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Jeff Ostrowski
January 20, 2009
When I talked to Palm Beach billionaire Wilbur Ross last week about his deal to buy most of First Bank & Trust Co. of ...
The one-two punch of the recession and the housing meltdown continued to batter Palm Beach County commercial real estate ...
January 15, 2009
Foreclosure filings rose 133 percent in Florida, 96 percent in Palm Beach County and 81 percent nationwide from 2007 to 2008, ...
January 14, 2009
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The housing downturn is killing most homebuilders, but privately held GL Homes keeps buying land and selling homes. Its Valencia ...
January 9, 2009
For two years now, we heard speculation that vulture investors were circling West Palm Beach’s overbuilt condo market, ...
January 8, 2009
Southeastern consumers are unusually sour about the economy, according to RBC Bank’s Consumer Attitudes and Spending ...
Macy’s Inc. said this morning it will close its 190,000-square-foot store at the struggling Palm Beach Mall on Palm ...
January 7, 2009
In a sign that bargain hunters are taking advantage of West Palm Beach’s condo glut, the head of a large Pennsylvania-based ...
January 6, 2009
Not-so-Happy New Year: 2009 and 2010 will be tough years for Palm Beach County’s housing market, predicts Attorneys’ ...
January 5, 2009
I went to the Yard House at Downtown at the Gardens on Saturday night, and the place was packed. The Whole Foods Market ...
CB Richard Ellis paid $67.55 million for the Esperante Building in downtown West Palm Beach, according to a deed filed today. ...
December 31, 2008
Among Palm Beach County’s publicly traded companies, there was one big winner and a lot of big losers in 2008. The ...
December 29, 2008
Battered by the housing downturn, the developer of Tesoro, a high-end community in Port St. Lucie, has filed for bankruptcy ...
December 27, 2008
With its curved staircases, intricate ceilings and tile, massive closets and wine cellar, not to mention its $15 million ...
December 24, 2008
From today’s University of Florida’s monthly consumer confidence report: Consumer confidence among Floridians ...
December 23, 2008
Palm Beach County home prices continued to plunge in November, falling to their lowest level since 2003, the Florida Association ...
December 19, 2008
Cleaning up the Madoff mess will take years. Any money recovered by victims won’t arrive for a long time, but Bernard ...
Normally, Florida’s jobless rate falls in November as the holiday hiring season gears up. But, as President Bush said ...
December 18, 2008
We’re still two weeks away from the end of 2008, but here’s the Google map of Palm Beach County’s biggest ...
December 17, 2008
The mortgage meltdown continued to batter banks during the third quarter. BankUnited, the largest financial institution based ...
A few weeks ago, I posted here that Coral Gables-based BankUnited told the FDIC it lost $261.6 million in the Sept. 30 quarter. ...
December 16, 2008
For decades, Charles Ponzi has been known as the king of the scammers. But Bernard Madoff makes Ponzi look like a piker. ...
Homebuilders broke ground last month on the fewest new homes since the federal government began tracking this statistic in ...
December 15, 2008
From the Realtor Association of Martin County: Single-family sales November 2007 - 91 Units November 2008 - 78 Units Single-family ...
Palm Beach mansion prices have managed to keep rising in spite of a global economic meltdown. The median home price in Palm ...
December 12, 2008
Chalk up R.J. Gator’s as another victim of Florida’s recession. After two Chapter 11 filings in a year, the ...
December 11, 2008
In November, Florida again had the nation’s second-highest number of properties with foreclosure filings, RealtyTrac ...
December 10, 2008
Wal-Mart is the big winner this holiday shopping season, says Britt Beemer, CEO of America’s Research Group in Charleston, ...
December 9, 2008
The estate of murderer Fred Keller is asking nearly $100 million for the late landlord’s 29 warehouses in Palm Beach ...
December 4, 2008
A Boca Raton title attorney has been charged with one count of mail fraud after selling a home to a player in a wide-ranging ...
Raymond James & Associates has leased 9,000 square feet on the ninth floor of CityPlace Tower in downtown West Palm Beach, ...
Mortgage broker Lauren Jasky (right) was sentenced today to 36 months in federal prison for her role in a scam that used ...
December 2, 2008
Florida remains the nation’s leader in mortgage fraud, according to a study out today from the Mortgage Asset Research ...
December 1, 2008
Convicted mortgage scammer Ralph Michel was sentenced this morning to 30 months in federal prison for his role in using dozens ...
November 28, 2008
Economists expect this holiday shopping season to be one of the worst in decades. They blame rising unemployment, falling ...
November 25, 2008
As the housing market craters, the fifth- and sixth-largest banks in Palm Beach County are getting pummeled with body blows. ...
Consumer confidence among Floridians fell one point in November to 62, “ushering in what may be the worst holiday buying ...
November 24, 2008
The region’s home prices continued to plunge in October, but sales volumes spiked, the Florida Association of Realtors ...
November 21, 2008
Gotta love those contrarians on the other side of the Intracoastal. Everyone else in the county and country might have decided ...
Here’s University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith’s outlook for the holiday shopping season: “Next ...
Another downbeat holiday retail forecast: U.S. households will spend an average of $418 on gifts during the holiday season, ...
Palm Beach County’s jobless rate remained unchanged in October, but statewide unemployment spiked, according to state ...
November 20, 2008
Two not-so-glittering predictions for the holiday shopping season were released this morning. The first comes from Britt ...
November 19, 2008
Convicted mortgage scammer Berry Louidort was sentenced this afternoon to 37 months in federal prison for his role in using ...
An analysis of the nation’s market for new homes from Metrostudy: “There are hundreds of housing markets, and ...
November 18, 2008
Palm Beach County single-family home prices fell 18 percent in the third quarter while sales volumes rose 9 percent, the ...
When I visited the former Moroso Motorsports Park earlier this year to write about exotic cars, I was struck by this contrast: ...
Falling oil prices are a sliver of good news for consumers who are getting hammered by a cratering stock market and still-falling ...
November 17, 2008
I just crunched the numbers on Saturday’s auction of 33 condos at The Edge in downtown West Palm Beach, and the only ...
November 15, 2008
The developer of The Edge condominium building in downtown West Palm Beach hadn’t sold a single unit all year. On Saturday, ...
November 14, 2008
Anthony “Iggy” Affatati has pleaded guilty to charges that he was involved in two investment schemes, federal ...
Less than a year ago, Dick’s Sporting Goods aimed to make a major move into South Florida. What a difference 11 months ...
The Realtor Association of Martin County’s data for October shows prices are still falling, sales are flat and pending ...
Realtors and homebuilders are practically begging Congress to throw money at homebuyers, but apartment landlords warn that ...
November 13, 2008
One in every 157 Florida homes received a foreclosure filing in October, the nation’s third-highest foreclosure rate, ...
November 12, 2008
Treasure Coast home prices have fallen a stunning 50 percent in the past three years. Given his market’s doldrums, ...
In a bid to boost the local economy, the city of West Palm Beach will speed the spending of $127 million budgeted for construction ...
November 10, 2008
I arrived at the National Association of Realtors convention in Orlando on Friday ready for a full-bore blast of media bashing ...
November 8, 2008
Odds and ends from the first day and a half of the National Association of Realtors conference in Orlando: The slump spreads ...
Subprime loans are gone, but mortgage fraud is alive and well, a Freddie Mac mortgage fraud investigator says. During the ...
November 7, 2008
Rei Mesa, head of Prudential Florida Realty, has a message for his agents: Don’t take overpriced listings. “A ...
Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink today launched Florida Housing Help at MyFloridaCFO.com. Sink says the site helps ...
More from National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun, who offered a sober housing forecast during a press ...
ORLANDO — Taxpayers should give homebuyers $100 billion in incentives to jump-start the moribund housing market, National ...
November 5, 2008
Realogy Corp., the largest real estate broker in the county, the state and the nation, lost $50 million in the third quarter, ...
We’ve got a black president, but here’s some truly shocking news: David Lereah, former chief economist of the ...
November 4, 2008
Boca Raton Realtor Dave Freudenberg e-mails these before-and-after pics of a once-sparkling home. Click here for the before ...
November 3, 2008
Housing starts in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast ground to a near-halt during the third quarter, research firm ...
October 31, 2008
No need to put a fright mask on these numbers: Nearly a third of Florida mortgage borrowers owed more on their loans than ...
Two retail REITs have hired commercial real estate firm Strategic Realty Services of West Palm Beach to lease shopping centers ...
October 30, 2008
Convicted mortgage scammer Gregory C. Brown was sentenced today to 20 years in federal prison. Brown landed mortgages for ...
Falling home prices will create a drag on consumer spending, researchers from USC and UCLA say in a new study. “We ...
