Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
Ten years after the housing collapse during the Great Recession, a new and different housing crisis has emerged.
Back then, people were losing their homes as home values crashed and homeowners went underwater. Today, home values have rebounded, but people who want to buy a new home are often priced out of the market. There are too few homes and too many potential buyers.
— NPR
NPR takes a closer look at the impact of the housing affordability crisis in midsized, fast-growing cities, like Des Moines, IA, Durham, NC, and Boise, ID—far away from the usual, well documented housing hot spots of the big coastal cities. View full entry
Discovery Inc.'s HGTV network has won the bidding for the California house that served as the exterior for the home of the family in The Brady Bunch, Discovery CEO David Zaslav said Tuesday.
"I am excited to share that HGTV is the winning bidder and will restore the Brady Bunch home to its 1970s glory as only HGTV can," he said on the company's second-quarter earnings conference call [...].
— Hollywood Reporter
The midcentury house in Studio City, CA served as the make-believe exterior of the Brady TV family's home from 1969 to 1974. It was listed for $1.885M last month, and for a brief moment it appeared that 'N Sync star Lance Bass had placed the winning bid—only to wake up to the news that... View full entry
Neighborhoods with high vacancy rates rarely recover, according to the study. Vacancy is “first and foremost a symptom of other problems — concentrated poverty, economic decline, and market failure,” the study notes. That means the solutions must go beyond just tearing abandoned buildings down. The study urges local governments to use tools like “spot blight” eminent domain, vacant property receivership, and land-banking to speed up the transition from owner to owner. — CityLab
CityLab editor-at-large Richard Florida summarizes a new report by Alan Mallach of the Center for Community Progress about the increase of vacant properties and hypervacancy in cities across the U.S. in recent decades — another worrying aspect of the American housing crisis. The report assesses... View full entry
Now on the market for the first time since 1973 is the Studio City residence known the world over as the Brady Bunch house. Built in 1959, the property was discovered by location scouts a decade later and appeared in every episode of the hit TV show except the first. [...]
Sited on a .29-acre lot that abuts the LA River, the cultural icon is listed with an asking price of $1.885 million. Due to the intense interest expected, no open houses will be scheduled.
— Curbed LA
Curbed LA quotes the show's creator, Sherwood Schwartz, explaining in an 1994 interview why this particular house was chosen for the Brady Bunch exterior shots from 1969 to 1974: "We didn’t want it to be too affluent, we didn’t want it to be too blue-collar. We wanted it to look like it would... View full entry
Whether these new apartment buildings can endure another major storm does not seem to be a concern for most residents, who are glad to have new options in inventory-starved markets. Critics, though, ask whether the neighborhoods can withstand the surge of new development and the stress it will add to an already strained infrastructure. These new buildings might remain unscathed in a flood, they say, but what about the damage caused by the torrent around them? — The New York Times
Perhaps it’s not a surprise in a city where residential prices can reach into the stratosphere, but in Los Angeles, more than 17 percent of all homes are valued at over $1 million.
What may be more shocking is that L.A. doesn’t have the highest share of million-dollar homes. [...]
San Jose and San Francisco were No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. In San Jose, homes valued over $1 million made up 53 percent of the market. San Francisco’s million-dollar-share was at 40 percent.
— The Real Deal
Other major cities ranked in the new LendingTree survey are New York (4th place with 12 percent market share), Miami (9th, 4 percent), and Chicago (18th, 1.3 percent). View full entry
Located in Los Feliz, the 5,500-square-foot house was built from 27,000 concrete blocks, with some blocks featuring intricate geometric patterns. [...] Ron Burkle purchased the home from the nonprofit Ennis House Foundation for $4.5 million in 2011, property records show. After purchasing, he then restored it, adding an extra $10 million to improve the home after it had suffered major damage from a previous earthquake and heavy rains. — The Real Deal
The architect behind 53 West 53rd wanted the tower to be synonymous with New York City, to be a building that couldn’t easily be slipped into another skyline.
