July.

But some of the firm’s investors now question its actions earlier in the year, when PPA, as it’s called, tried to raise cash for an “Opportunity Fund” so it could buy distressed properties at bargain prices.

Interest rates of 12% to 15% would be doubled for the first few months for those investing by April 30. On May 4, the company suspended interest payments to all its investors, including those investing in the Opportunity Fund.

Jebb Harris/The Register

Gene Stewart

“They cut everything off on April 30,” said investor Gene Stewart of Yorba Linda. “Then, all of a sudden on May 1, they were broke.”

But company CEO Michael Stewart, no relation to Gene, denied that the company knew it would halt interest payments to 674 investors at the time it was seeking a fresh infusion of cash.

“I can tell you unequivocally on a stack of Bibles that there’s no way that would have ever occurred,” Michael Stewart said. “We had absolutely no clue until minutes before the payments were suspended. And at that point, we stopped raising money.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: Commercial property • Top tale • • • | 8 Comments »

Realtor says short sales getting easier to do

November 19th, 2009, 2:41 pm by Jeff Collins

Vicki Cox Golder, the 2010 president of the National Association of Realtors, told reporters last week that short sales are getting easier because real estate agents now are better educated about the process.

For her complete comment, check out the video:

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Brightcove video.

The 1.2 million member trade group recently held its annual convention in San Diego starting Friday. At the meeting, Golder also said she that Realtors don’t have to do any soul searching about their role in the housing market bust that triggered the global economic meltdown.

More National Association of Realtors convention news:

Posted in: Distressed properties • Top tale • • | 16 Comments »

Broke actor’s O.C. cottage unsold at half off

November 18th, 2009, 9:30 pm by Jeff Collins
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Financially troubled actor Nicolas Cage’s 1913 cottage — just steps from the Newport Pier on the Balboa Peninsula — has been pulled off the market after he dropped the price three times, down from $1.9 million to $995,000.

Cage’s real estate trust paid $1.7 million for the home in December 2006, county records show.

The most recent price cut occurred Nov. 12, according to Redfin. Less than one week later, however, one of the home’s listing agents said that the house was off the market because it had been rented out. A neighbor said the home was still vacant on Wednesday.

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The actor’s late father, literature professor August Coppola, had been living in the home. Coppola, brother of “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola, died three weeks ago in Newport Beach of a heart attack. The home’s neighbor said he moved out sometime since the house went on the market in July.

According to the property listing, the one-story cottage, located about six doors from the sand, has 1,500 square feet, with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, “high-vaulted ceilings, a granite kitchen with maple cabinetry, all the best appliances … beautifully tiled bathrooms, attached to each of the three bedrooms (and) bamboo and tile flooring throughout.”

The front porch is adorned with saloon-style doors, stain-glass with artificial bunches of grapes suspended from the rafters.

  • Click on photos above to enlarge. For interior photos, CLICK HERE!

The listing described the home this way:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: Celebrity homes • Luxury homes • Top tale • • • | 49 Comments »

LA Times real estate blog folds

November 18th, 2009, 1:50 pm by Jon Lansner

screen-shot-2009-11-18-at-11400-pmThe “LA Land” real estate blog from our pals at the Los Angeles Times is no more. It’s a victim,so to speak, of a consolidation strategy where most business content will appear in one giant financial blog. LA Land’s last post reads …

LA Land has moved to a bigger, brighter, newer home. You can now find it in our Money & Company blog. You will still be able to find all the real estate news, foreclosures, and Hot Property pieces, but now in our uber-business blog.

  • Says my old pal, Russ Stanton, editor of the Los Angeles Times …

We aren’t killing it, we’re merging with other business-related blogs. It’s a strategy that we have had a great deal of success with, gang blogging (see LA Now, Fabulous Forum or Hero Complex, named best blog at Online News Association this year). Three years ago, with a bunch of single-author blogs, only 4% of our site traffic came from our blogosphere. Today, it’s 20%.

  • One comment on the final LA Land post seemed most special:

I’ll miss you LALand. You were a great blog and I’ll definitely miss the musings of Pete, Pete, Lauren, Beef, Nelciso,Cal, and even Lefty. It is funny how, just like real folks during the recession, LALand is going to be bunking with friends (Petruno) to cut costs. Farewell.

The latest Los Angeles Times blog to fade away is L.A. Land, which never seemed to quite recover its mojo from last year’s departure of originator Peter Viles. When real estate reporter Peter Hong left the paper last month on a buyout, the blog became less necessary. Now what’s left of the real estate news and observations has been folded into Money and Company, the main blog produced by the paper’s business writers. … Back in April, based on these stats, L.A. Land was doing way better than most Times blogs.

If you were a boss at The Register, you would ...
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Just so you know, we at The Register are still very committed to real estate blogging. Outside of this one, have you checked out our portfolio recently?

Mortgage Insider by Matt Padilla:

Huntington Homes by Marilyn Kalfus:

South Coast Homes by Kelli Hart:

Irvine Homes by Erika Chavez:

Posted in: Media & Real Estate • Top tale • • | 28 Comments »

Housing debacle hits 4th anniversary

November 17th, 2009, 2:18 pm by Jeff Collins

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This month marks the fourth year since the discovery of what turned out to be the latest housing slump — the one that triggered the worst recession since the Great Depression.

October 2005 was the first month when total homes sold in Orange County and California fell from year-before levels. Similar annual sales drops continued month-in, month-out for the next 2 3/4 years locally.