October 29, 2008
South Floridians are wiser to rent than own, according to a new study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and ...
October 28, 2008
As the housing market’s chief cheerleader, National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun never fails ...
South Florida home prices were down 28.1 percent from August 2007 to August 2008, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home ...
October 27, 2008
Closings have begun at the 467-unit Two City Plaza in downtown West Palm Beach, and so far more buyers are making good than ...
October 24, 2008
The typical price of a single-family home fell below $300,000 in September, although sales picked up from a year ago, the ...
Not exactly. But as the Maestro’s rep goes from revered to reviled, he says his laissez faire approach to regulation ...
October 23, 2008
More from Jorge Perez: The head of Related Group expects about 100 buyers to walk away from their contracts to buy condos ...
The Florida Department of Financial Services says calls are flooding in about the pastor-and-mortgage-broker team in Jensen ...
Jorge Perez, the billionaire head of The Related Group, admits that he got caught up in South Florida’s real estate ...
Florida had the second-highest rate of foreclosures in the nation in September, according to foreclosure listing service ...
October 22, 2008
Seacoast Banking Corp. reports a third-quarter loss of $3.4 million, or 18 cents a share, compared to a profit of $285,000, ...
October 21, 2008
Real estate industry experts expect financial and real estate markets to hit bottom in 2009 and then “flounder” ...
October 20, 2008
Yet more depressing news from the real estate market, this time courtesy of Veros Real Estate Solutions of Santa Ana, Calif. ...
Condo Vultures’ latest foreclosure report tallies up defaults at South Florida condo projects and finds West Palm Beach ...
The real estate market is in the tank, but some agents still are managing to make good money selling houses. Here are the ...
October 17, 2008
Peter Linneman, chief economist at commercial real estate firm NAI Global, calls it the minefield effect. A year ago, consumers, ...
HomeVestors, the “We Buy Ugly Houses” company, is running a contest to pick the nation’s ugliest house. ...
Palm Beach County’s unemployment rate dipped ever so slightly in September, but state statistics don’t paint ...
October 16, 2008
The housing market can’t seem to catch a break. Mortgage rates spiked this week to 6.74 percent from 6.20 percent last ...
October 15, 2008
Palm Beach hedge fund manager Doug Kass thinks the stock market has hit bottom, but he sees other troubles for the economy. ...
October 14, 2008
Planning firms Urban Design Studio and Kilday & Associates said today that they have combined to form Urban Design Kilday ...
Risky mortgages, not reckless borrowers, caused the mortgage meltdown, according to a new study by the University of North ...
October 13, 2008
More depressing news from the real estate market: Cushman & Wakefield sees “a heavy market correction” in ...
Gotta love the irony: You can sell a trophy property for $100 million and pay 70 cents in Florida documentary stamp taxes. ...
October 10, 2008
Turns out borrowers who were lying to get liar loans from Countrywide weren’t telling little white lies. They were ...
Taxable sales in Palm Beach County fell to $1.55 billion in July, down 7.8 percent from a year ago, the Florida Office of ...
Publix says it’ll open a store in Riviera Beach, a city where it hasn’t had a location for nearly two decades. ...
This week’s news that a Chicago investor is turning two office buildings in West Palm Beach into hotels makes more ...
With this week’s arrest of Johnson Cuffy and new details about the scam run by Berry Louidort, Ralph Michel and Lauren ...
October 9, 2008
The Dow’s below 9,000, foreclosures are soaring and capital’s drying up, but there’s still a real estate ...
The Florida Bankers Association says its members are still making loans. “Recent headlines would lead you to believe ...
Looking for a bright side to the global economic collapse? How about this: Mortgage rates are falling. The average 30-year ...
What credit crunch? Chicago-based NCP Properties plans to turn two historic office buildings in West Palm Beach into hotels ...
October 8, 2008
The top four real estate sites for September were unchanged, according to Hitwise’s monthly report. Realtor.com remains ...
Nine people have been arrested in a mortgage fraud scam that used straw buyers and shell companies to rip off lenders for ...
South Florida has the distinction of being hit hard by both the S&L crisis of the late ’80s and early ’90s ...
October 7, 2008
Wachovia Corp. today laid off 50 workers from a mortgage processing center at 1301 N. Congress Ave. in Boynton Beach. That ...
Judging by the frantic calls I’ve been getting from readers over the past few weeks, a lot of you want to withdraw ...
A Congressional district in northern California has the highest foreclosure rate of the nation’s 435 House seats, according ...
October 6, 2008
The U.S. economy is facing a deep downturn, in spite of last week’s $700 billion bailout package, says Congressman ...
Coldwell Banker, the largest brokerage in Palm Beach County, is doing a 10-day national sale that starts Friday. The broker ...
Many banks that do business in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast saw their safety ratings fall during the second quarter. ...
The rising flood of foreclosures is crippling the economy, pummeling the stock market and serving up bargains for opportunists ...
October 3, 2008
In the first nine months of this year, lenders filed 55,737 foreclosure actions valued at more than $14.2 billion on properties ...
October 2, 2008
Reversing last month’s trend of falling rates, mortgages grew more costly for a second straight week, Freddie Mac says ...
Every housing market in Florida faces a “high” risk of further price declines, mortgage insurer PMI says. Broward ...
I’ve started a version of Real Time on Twitter, the microblogging site. Click here to follow.... ...
October 1, 2008
Consumer confidence among Floridians rose three points in September to 70, marking the third month of increases since the ...
September 30, 2008
Fully 55 percent of Palm Beach County sales handled by Coldwell Banker these days are all-cash deals. Last year, only 39 ...
Usually, when a big bank takes over deposits in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast, the region’s community banks ...
September 29, 2008
When I wrote last year about John Freeland’s new brokerage, he planned to quickly build Palm Beach Realty Advisors ...
Real estate investor Ralph Michel and mortgage broker Lauren Jasky each have pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to ...
September 26, 2008
It wouldn’t be a Realtors convention without a fair amount of media bashing, and speakers at this year’s Florida ...
The housing market is unlikely to regain its footing until 2011, and the recovery will be less dramatic than Realtors and ...
Neil Merin, head of NAI/Merin Hunter Codman, acknowledges that the commercial real estate market has been sluggish in recent ...
September 25, 2008
With home prices falling, “short sales” (or at least promises about short sales) have become all the rage in ...
September 24, 2008
Palm Beach County home prices bounced back in August, when the typical single-family home sold for $323,300, up from a median ...
September 19, 2008
Troubled BankUnited just announced that it’s cutting 160 workers, or 12 percent of its workers. The struggling Coral ...
Jack McCabe, whose outlook has been relentlessly (and, alas, accurately) gloomy over the past few years, finally finds reason ...
Lehman Brothers, which filed bankruptcy this week, holds 15 commercial mortgages in Palm Beach County totaling $489.6 million, ...
This morning’s unemployment data from the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation caused me to have a flashback to ...
September 18, 2008
The government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was bad news for shareholders in the mortgage giants but good news ...
State Rep. Maria Sachs (right), D-Delray Beach, hosts a foreclosure-prevention workshop in Delray Beach Monday. Bankers and ...
September 17, 2008
Anything sound odd about this deal? Back in 2006, Sharon Schofield back paid $365,000 for a home at 1000 N.E. County Line ...
September 15, 2008
Ahh, the joys of being a Florida homeowner. As if the roller-coaster ride in home values and the constant threat of a Cat ...
September 12, 2008
Here’s another sign that the high end of the economy is doing just fine, thanks: Affluent snowbirds are ponying up ...
With the commercial real estate market at a near-halt lately, I haven’t been writing as regularly about deep-pocketed ...
September 10, 2008
You’ve probably had your fill of financial engineering during the latest boom and bust, but Yale University economist ...
September 9, 2008
Wachovia Corp. will lay off 69 workers from its mortgage processing center at 12700 S. Military Trail in Boynton Beach, spokeswoman ...
Prices for “middle-management” housing in Palm Beach County are well off over the past two years, according to ...
Ocwen Financial ranked last in the J.D. Power and Associates 2008 Primary Mortgage Servicer Study released today. West Palm ...
September 8, 2008
Car dealer Terry Taylor is asking $72.5 million for his home at 780 S. Ocean Blvd. in Palm Beach. That property hasn’t ...
Federal Realty Investment Trust says today it paid $37.9 million for Courtyard Shops at 13860 Wellington Trace in Wellington. ...
A few months after selling their Palm Beach manse for $68.5 million, George and Frayda Lindemann have downsized to a $23.5 ...
The federal government’s takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sent stock prices soaring. Will the bailout boost home ...
September 5, 2008
Still smarting from losing all that cash as your home has plummeted in value in the past two years? Pete Martinsen, owner ...
