Also, Congress pares tax credits for energy-saving home renovations, the mortgage industry shrinks, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are more likely to foreclose than modify home loans.
My notebook runneth over. Sightings from the real estate landscape:
•Still going green. Impaired as it has been by the economy, the home-building industry nonetheless has been making a fair amount of noise in the last couple of years about efforts to be more environmentally friendly.
But it has a long way to go, according to a new report from Calvert Investments, a Bethesda, Md., company that specializes in sustainable and socially responsible investing. Calvert compiled a ranking of sustainability practices at the top 10 publicly held home-building firms, and despite giving a couple of builders a shout-out for their improved performances, the investment firm still flunked them. With a possible overall score of 42, the average builder scored just over 6 points.
Where the builders are making strides is in the areas of energy- and water-conservation aspects of the homes they're constructing, as well as building material recycling, Calvert reported.
The report did single out Westwood-based KB Home for being the only national builder to produce a comprehensive "sustainability report" for consumers. It said that without the efforts of KB Home and Pulte Homes, "the overall analytical performance of the industry in our study would have been far worse."
• Vanishing acts. The mortgage industry is eroding faster than the polar ice caps. The number of people employed in some aspect of the home loan business was more than half a million in the fall of 2005, at the peak of the real estate boom. Today that number has shrunk by half, according to MortgageDaily.com, a trade publication. The numbers are still falling. Although some lenders and affiliated businesses were hiring in the third quarter, the industry saw a net loss of more than 900 workers in that period.
• Who's hot and not. When interest rates started climbing in November, first-time home buyers got off that proverbial fence.
The share of first-timers buying homes that month climbed to about 37%, from 34% in October, according to the Campbell Surveys' monthly HousingPulse poll of 3,000 real estate agents.
On the other hand, investors apparently decided that the rising finance costs were making the game too pricey for them, according to the survey, which also cited agents' field reports of investors backing out of deals because of fears that home values would continue to fall.
The survey said investor activity amounted to about 20% of all purchase transactions in November, down from more than 22% in September.
posted on Twitter by @Agentopolis
by Mary Umberger, The Chicago Tribune (published in the Los Angeles Times)
http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-umberger-20110123,0,7013624.story