The Great Recession that followed reads like a slow-moving catastrophe: Subprime lenders collapsed as defaults and foreclosures soared, followed by the global credit crunch, the collapse of Wall Street mortgage traders and hedge funds, the federal takeover of government-sponsored lending agencies and finally massive layoffs and the stock market crash.

Many economists now say that the slump has ended and recovery has begun. Some Realtors, commentators and many readers on this blog say pronouncements of the slump’s demise are premature.

There have been three major housing slumps since the early 1980s (click on chart to enlarge). Our analysis of California housing data back to 1979 and Orange County data back to 1988 shows that each major slump is spaced roughly five to 10 years apart.

This latest slump turned out to be the most severe and shortest of modern slumps on record. It hit swiftly, lasted just three years, induced the steepest price drop in 30 years of housing data, then — some say — began a slow turnaround early this year.

It took 21 months for price drops to take hold after sales first slumped. Such denial is typical of recent slumps. It took three years for the first annual price drop to appear in California after sales slumped in January 1980. It took a year in the early ’90s

Based on monthly housing data from the California Association of Realtors and MDA DataQuick, here’s a synopsis of key milestones from the last three major housing slumps: the early 1980s, the early 1990s and the Great Recession: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: Meltdown • Seeking a bottom • Selling patterns • Top tale • • | 25 Comments »

Most likely to cut home price? Try Newport!

November 17th, 2009, 12:01 am by Marilyn Kalfus, real estate reporter

The Balboa island and peninsula areas of Newport Beach this month emerge as the Orange County communities with the most home price reductions – each with 41% of the listings there reduced, according to Trulia.com.

Another Newport area community — Corona del Mar — came in 4th, with 37% of asking prices cut.  Of the top 5 places in the county with discounts, Irvine is the only inland one, with 36%.

In Orange County overall, price reductions have slightly lessened in the past 6 months; As of Nov. 1, 25.1% of listings had price cuts, compared to 26.7% in Oct., 26.8% in September, 29% in August, 28.6 in July and 30.1% in June.

Around the country, 25.6% of homes currently on the market as of Nov. 1 had at least 1 price cut during the past 12 months. The average discount for price-reduced homes continues to hold steady at 10% off of the original listing price, according to Trulia.

Here’s how the ratio of price cuts in the regions shape up:

  • Northeast: 29%
  • Midwest: 28%
  • West: 25%
  • South: 24%

Please note the list of Orange County price reductions, by town: Share of homes with cuts; average size of cut; average price after cut. If your favorite ZIP is not included, it’s because there were not enough listings to qualify for this report … Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: Top tale • • | 29 Comments »

Why would LinkedIn link up with Twitter?

November 15th, 2009, 9:31 am by Jon Lansner

sslinkedinLinkedIn, the social networking tool with a decidedly corporate edge, has crafted an alliance with pop culture’s Twitter that allows tweets to easily appear (by “hasthag,” for you tweeps!) on LinkedIn pages. sOCial sunday wondered why, so we “twinterviewed” Neal Schaffer (@nealschaffer) — Orange County social media strategist and author of the new book, “Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn” As can happen with Twitter interviews, the public chimed in. Here’s an lightly edited transcript …

Us: yo @NealSchaffer. Twitter and LinkedIn hook up http://j.mp/ZJQk. what do u think?
Neal: @jonlan Twitter positioning themselves as a professional site, LinkedIn wanting to gain more traction, perfect match to combat Facebook, no?
Us: @NealSchaffer Isn’t LinkedIn the “professional site” … so will this make it less so?
Neal: @jonlan People updating LinkedIn w/ every Tweet already using Ping.fm. LinkedIn tie up will accelerate Twitter becoming professional app.

@TopBrokerOC … @NealSchaffer Still not sure that I want all my tweets on my LinkedIn profile……maybe I am missing something. @jonlan
Neal: @jonlan Companies are already using both LinkedIn and Twitter for many reasons, so this announcement is probably only the beginning…
Neal: @jonlan And over time professionals become more savvy with Twitter, so it allows them to share dynamic information with LinkedIn network.
@topbrokeroc … @NealSchaffer Still not sure that I want all my tweets on my LinkedIn profile……maybe I am missing something. @jonlan
@cfleury … Heck Yeah! @NealSchaffer: @TopBrokerOC @jonlan …a tweet w/ certain hashtag can be integrated into another web app is significant, no?
Neal: @jonlan I think it’s a total win-win…but I’d like to see LinkedIn give us the option of turning OFF status update of people who abuse it!
Neal: @TopBrokerOC @jonlan No need to put your tweets on your LinkedIn profile if you don’t want to…I don’t either. But it opens up potential.
Neal: @TopBrokerOC @jonlan The fact that a tweet w/ certain hashtag can now be integrated into another web application is pretty significant, no?
Neal: @cfleury The Twitter hashtag integration with web apps. potential is EXTREMELY significant for corporations as you can imagine!

Us: @NealSchaffer Hashtag-2-app is pretty cool … certainaly a threat 2 the aggregators! But would it hur t LinkedIn’s high gloss?
Neal: @jonlan I agree w/ @Mashable’s view on potential for business intelligence: http://bit.ly/4DIHcD
Us: Hmmn! @Mashable guesses Twitter could “provide real-time updates from CEOs, employees of companies on LinkedIn.”
Neal: @jonlan Yes, Twitter gains by becoming a professional platform to compete with FB/FriendFeed.
Neal: @jonlan It’s all very futursitic but the potential is there. For the short-term I really don’t see much of a huge affect to be honest.

READ Neal’s full take on this alliance at HIS BLOG HERE!

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[ Social media tips by email? CLICK HERE! ]

Posted in: Top tale • • • | 2 Comments »

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