Florida’s foreclosure picture got truly ugly in the second quarter of this year, according to a report today from the ...
September 4, 2008
Ocwen Financial Corp., which collects payments from 300,000 subprime mortgage borrowers, says delinquencies on loans it handles ...
Palm Beach County real estate investor Berry Louidort has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud ...
It’s ugly out there for people who bought at the height of the boom. Four examples of recent sales at big losses: 64% ...
September 2, 2008
Chalk up another victim of the housing slump: Longtime Florida builder Oriole Homes Corp. has filed for insolvency. Boca ...
August 29, 2008
Remember when Dillard’s opened at Palm Beach Mall in 2000? It was supposed to spark the rebirth of the aging mall. ...
Prudential Florida WCI Realty now is just Prudential Florida Realty after dropping the name of struggling homebuilder WCI ...
The new owner of Moroso Motorsports Park paid $10.4 million for 196 acres west of Jupiter, property records show. Moroso ...
The housing market has plenty of sellers, a flood of foreclosures and a plethora of struggling agents looking for new careers. ...
August 28, 2008
With parts of St. Lucie County under water (that’s Port St. Lucie above), the federal government is offering disaster ...
Home prices aren’t the only thing in Palm Beach County that have returned to 2004 levels. So has economic activity. ...
August 26, 2008
The University of Florida’s consumer confidence index rose in August from June’s all-time low, and survey director ...
The Case-Shiller Home Price index out today says South Florida home prices fell 28.3 percent from June 2007 to June 2008. ...
August 25, 2008
Target says its Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard store will close at the end of business on Oct. 18. The retailer hopes to reopen ...
Mike Pappas, head of Keyes Co., likens the real estate boom and bust of the past five years to a drug binge. “There ...
Palm Beach County home prices plunged in July, raising new questions about just how far property values can fall. The median ...
Florida continues to lead the nation in mortgage fraud — and by a margin that would make Usain Bolt proud. Florida ...
August 22, 2008
The mansion market in the town of Palm Beach remains immune to the deep downturn affecting property values in the rest of ...
August 20, 2008
If you’re falling behind on your mortgage payments, contact your lender immediately, says broker Myles Minns, head ...
August 19, 2008
Target will lay off 90 people at its Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard store on Oct. 7, the retailer tells the Florida Agency for ...
August 15, 2008
The housing downturn continues to hurt the Florida economy. Unemployment stats released today by the Florida Agency for Workforce ...
August 14, 2008
Palm Beach County home prices fell 14 percent in the second quarter of this year compared to a year ago, the Florida Association ...
Foreclosure attorney Neal Taslitz has lost count of the number of frantic homeowners who have called him for help. Many of ...
August 13, 2008
Realogy Corp., the largest broker in Palm Beach County, Florida and the nation, says it lost $27 million in the second quarter. ...
August 12, 2008
Seattle-based online broker Redfin offers these strategies for turning today’s buyer’s market even more in your ...
A report today from Zillow slices and dices the real estate numbers in all their depressing glory. The lowlights: In the ...
Descriptions of properties for sale should be taken with a dose of skepticism, but some sellers stretch the truth more than ...
August 6, 2008
I’m on assignment for a few days, so I won’t be posting to Real Time until Monday, August 11.... ...
August 4, 2008
Home sellers who paid cut-rate commissions to their Realtors were just as happy as seller who paid 6 percent or more, Consumer ...
Remember those Farm Aid concerts back in the ’80s, when Willie Nelson and John Cougar Mellencamp tried to raise cash ...
August 1, 2008
Florida’s economy declined by 1.6 percent during the second quarter, its sharpest downturn in 16 years, Wachovia economist ...
Palm Beach County’s office and industrial developers are adding space, but tenants aren’t exactly snapping up ...
Developer Tom Hinners boasts about the ocean views from the top floor of his new condo development. He ticks off the amenities ...
Well, at least one home. When Lake Worth resident Gary Orrock decided to sell his one-bedroom condo, he hired a Realtor and ...
July 31, 2008
For the first time, J.D. Power & Associates has rated real estate brokers on customer satisfaction. The results: Keller ...
At the EcoCentre in Lake Worth and EcoPlex in West Palm Beach, developers are putting the finishing touches on eco-friendly ...
July 30, 2008
Three intriguing takes on our economic doldrums from a curmudgeonly trio: Christian Weller, that nattering nabob of negativism ...
BankAtlantic Bancorp said late last night that it lost $19 million in the second quarter. Still, Alan B. Levan, chairman ...
Palm Beach County has some of the most expensive commercial rents in the Southeast, according to a new report by NAI Global. ...
July 29, 2008
Economic forecasters have taken to following informal indicators like the length of the line at the dry cleaner or the mall. ...
Second-quarter housing starts picked up in Palm Beach and Martin counties but fell in St. Lucie County, research firm Metrostudy ...
July 28, 2008
The International Monetary Fund roiled Wall Street today with its prediction that the housing mess will get worse before ...
Back at the blog after a two-week summer vacation. Here’s what I missed while I was gone: Donald Trump got $95 mil ...
July 11, 2008
In the latest in a series of ultrahigh-end Palm Beach listings and sales, a Florida car dealer is asking $72.5 million for ...
Homeowners associations plagued with deadbeat owners face little choice but to cut services or raise fees to cover people ...
July 9, 2008
Mortgage fraud fighters are busy these days, as evidenced by a string of fresh arrests. Three more names have been added ...
July 8, 2008
More doomsaying on the housing front: Palm Beach County home prices have a 91.9 percent chance of being lower in two years. ...
More pessimistic news on the housing front. Contracts to buy homes fell more than forecast in May, the National Association ...
July 7, 2008
Looks like Veronica Hearst has escaped the financial jam that led to the foreclosure sale of her Manalapan mansion earlier ...
So much for commercial real estate defying the housing slowdown and buoying the Florida economy. The state’s apartment, ...
July 2, 2008
“New,” “beautiful” and “nice” are among the adjectives most commonly used in real estate ...
July 1, 2008
Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has sued Countrywide Financial for “deceptive and unfair” practices that ...
June 26, 2008
Flagler Development Co. has paid $42.25 million for a 160,000-square-foot office building at 8051 Congress Ave. in Boca Raton, ...
Palm Beach County home prices and home sales climbed in May compared to April, providing a glimmer of hope in an unrelentingly ...
June 25, 2008
The bursting of the housing bubble is bad news for baby boomers heading into retirement, says a new report from the Center ...
June 24, 2008
Sellers are pulling out all the stops these days. There are staid efforts like Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate’s ...
I went to lunch at my favorite Thai restaurant today, and the place was eerily empty. A couple years ago, there routinely ...
The latest Case-Shiller Home Price report is out today, and it once again shows South Florida as one of the nation’s ...
June 23, 2008
The housing downturn will continue, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies says today in its annual State of the ...
Russian fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev is the mystery buyer of Donald Trump’s property at 515 N. County Road, ...
June 20, 2008
The housing slowdown continues to suck jobs from the local economy. State officials say today that Florida’s seasonally ...
June 19, 2008
Are you feeling financially miserable yet? You should be, according to my new Palm Beach County Pocketbook Pain Index — ...
June 18, 2008
In the past few months, the town of Palm Beach has set records for prices of a single-family mansion, a condo and an empty ...
June 13, 2008
Posting has been light this week because I’ve been in an intensive training session learning to record and edit audio, ...
June 10, 2008
Venezuelan banker Victor Vargas has paid $68.5 million for George Lindemann’s manse at 60 Blossom Way in Palm Beach, ...
June 6, 2008
A federal jury has convicted mortgage scammer Gregory C. Brown of conspiracy, wire fraud, mail fraud and tax evasion, the ...
In flush times, the classic hockey stick chart is used to show dizzying increases for the asset of the moment — dot-com ...
Freeloaders are familiar with the concept of couch surfing. Here’s a new concept: Foreclosure surfing. Bargain-hunting ...
June 5, 2008
Florida’s gross domestic product was unchanged from 2006 to 2007, the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis says today. ...
Fully 7 percent of Florida’s 3.5 million home loans were past due in the first three months of 2008, not including ...
June 3, 2008
High-end homebuilder Toll Brothers has been an especially creative player in the blame game. Robert Toll never misses a chance ...
June 2, 2008
In September, a German investor paid $180 million for Legacy Place in Palm Beach Gardens. In the eight months since, Palm ...
May 30, 2008
The flood of foreclosures in the past year has created deer-in-the-headlights syndrome for borrowers, who stop making payments, ...
May 29, 2008
Ask any longtime Realtor about the MLS book, and you’ll hear a story about the good old days when the only way for ...
May 27, 2008
I’m really starting to wish I’d sold my house in late 2005. The S&P/Case-Shiller index says prices in South ...