“A worldwide catastrophe today is the number of buildings that are parachuted because they were preconceived. Offices, housing, shopping malls all look the same,” Jean Nouvel told The Real Deal, translated from French.
— The Real Deal
Mini video interview with 53W53 'MoMA Tower' architect Jean Nouvel, produced by The Real Deal. 53W53: Jean Nouvel's "New York" Building. Video via The Real Deal on YouTube.The 1,050-foot luxury tower topped out a few days ago and ranks now—along with Renzo Piano/FXFOWLE's New York Times... View full entry
Hong Kong is the world's most expensive real estate market, which helps explain why the world's most expensive parking spot just sold there for the equivalent of $760,000 USD. And no, despite the enormous price tag, the parking spot doesn't come with an apartment included, or anything particularly... View full entry
A Crunchbase News analysis of residential-focused real estate startups uncovered a raft of companies with a shared and temporary housing focus that have raised funding in the past year or so.
This isn’t a U.S.-specific phenomenon. Funded shared and short-term housing startups are cropping up across the globe, from China to Europe to Southeast Asia.
— TechCrunch
Crunchbase reporter Joanna Glasner takes a look at the new crop of shared and short-term housing startups that have recently raised millions of dollars in funding, such as Common, Starcity, Roomi, Ollie, HubHaus, and others. View full entry
As seas rise and coasts wash away, who owns the land that goes underwater? Versions of that debate are taking place in courtrooms, legislatures, and government offices, raising the question of whether and when climate change justifies seizing private property. The stakes are enormous, affecting not just ownership of offshore mineral and fishing rights but also potentially trillions of dollars of coastal real estate. — bloomberg.com
Climate change has left many rules governing real estate ownership murky. As sea levels rise this especially affects coastal property and laws hinging on high-tide lines. View full entry
A homeowner in a housing complex in London with Grenfell-type cladding has been told the value of her £475,000 home has collapsed and is now just £50,000.
Galliard Homes, the developer of the 11-block complex in New Capital Quay in south-east London, is facing a £30m-£40m bill to replace the cladding and is locked in a legal dispute over who should pay.
— The Guardian
The New Capital Quay development—home to about 2,000 residents—is believed to be the largest private development to have flammable cladding after the 2017 Grenfell fire tragedy that killed 71 people, The Guardian reports. The apartments are now considered unsellable. View full entry
Last December, plans were unfurled for 130 William, a reverential new skyscraper to jostle amongst the spired giants of lower Manhattan.
[...] we can note that the project has achieved two small construction milestones in its journey against the sky: crews have reached street level and standing upright is a red kangaroo crane that will bring the rectangular tower to its full 66-floor, nearly 800-foot-tall summit.
— CityRealty
Rendering courtesy of Lightstone.Fully revealed only a few weeks ago, the Lightstone-developed, Adjaye Associates-designed 800-foot luxury condo tower is already making construction progress with its crane fully installed and prepared to stack 66 floors wrapped in a hand-cast concrete facade with... View full entry
Ford Motor Co. is in discussions to purchase the dilapidated Michigan Central Station in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood just outside of downtown, Crain's has learned from multiple sources familiar with the negotiations. — Crain's Detroit Business
"A redevelopment of the depot, which has been abandoned and blighted for three decades since Amtrak stopped service in 1988, would be one of the most expensive and complex local undertakings in recent history," Crain's reports. View full entry
[...] the value of the average Japanese house depreciates to zero in 22 years. (It is calculated separately from the land, which is more likely to hold its value.) Most are knocked down and rebuilt. Sales of new homes far outstrip those of used ones, which usually change hands in the expectation that they will be demolished and replaced. In America and Europe second-hand houses accounted for 90% of sales and new-builds for 10% in 2017. In Japan the proportions are the other way around. — The Economist
The Economist article describes Japan’s throwaway housing culture as a phenomenon that is not only a burden on the national economy and the environment but also does not see renovation and refurbishment of existing structures as an appreciation in value. There are exceptions of course: one rare... View full entry