May 23, 2008
So much for the local real estate market turning the corner. Home prices in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast continued ...
May 22, 2008
In its quarterly home price report out today, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight ranks Palm Beach County ...
May 20, 2008
All of a sudden, Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast are bastions of affordability. According to the National Association ...
May 19, 2008
In his new autobiography, billionaire überdeveloper Jorge Pérez says he was none too certain that CityPlace would ...
May 16, 2008
Jobless rates shrank in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties from March to April, which sounds good until you realize ...
May 15, 2008
This just in from the records-are-made-to-be-broken department: Donald Trump has a $100 million contract for his oceanfront ...
If the market is turning, you wouldn’t know it from the results posted yesterday by Realogy Corp., parent of Century ...
Has the housing market hit bottom yet? As usual, the answer depends on who’s answering. First, Bob Graeve of Illustrated ...
May 14, 2008
The Palm Beach real estate market just keeps defying the laws of gravity that apply elsewhere. The latest record: $12.1 million ...
May 13, 2008
Martin County condo sales are perking up a bit, but prices are still way down from a year ago, the Realtor Association of ...
Home prices are still rising in flyover country, the National Association of Realtors says today. In the first quarter, prices ...
May 12, 2008
A grand jury last week indicted three people accused of running a scheme to inflate the values of high-end homes, borrow ...
May 9, 2008
In the shameless self-promotion department, I’ll offer this tidbit: The National Association of Real Estate Editors ...
May 7, 2008
Home prices are likely to fall 10 percent this year, ZipRealty CEO Pat Lashinsky said in an earnings call a few minutes ago. ...
Federal prosecutors say Berry Louidort, Ralph Michel and Lauren Jasky used inflated appraisals and bogus loan applications ...
You just can’t make this stuff up. Check out the details of a mortgage fraud ring busted by federal and state investigators ...
May 6, 2008
Not a single member of the Florida Senate voted against a bill to close a loophole that lets buyers and sellers of big properties ...
May 5, 2008
The palatial entrance to Versailles is so scenic that when I happened past last week, a family was using it as a backdrop ...
Economist Joseph Cortright offers a contrarian explanation for the fall in housing prices in many markets. His culprit isn’t ...
April 30, 2008
Another day, another eye-popping deal on the island of Palm Beach. Bill Meyer says he has sold the lot at 770 S. County Road ...
April 29, 2008
Two of the biggest banks in South Florida reported earnings yesterday, and both are feeling the effects of the housing meltdown. ...
Builders in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast picked up the pace of construction a bit in the first quarter of this ...
Jimmy Carter’s all over the news. Oil prices are soaring. Stagflation is back on the lips of economists. Can polyester ...
April 28, 2008
For a special section in today’s print edition, I put together a list of the biggest foreclosures in the region. The ...
April 25, 2008
The housing crisis has strained Florida’s once-booming job market, but there’s opportunity in one niche: credit ...
April 24, 2008
They say you need an insider to pull off a mortgage scam. Federal prosecutors say today that three lending-industry insiders ...
Miami hotel developer Finvarb Corp. has paid $3.9 million for a 1.5-acre site at Abacoa Town Center in Jupiter. It plans ...
Sidney Kimmel’s Palm Beach mansion, which set a price record for Palm Beach, went from on the market to sold at don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it ...
April 23, 2008
Federal and state investigators have turned their attention to mortgage fraud, and they’re beginning to uncover a slew ...
Another reason to carefully cultivate your credit score: Mortgage giant Fannie Mae has begun levying extra fees for borrowers ...
April 22, 2008
Until a couple years ago, I thought a “short sale” was what you did when you expected a stock to fall. Now I ...
So much for Palm Beach County home prices hitting bottom. After staying flat for several months, the median price of a single-family ...
April 18, 2008
The Palm Beach mansion market is en fuego, as they say. On Tuesday, Jane Goldman of New York paid $22.45 million for the ...
Looks like the state collected its full share of documentary stamp taxes on the recent record-breaking sale of a Palm Beach ...
Jobless rates continued to rise in the region and the state in March, says the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation. It ...
April 17, 2008
PALM BEACH — In another sign of the hale health of the mansion market, the oceanfront estate built by billionaire businessman ...
Pity the poor condo owner who bought a new unit at the peak of the boom. First, his can’t-miss investment plummeted ...
April 15, 2008
There’s a nearly 80 percent chance that home prices in Palm Beach County will fall in the next two years. That’s ...
The raw numbers of foreclosures are soaring in Palm Beach and Martin counties, but they remain in the middle of the pack ...
April 11, 2008
March home sales picked up a bit in Palm Beach and Martin counties, while prices continued to fall, two reports say. A market ...
April 10, 2008
BOCA RATON — I’m at the annual conference of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, the grandly named network ...
April 9, 2008
A Florida Senate committee unanimously passed a bill to close a loophole that has let buyers and sellers of big properties ...
April 4, 2008
A couple years ago, economists referred to the standoff between buyers and sellers as a who’ll-blink-first contest. ...
April 2, 2008
Investors are beginning to smell opportunity in the flood of foreclosures in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast. Lenders ...
April 1, 2008
Realogy recently acknowledged that its typical commission side remained below 2.5 percent last year. But Redfin, a Seattle-based ...
March 28, 2008
No surprise here, but the National Association of Realtors reports a steep decline in sales of vacation homes and investment ...
The Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation today offers yet more evidence of the housing slowdown’s fallout for the ...
March 27, 2008
I wrote here yesterday about GL Homes’ decision to spend $117 million on land, in spite of the down market. Levitt ...
During the housing boom, the folks at the National Multi Housing Council saw their product — rental apartments — ...
In an attempt to talk home buyers off the fence and into the closing room, the Florida Association of Realtors has created ...
March 26, 2008
The housing market might be in the tank, but GL Homes just dropped $117 million for 1,068 acres along State Road 7 in the ...
The Florida Association of Realtors’ most recent numbers showed signs of a recovery. But the latest figures from the ...
March 25, 2008
Chris McCarty, director of survey research at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research, ...
March 24, 2008
Palm Beach County home prices edged up slightly in February, the second month in a row of month-over-month increases and ...
March 21, 2008
John Tuccillo, former chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, visited Palm Beach County last weekend to ...
March 20, 2008
The average residential real estate commission remained below 5 percent in 2007, according to Realogy Corp.’s latest ...
March 14, 2008
While the housing downturn has hurt bank profits, fewer than 2 percent of the nation’s banks appeared on BauerFinancial’s ...
The Palm Beach mansion market has defied the overall housing market for the past two years, but even the island of Palm Beach ...
March 13, 2008
A new report from the Mortgage Asset Research Institute ranks Florida tops in the nation in mortgage fraud in 2007. It’s ...
March 12, 2008
Martin County sales volumes rose a bit in February, but home prices were well off their February 2007 levels, according to ...
March 11, 2008
Shrapnel from the mortgage market’s implosion keeps landing in unexpected places. The latest example: A small water-and-sewer ...
March 7, 2008
And that quote’s from the bank’s own president. Back in the halcyon days, little Ameribank from West Virginia ...
Unemployment rates in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties edged up in January as the state’s economy continued ...
March 6, 2008
So much for new jumbo loan limits putting Palm Beach County’s housing market back on solid ground. Fannie Mae and Freddie ...
Another day, another depressing map showing Florida at the leading edge of the housing downturn. This one comes from the ...
Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Sidney Kimmel has put his estate at 1236 S. Ocean Blvd. in Palm Beach on the ...
March 4, 2008
The housing market never stops creating new jargon, and I’m not even talking about the boring acronyms like CDOs, ARMs ...
Do a search on Realtor.com for single-family homes in Boca Raton priced at $400,000 to $450,000, and you’ll find 231 ...
March 3, 2008
Just finished the book Mobs, Messiahs and Markets by Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva. They bash just about anyone worth bashing, ...
February 29, 2008
A couple nuggets from builder Toll Brothers’ earnings call: Robert Toll says cancellation rates have soared from an ...
The town of Palm Beach isn’t the only place where property owners are partying like it’s 2005. Timeshare developer ...
I can’t help but chuckle when Realtors cheerily tell me the housing market is poised to rebound any moment now. Even ...
February 28, 2008
Economists don’t like to apply the R-word to local and state economies, but just about everyone agrees that Palm Beach ...
February 27, 2008
Housing slowdown? What housing slowdown? In spite of a severe real estate downturn that’s pushing Florida into a recession ...
February 26, 2008
Neither of these maps looks good for us. First off, the latest Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight map says our ...
Not every economic indicator is heading straight down. The University of Florida’s monthly consumer confidence index ...
It’s a good time to be a renter in Palm Beach County, according to a report on the apartment market from CB Richard ...
South Florida ranks dead last in the latest S&P/Case-Shiller index for the nation’s top 20 metro areas. Prices ...
February 25, 2008
In a hopeful note for the housing market, Palm Beach County’s median home price rose slightly in January compared to ...
February 22, 2008
Fourteen months in a row. That’s how long year-over-year taxable sales have been falling in Palm Beach County and the ...
February 21, 2008
BOCA RATON — Residential real estate brokers aren’t the only ones who can get sweet incentives by doing an elusive ...
February 20, 2008
From the man-bites-dog department: John Mike, a longtime agent and chairman of the Realtors Association of the Palm Beaches, ...
February 19, 2008
Back in 2005, I possessed incontrovertible proof of my financial foresight and investing acumen. I could live anywhere in ...
February 18, 2008
The homebuilding industry is in a steep downturn, so I attended last week’s International Builders’ Show expecting ...
February 15, 2008
ORLANDO — One school of thought says that when home sales plummet, home remodeling projects rocket. Homeowners decide ...
ORLANDO — I went to a builders’ convention, and an Earth First! meeting broke out. I’m exaggerating. Builders ...
Atlanta-based IDI has paid $17 million for 129 acres in Fort Pierce, making it just the latest major industrial developer ...
February 14, 2008
The wealth-sapping downturn in home prices continued during the fourth quarter of 2007, the Florida Association of Realtors ...
At Green Cay Village, a freshly built condo project west of Boynton Beach, 20 sales fell through after buyers who qualified ...
February 13, 2008
ORLANDO — Amid all the news about the credit crunch, this little fact has been lost: plain old 30-year fixed-rate mortgages ...
ORLANDO — David Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, gave a gloomy outlook for the ...
February 12, 2008
On the eve of the annual International Builders’ Show in Orlando, the miffed members of the National Association of ...
February 11, 2008
The fast-shrinking Brandon Home Furnishing chain is about to disappear, a victim of the housing market’s slowdown. ...
February 8, 2008
Pity the Toll Brothers, Robert and Bruce. Sales and profits at their Pennsylvania-based company are tanking. Shares are down ...
February 7, 2008
The National Association of Realtors’ Pending Home Sales Index for December is out today, and it doesn’t look ...
With homes slow to move, sellers increasingly are offering incentives to buyers’ agents who deliver their elusive prey ...
February 1, 2008
How do you make a small fortune? Start with a large fortune, then invest in Florida apartments in late 2005, with plans for ...
As Bankrate Inc. executed a stunning turnaround from the dot-com trash heap to profit machine, the conventional wisdom was ...
January 30, 2008
The homeownership rate fell to a five-year low in the fourth quarter of 2007, the U.S. Census Bureau says. Some 67.8 percent ...
Builders in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast are whittling away at the glut of homes by drastically cutting construction. ...
January 29, 2008
The housing market’s supply-and-demand equation clearly favors the supply side right now, which has the real estate ...
January 25, 2008
In theory, private enterprises can do things more quickly and efficiently than can fat-and-happy government employees. In ...
January 24, 2008
The pain continued for homeowners in December, the Florida Association of Realtors says today. The median home price in Palm ...
January 18, 2008
In another example of deep-pocketed buyers and sellers taking advantage of the loophole in the state’s documentary ...
December’s supposed to be a good month for Florida workers. After all, retailers are hiring as many hands as they can. ...
January 17, 2008
No shock here, but Save Our Homes has helped the state’s wealthiest homeowners the most, and voter approval of the ...
January 15, 2008
I wrote last April that Ocwen Financial Corp. had managed to escape the subprime meltdown. At the time, its shares were off ...
January 10, 2008
The sales center at Belaire at Boca was a lonely place when I stopped by Wednesday — half a dozen desks, one sales ...
For the past two years, Realtors have complained about what they view as the media’s relentlessly negative coverage ...
January 8, 2008
What’s this? An admission from National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun that all is not well in ...
January 7, 2008
With the owner of Palm Beach Mall poised to start major renovations, the Borders bookstore there will close Feb. 2, Borders ...
January 4, 2008
Troubled condo converter Tarragon Corp. continued to unload properties, selling a Boynton Beach project and five other properties ...
January 3, 2008
The news about the Palm Beach County housing market has been unrelentingly gloomy, but here’s something we still have ...
December 31, 2007
Home prices in Palm Beach County continued to slip in November, the Florida Association of Realtors says. The median home ...
December 28, 2007
Desperate sellers have slashed asking prices by $1 billion in the past year, according to a report by brokerage Condo Vultures ...
I’m over year-end Top 10 lists, but Century 21 America’s Choice broker Douglas Rill asked me to recap my top ...
December 27, 2007
University of Central Florida economist Sean Snaith says passage of the Jan. 29 property tax referendum will “create ...
December 26, 2007
Bad news for sellers, good news for buyers, says Chris McCarty of the University of Florida Bureau of Economic and Business ...
December 24, 2007
Ken Ringe, head of Bayview Construction Corp. in Stuart, can’t complain too much about his business. He sees a booming ...
December 21, 2007
Six months ago, there was no hotter real estate market anywhere than Palm Beach County warehouses. Encouraged by microscopic ...
December 20, 2007
If you were playing watchword bingo today during the National Association of Home Builders’ 2008 forecast, you would ...
December 19, 2007
The National Association of Realtors says investment in commercial real estate has slowed, but that the industry’s ...
Redfin, the Seattle-based brokerage that Realtors love to hate, says its computer scientists have been crunching numbers ...
December 18, 2007
A fifth of Floridians are fed up with living here and are considering moving, according to a survey by Leadership Florida. ...
December 13, 2007
The commercial real estate market has cooled, but deals are still happening. The latest example: The office building at 4400 ...
December 12, 2007
Today’s roundup of gloomy news: Office Depot says the housing market is killing its profits. The Federal Reserve says ...
Among Yogi Berra’s famous lines is this: “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” I’ll ...
December 11, 2007
Palm Beach County’s commercial real estate market saw a flurry of $25 million-and-up deals earlier this year, but the ...
To help property owners make sense of the Jan. 29 tax amendment, Palm Beach County Property Appraiser Gary Nikolits has added ...
December 10, 2007
The housing downturn has forced marginal agents to go back to their old jobs, but even top-producing agents are feeling the ...
December 7, 2007
A few stories that caught my eye today: President Bush’s subprime rate freeze: Too little to help, asks The Wall Street ...
December 5, 2007
Here’s a glimmer of good news for South Florida homeowners: Remodeling projects here recoup more of their cost than ...
November 30, 2007
Even in a slowing market, two Palm Beach County agents managed to post hefty sales volumes last year, according to lore magazine’s ...
November 29, 2007
The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s third-quarter price index is out today, and it ranks Palm Beach ...
Just how weird has the real estate meltdown gotten? This weird: Gov. Charlie Crist and his cabinet today were forced to freeze ...
The real estate meltdown has created a new oxymoron: “friendly foreclosure.” That’s how borrower Skip Stoltz ...
November 28, 2007
Palm Beach County home prices continue to fall, the Florida Association of Realtors says today. October’s median existing ...
November 27, 2007
More pessimistic news today from the University of Florida Bureau of Economic and Business Research. It says consumer confidence ...
The Florida Association of Realtors’ October report is set to be released tomorrow, and two reports out today don’t ...
You could almost lob a vanilla latte from the Starbucks on the second floor of The Gardens Mall to the Starbucks on the first ...
November 26, 2007
Palm Beach County was one of the 10 priciest housing markets in the nation back in 2005. No longer. Palm Beach County’s ...
November 20, 2007
In this morning’s earnings conference call, Office Depot CEO Steve Odland apologized for “disappointing” ...
November 15, 2007
In contrast to the happy predictions from the National Association of Realtors conference, The Economist sees recession ...
Every time I go to Home Depot, I silently curse the American dream of homeownership. That reciprocating saw I bought a while ...
November 14, 2007
Gotta love those spinmeisters at the National Association of Realtors. They put out a release yesterday touting 2007 as “the ...
November 13, 2007
Three intriguing things reported elsewhere: Price plunge? Fortune magazine says Palm Beach County home prices have further ...
November 10, 2007
If you’re hiring an agent to list your home, two things are sure to happen. First, you’ll ask for a discount ...
November 9, 2007
When times get tough, everyone looks for someone to blame, and for the housing industry, the glut of unsold homes must be ...
November 7, 2007
Back in 2005, Wachovia economist Mark Vitner was positively ecstatic about Florida’s economy. I wrote last year that ...
No surprise here, but struggling builder WCI Communities says it will cut 575 workers in six states, including about 30 in ...
November 3, 2007
Gov. Charlie Crist has worn out the superlatives in touting a property tax plan that will be on the ballot next year. He ...
November 2, 2007
For the past 20 months or so, I’ve been badgered by Realtors and others who insist I focus too much on flat or declining ...
Since my piece Sunday on cash-back-at-closing mortgage scams, I’ve received several e-mails from readers telling me ...
November 1, 2007
To realize how overwhelmed consumers are with a dizzying array of choices, you need only visit the toothpaste aisle at Publix ...
October 31, 2007
Zillow.com, the either-you-love-it-or-you-hate-it provider of home-price estimates, is watching you. The Seattle-based company ...
October 30, 2007
South Florida home prices fell 7.8 percent in the past year, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller index out today. ...
It’s official: Cleveland Clinic of Florida has leased nearly 29,000 square feet at CityPlace Tower, the 18-story office ...
October 28, 2007
One of the little-noticed developments in the mortgage meltdown: Predatory borrowing. Not all foreclosures are the result ...
October 26, 2007
Troubled builder Levitt and Sons is laying off 158 workers, including 18 at Tradition in Port St. Lucie. In a letter Levitt ...
Popular perception says Realtors get paid big bucks for doing little work. The more complicated reality is that a few star ...
October 25, 2007
Megamansion developer Frank McKinney could give Donald Trump a few pointers on self-promotion. Case in point: Frank McKinney’s ...
October 24, 2007
Home prices and sales continued to fall in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast in September, the Florida Association ...
October 23, 2007
We’ve emptied barrels of ink reporting how severely the subprime crisis has smacked securitized mortgages, but banks ...
The Wall Street Journal reports today that Florida leads the nation in loan defaults. Here are the ugly stats:... ...
October 22, 2007
The outlook for the Palm Beach County housing market is none-too-stellar. Jobless rates have risen from 2.8 percent to 4.8 ...
October 11, 2007
One of the old saws in the business world is that most entrepreneurs with creative new ideas go broke. That’s certainly ...
October 10, 2007
After reading a prediction that Palm Beach County’s housing downturn is just beginning, Douglas Rill, owner of Century ...
October 9, 2007
I went to a dissection of the real estate slowdown and a stand-up routine broke out. William Davis, president of Private ...
October 5, 2007
New York research firm Radar Logic has begun tracking the nation’s 25 largest housing markets based on sales price ...
October 4, 2007
DiVosta Building Corp. and its Florida Building Products division say they’ll lay off 19 employees in early December. ...
Troubled homebuilder Standard Pacific made headlines last month with its push to sell 200 homes in 10 days in Southern California. ...
October 1, 2007
The nation’s hottest housing market — Dallas — will appreciate by a none-too-impressive 6.4 percent in ...
September 28, 2007
Florida might not be No. 1 in home-price appreciation any longer, but we are tops in a less-desirable category: mortgage ...
September 27, 2007
The price of a typical “middle-management” home in Palm Beach County plunged this year, according to Coldwell ...
As if we needed another reminder of just how superheated the Florida economy became at the height of the real estate boom, ...
September 26, 2007
Back from vacation in northern California (median home price: $800,000) to find things haven’t changed much on the ...
September 19, 2007
In hopes of gaining some trenchant insight into the housing boom and bust, I cracked open Alan Greenspan’s heavily ...
September 18, 2007
I’ve been dutifully making note as companies such as First NLC, HomeBanc and First Magnus ax workers in Palm Beach ...
The Fed’s half-point rate cut sent the Dow soaring, but not everyone is cheering. Here’s contrarian analysis ...
Reports of the commercial real estate mortgage market’s demise have been grossly exaggerated, says Dan Fasulo, managing ...
September 17, 2007
Two items to ponder: Alan Greenspan tells the Financial Times to expect double-digit declines in home prices. What housing ...
September 12, 2007
Today we bring you “Last Comic Standing: Subprime Smackdown.” The housing meltdown is turning even economists ...
September 11, 2007
After promising for months that a turnaround is just around the corner, the National Association of Realtors says today that ...
September 10, 2007
Banking on Clematis Street’s comeback, Boca Raton attorney William Weisman has paid $10 million for the buildings at ...
September 7, 2007
Realtor bashers insist a real estate license provides a near-guarantee of riches, but an IPO filing from discount broker ...
Commercial property prices have soared in the past two years as home prices have fallen, but the boom could be winding down. ...
September 6, 2007
Subprime lender First NLC Financial Services last week laid off 56 workers, the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation says. ...
We in the media have been hyperventilating about a subprime meltdown that contrarians call minor. But two new studies show ...
If I had a dollar for every Realtor who justified Palm Beach County home prices by comparing our market to New York and California, ...
September 5, 2007
DiVosta Building Corp. will cut 13 more workers in late October and early November, the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation ...
Gov. Jeb Bush was none too convinced that Florida’s property tax problems could be fixed easily, which explains why ...
September 4, 2007
Seems like every affluent Baby Boomer I know owns more than one house. They’ve got their primary residence. They’ve ...
September 2, 2007
For regular folks who sell our residences for a few hundred thousand dollars, documentary stamp taxes are an unavoidable ...
August 31, 2007
Sure, the subprime meltdown has shaved my portfolio, but I’m looking at the bright side: At least my pristine, carefully ...
August 30, 2007
The bad news: Home prices in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast fell 4.5 percent in the year that ended June 30. The ...
The new home market won’t return to normalcy for years, says National Association of Home Builders Chief Economist ...
August 29, 2007
Five pieces of fodder: Yet more mortgage layoffs: GreenPoint Mortgage Funding is axing 72 people in Deerfield Beach and Tampa. ...
I took my 4-year-old to Sea Shell City in Riviera Beach the other day. She was transfixed by the treaure trove of trinkets, ...
August 28, 2007
For months, we’ve heard from the real estate market’s cheerleaders that the housing correction is nothing to ...
August 27, 2007
Still not much good news on the home price front, according to today’s report from the Florida Association of Realtors. ...
Complaining about Realtor commissions is a national pastime, and why not? After all, in public opinion polls of general usefulness ...
August 24, 2007
Falling home prices have eased the affordability squeeze in the Treasure Coast, but Palm Beach County’s housing affordability ...
Give Gov. Charlie Crist credit for tackling the insurance and property tax crises that have crippled the real estate market. ...
August 23, 2007
“Staging” homes for sale is all the rage these days, but a group of buyer agents warns buyers not to be fooled ...
Home values are down. Sales volumes have plummeted. Builders and lenders are axing workers. People no longer are flocking ...
August 22, 2007
The mortgage meltdown is causing more and more pain in Florida’s increasingly shaky job market. The latest victims: ...
The dollars behind the documentary stamp tax loophole keep piling up. I reported recently on $600 million in deals in Broward ...
August 21, 2007
My home’s value is down 11 percent from last year, according to the Palm Beach County property appraiser valuation ...
When state lawmakers passed a property tax package that included a convoluted ballot question in January, many fretted the ...
August 20, 2007
A year ago, subprime lending guidelines went something like this: Fog this here mirror, and we’ll give you a loan. ...
August 16, 2007
Palm Beach County’s property appraiser mails 680,000 preliminary tax bills on Tuesday, and Florida TaxWatch has estimated ...
August 15, 2007
The National Association of Realtors offers a predictably rosy interpretation of the second-quarter housing figures out today. ...
August 14, 2007
You’ve heard of “liar loans,” as no-documentation mortgages are known, but what about Ninja mortgages? ...
August 13, 2007
I wrote in yesterday’s paper about a tax loophole that let three sales totaling $600 million pay only $2.10 in documentary ...
August 7, 2007
I chatted today with longtime banker Pat Cooper, president of First Bank of the Palm Beaches, whom I hoped would find some ...
August 6, 2007
I blogged last week about how the housing market is killing nearly every industry in the U.S. economy. Today I’ll amend ...
August 2, 2007
Remember 2004 and 2005, when the housing market represented all that was good and true in American capitalism? Good ol’ ...
August 1, 2007
John Burford, investment portfolio manager at The International Bank of Miami, has some comforting advice for homeowners: ...
July 31, 2007
The $510 million Briny Breezes deal, which fell apart yesterday, always had more than its share of surreal touches. For starters, ...
July 19, 2007
DiVosta Building Corp. has laid off six more workers in Palm Beach Gardens, bringing to 430 the number of local layoffs since ...
An office complex west of Boca Raton sold this week for $33 million, marking, by my count, the fifth $30 mil-plus office ...
July 18, 2007
West Palm Beach-based Ceebraid Signal has irritated buyers at its long-unfinished Eden Place project in Boca Raton, but the ...
July 16, 2007
In one of the richest real estate deals in Palm Beach County history, Phillips Point, the prestigious waterfront office tower ...
July 13, 2007
I’ve owned two homes in Palm Beach County, a brand-new townhouse and a 30-year-old fixer-upper, and I was amazed at ...
July 10, 2007
Remember when Donald Trump’s $125 million listing in Palm Beach was the nation’s most expensive home? Ahh, the ...
June 22, 2007
Florida’s property tax system favors longtime homeowners and punishes everyone else, but commercial property owners ...
June 21, 2007
Item one: Mortgage rates dipped a bit this week, according to Freddie Mac’s survey out today, but the overall trend ...
June 20, 2007
Still trying to make sense of the property tax reform you’ll vote on in January? Three new online calculators help ...
June 19, 2007
In yet more downbeat news for Palm Beach County’s real estate market, PMI Mortgage Insurance rates us as one of four ...
I hope you weren’t counting on our fearless leaders in Tallahassee to fix Florida’s unfair property tax system. ...
June 15, 2007
The expensive consumer lesson of the week comes courtesy of Genco Power Solutions, the generator company that went broke ...
June 14, 2007
June, the press releases from the Realtor associations keep reminding me, is something called National Homeownership Month. ...
June 13, 2007
I’ve lost count of the number of times in the past 18 months that I’ve been lectured about the media’s ...
June 12, 2007
The Ph.D.s just keep piling on Realtors. The latest example comes in this report from economists at Northwestern University ...
June 11, 2007
If you missed Post reporter Michael Bender’s live chat about property tax reform, read the transcript here. More layoffs ...
June 8, 2007
Here’s a break from the barrage of bad news about windstorm insurance costs: New rules that took effect June 1 are ...
Our fearless leaders in Tallahassee go into special session next week to tinker with the state’s wacky property tax ...
June 7, 2007
Here’s a quick study guide for real estate students: — Realtor commissions are set by negotiations between the ...
June 6, 2007
We in the media tend to hype each newly released sales report as gospel. But a close look at three widely covered studies ...
June 5, 2007
Not that layoffs at DiVosta Building Corp. are news any more, but the builder said late Monday that it will lay off an additional ...
June 4, 2007
TUESDAY UPDATE: First Industrial paid $162 million for the 537 acres at Palm Beach Park of Commerce. A Chicago-based real ...
June 1, 2007
The property insurance reform passed by state lawmakers earlier this year mainly helps homeowners in the coastal counties ...
May 31, 2007
I’m the proud recipient of yet another piece of junk mail advertising Donald Trump’s appearance at The Learning ...
May 30, 2007
The housing doldrums are done, according to two reports out today. In a good news/bad news report, University of Central ...
Blaming a “challenging operating environment” for homebuilders, Pulte Homes is cutting 1,900 workers nationally. ...
May 25, 2007
Just toured Florida Research Park, the industrial park along the Beeline Highway, and my first thought (as always) was, This ...
May 15, 2007
DiVosta Building Corp. says today it’s laying off 42 people, the homebuilder’s third round of layoffs in recent ...
May 14, 2007
The latest annual ranking of Palm Beach County’s biggest real estate brokers is out from REAL Trends, and there’s ...
May 9, 2007
In a new report, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission call for more competition in the real estate ...
May 4, 2007
Another dispatch from the land of conflicting statistics: A National Association of Realtors survey says vacation homes and ...
May 2, 2007
Three tidbits today: The haters won’t have David Lereah to kick around any more. Lereah is leaving his position as ...
May 1, 2007
Home builders in Palm Beach County have cut waaay back on home production. In the first quarter of ‘05, builders broke ...
April 30, 2007
In his new book Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy, business journalist Daniel Gross makes the contrarian-but-persuasive ...
April 27, 2007
Bad news and a little good news from cement maker Rinker Group Ltd., which released its annual earnings yesterday. The Australian ...
April 26, 2007
Shares of subprime mortgage companies have been hammered in recent months, but West Palm Beach-based Ocwen Financial Corp. ...
April 24, 2007
Did I miss that February blizzard in Florida? The National Association of Realtors blames “unusually bad winter weather” ...
April 23, 2007
If a Boca Raton-based developer’s plans for Briny Breezes are approved, expect the condos there to sell for an average ...
April 22, 2007
Look at the bright side of the housing slump, says author and researcher Joel Kotkin. Sure, the slowdown has created a drag ...
April 20, 2007
Zillow’s Zestimates have made online home valuations all the rage, but here’s a new twist: HouseFront will text ...
April 16, 2007
Let’s say you’ve got a high-end condo on Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach that you’d like to sell. Expect ...
April 14, 2007
Magazine publisher Palm Beach Media Group has suspended publication of two magazines and has laid off three people, Chief ...
April 13, 2007
The housing slowdown has created two cliches that optimists just can’t stop repeating: “The phone is starting ...
April 12, 2007
For Nancy Case, an agent at Paradise Properties in West Palm Beach, 2006 was a tough year. She sold only five houses, and ...
April 6, 2007
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to listen to affluent people complain about the outrageous cost ...
April 5, 2007
Historian and real estate attorney Harvey Oyer looks at Florida’s recent housing boom and sees parallels to the 1920s, ...
April 4, 2007
In a speech today, Palm Beach County Property Appraiser Gary Nikolits says homeowners shouldn’t expect their tax assessments ...
April 2, 2007
The subprime meltdown is getting serious enough that even the ever-optimistic folks at the National Association of Realtors ...
March 30, 2007
For months now, the conventional wisdom has been that the housing slowdown would hurt the booming job market in Palm Beach ...
The latest book from National Association of Realtors Chief Economist David Lereah is out. The title: All Real Estate Is ...
March 28, 2007
Borrowers should stick with boring old fixed-rate mortgages, says Susan M. Wachter, professor of real estate and finance ...
March 27, 2007
The nation’s largest real estate broker says in a recent SEC filing that commissions are steadily dropping, but Kevin ...
March 26, 2007
Florida leads the nation in the number of foreclosures, according to a report out today from RealtyTrac. It shows 19,144 ...
With super-low vacancy rates for warehouses and sky-high rates for hotel rooms, Palm Beach County boasts one of the nation’s ...
March 23, 2007
Ah, the irony of it all. Private equity firms have been snapping up publicly traded real estate companies with the rationale ...
The evidence is in: It’s safe to say that 5 percent is the new 6 percent. I reported Realogy’s ever-dwindling ...
March 22, 2007
The subprime mortgage meltdown has shaken economist David M. Jones’ faith in the housing recovery. Jones, author of ...
March 15, 2007
Alan “The Maestro” Greenspan visited Boca Raton today, and he said the housing slump inevitably led to the subprime ...
March 13, 2007
Once the short-term pain of Florida’s housing slowdown subsides, the real estate market will recover. So says a study ...
March 12, 2007
More evidence that prices are rising as we speak: Two buildings on Royal Palm Way in Palm Beach just sold for $600 a square ...
March 8, 2007
Realogy’s annual report, out yesterday, pokes holes in two pieces of conventional wisdom about real estate commissions: ...
In a slow market, every agent’s looking for a gimmick. Chuck Mata of Century 21 America’s Choice has an attention-grabber: ...
March 5, 2007
My wife and I bought our current home from a widow, and some months after we moved in, a neighbor told us the seller’s ...
March 1, 2007
In the debate over Americans’ growing debt, there are two schools of thought. The alarmists say the end is nigh and ...
February 26, 2007
Prices are rising as we speak, at least for commercial real estate. The building that houses Bally Total Fitness in West ...
The National Association of Business Economists says the economy will continue to grow in 2007, no thanks to the real estate ...
February 23, 2007
A few weeks ago, I blogged about West Palm Beach homeowner Al Vazquez’s gripes about soaring property taxes. He spoke ...
I’ve long held the vague notion that mass materialism and crass consumerism started sometime after 1945 and were the ...
February 22, 2007
The housing boom has come and gone, but that doesn’t mean real estate profits have disappeared. It’s just that ...
February 21, 2007
Nobody ever got voted out of office for cutting Florida homesteaders’ property taxes. So it’s probably not much ...
February 19, 2007
Here’s a sentence I haven’t written since 2005: Palm Beach County real estate prices are soaring. By “Palm ...
February 15, 2007
Price estimates posted by Zillow, the popular online home valuation site, sometimes are “very good” and sometimes ...
February 14, 2007
The sluggish housing market has been blamed for everything from soft sales at Home Depot to less demand for full-sized pick-up ...
February 12, 2007
Looks like property taxes have overtaken insurance as the state’s hottest political issue. I counted more than 300 ...
February 9, 2007
Just finished reading The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan’s award-winning chronicle of the Dust Bowl, and couldn’t ...
February 7, 2007
I have to admit I never paid attention to the vacancy rates at the end of the Census Bureau’s quarterly homeownership ...
Quote of the day comes from Brian Tuttle, who backed out of a deal to buy a chunk of land at Gulfstream Polo Club west of ...
February 6, 2007
With condo sales looking as slow as anyone who tries to tackle Devin Hester, I can’t help but wonder as I drive past ...
January 31, 2007
Al Vazquez voted for the Save Our Homes amendment to the state constitution back in 1992, and he was pleased with how the ...
January 17, 2007
An optimistic outlook from Lennar breathed a bit of life into homebuilder stocks, as did the growing sentiment among builders ...
January 11, 2007
In more Trulia news, the California-based Web site crunched some local numbers for us. The Zip code that includes Jupiter’s ...
Here’s the latest result of my ongoing (and fruitless) search for the magic statistic that will divine the future of ...
January 5, 2007
My story about the gap between tax bills for big apartment buildings and small ones yielded a couple encouraging e-mails ...
December 29, 2006
As part of his drive to get Save Our Homes “portability” on the ballot in November 2008, Palm Beach County Property ...
December 28, 2006
Palm Beach County home prices took a big dip from their November 2005 peak, the Florida Association of Realtors said today. ...
December 27, 2006
New-home sales bounced back a bit in November, the U.S. Commerce Department reports. The number of sales was up 3.4 percent ...
December 22, 2006
Jobless rates rose slightly in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast in November, an increase state officials blame in ...
December 21, 2006
Even the optimists aren’t exactly optimistic about the South Florida real estate market for 2007. David Lereah, chief ...
December 20, 2006
In an intriguing analysis of property tax bills, the Tax Foundation looks at 775 counties and finds Palm Beach County’s ...
December 19, 2006
Realogy Corp.’s brief run as a publicly traded company looks likely to end soon. The company, which was spun off by ...
At the risk of adding to the crass commercialization of Christmas, here’s a shopping idea that’ll satisfy both ...
December 18, 2006
A new study from Florida TaxWatch takes a look at Florida’s wacky property tax system and reaches the same old conclusions: ...
In another symptom of the slowing housing market, DiVosta Building Corp. says it will lay off 218 of the 552 workers at its ...
December 15, 2006
After writing about how a West Palm Beach homeowner’s real estate auction fell flat, I read with interest an economist’s ...
December 11, 2006
The National Association of Realtors expects 2007 to be another sluggish year for home sales and home prices. In a forecast ...
December 6, 2006
First came the National Association of Realtors’ Pending Home Sales Index on Monday, which said activity (down 13.6 ...
In 50 years, rural Hendry County will look as suburbanized as Wellington and Port St. Lucie. That’s according to a ...
December 5, 2006
The National Association of Realtors’ Pending Home Sales Index says the number of contracts signed in October is down ...
November 28, 2006
The Florida Association of Realtors says Palm Beach County prices stabilized in October, rising $100 from September, but ...
November 27, 2006
Here’s the latest unexpected consequence of the housing slowdown: Car sales are dipping. Today’s Wall Street ...
November 21, 2006
Little change on the affordability front, according to the National Association of Home Builders’ latest Housing Opportunity ...
November 20, 2006
Eve Samples’ story in Sunday’s paper detailed how Lennar unloaded its last few homes in a Martin County development ...
Web sites that estimate the value of your homes are all the rage these days, but good luck making sense of the valuations ...
November 17, 2006
Bob Graeve of Illustrated Properties asks me to report some good news about the local housing market, so I’ll oblige. ...
November 16, 2006
In another report from a disgruntled seller whose auction failed, Tom Minnehan of Tequesta relates this experience: I read ...
November 14, 2006
Economists call it the wealth effect: The value of your stocks or house rises sharply, and suddenly you’re in the mood ...
Palm Beach agent Cristina Condon handled sales worth $182 million in 2005, making her the nation’s fourth-most productive ...
November 9, 2006
Real estate brokers’ bottom lines are taking hits from the slowdown. Last week, Realogy, the largest broker in the nation ...
November 3, 2006
Buffalo attorney Allan Lipman is urging New York snowbirds to claim Florida as their home state. The big reason, of course, ...
Unable to get much “positive” play in the press, the National Association of Realtors is taking matters into ...
October 31, 2006
You’ve heard plenty about the far-reaching effects of the housing slowdown. One naysayer, Chris McCarty, director of ...
Yesterday’s story about a failed auction prompted a call from long-time auctioneer Lynn Gardner, who echoes the “amateur ...
October 30, 2006
With sales slumping, seems like everyone’s jumping on the auction bandwagon — and the ride can be a bumpy one. One ...
October 20, 2006
At their most basic level, home prices are determined by supply and demand. Anyone who suffered through Econ 101 knows that. ...
October 11, 2006
Realtor commissions “may be inflated by more than $30 billion annually,” says a new study. The report by Mark ...
October 9, 2006
Last week’s widely quoted study by Moody’s Economy.com painted a bleak picture for the housing market, but it ...
October 4, 2006
Victor DeFrisco listed his suburban Lake Worth home earlier this year at $469,900. No interest. Then he dropped the price ...
October 2, 2006
My story in Sunday’s paper elicited more tales of deals being scotched by rising homeowners insurance. Roger Selah ...
September 29, 2006
Don’t take this too seriously, but National City Corp.’s economist once again says Palm Beach County and the ...
September 28, 2006
Palm Beach County home prices are still rising by one measure. Coldwell Banker’s annual Home Price Comparison Index, ...
The Internet just keeps making things easier for buyers and sellers. If you don’t believe me, check out Trulia.com’s ...
September 25, 2006
Here are the ugly numbers from the latest Florida Association of Realtors report: Single-family home prices down 6 percent ...
September 22, 2006
As Florida’s property tax mess deepens, a couple of Republicans are offering fixes. First comes Coral Gables economist ...
September 12, 2006
Here’s another indication of just how sluggish the real estate market has become: Exit Realty Premier Properties agent ...
Townhouse owner “Twyla” writes to ask for some practical advice about selling her property in West Palm Beach. ...
September 11, 2006
Time to play name that property: It’s a palatial mansion in the 500 block of North County Road on the north end of ...
September 8, 2006
I’ve been a bit dubious of claims that the arrival of the Scripps Research Institute and the Torrey Pines Institute ...
September 7, 2006
Yet more pessimism from the National Association of Realtors. Its latest monthly forecast, out today, predicts fewer sales ...
The affordability squeeze is hitting black and Hispanic Floridians especially hard, according to a joint report by the National ...
September 6, 2006
We used to be able to count on the National Association of Realtors to publicize the results of its quarterly housing affordability ...
September 5, 2006
With home prices “cooling in a very significant way,” as the head of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise ...
September 1, 2006
Orlando economist Hank Fishkind has some good news, sort of: Things won’t get any worse. “Single-family housing ...
The slowing housing market could be bad news for bank stocks, The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek warn. The WSJ’s ...
August 31, 2006
Tell me if you know this person: He (or she) has a bigger bank account than most people you know, but he never stops spinning ...
August 29, 2006
High-school history teacher Jim Cox paid $410,000 last year for his house in Royal Palm Beach, and he didn’t mind the ...
August 22, 2006
A cooler real estate market isn’t doing much to ease the affordability squeeze, according to the National Association ...
The state’s largest real estate broker has a sanguine view of what he acknowledges is “a correction” in ...
August 21, 2006
For those of you feeling nostalgic for the boom, here’s some bullish news from the Census Bureau: Palm Beach County ...
August 16, 2006
West Palm Beach condo converter Ceebraid Signal continues to annoy its customers, if this blog is any indication. The irritated ...
August 15, 2006
Who says hurricanes are bad for housing markets? Indeed, Hurricane Katrina did for Louisiana and the Mississippi coast what ...
July 28, 2006
The flat-lining numbers in our real estate market aren’t pretty, but things are looking downright ugly in Southwest ...
July 27, 2006
Two weeks ago, when National City Corp. paid $1.1 billion for Harbor Federal Savings & Loan, I wrote about National City ...
July 26, 2006
Pop quiz: The residential real estate industry is (A) A freewheeling marketplace where competition thrives; (B) A crony-filled ...
July 21, 2006
In breaking news from the mine-is-bigger-than-yours front, Donald Trump’s $125 million listing in Palm Beach no longer ...
Mark Vitner, the oft-quoted Wachovia Corp. economist who once was the cheeriest of cheerleaders for Florida’s economy, ...
July 19, 2006
And you thought Florida’s homeowners insurance market was bad. Turns out we’re paying a premium — perhaps twice ...
July 17, 2006
So I know we in the media are supposed to be apoplectic about the affordable housing squeeze, but here’s one case where ...
July 13, 2006
More from the good news-bad news front: Two prominent real estate groups stick by their prediction of a soft landing for ...
July 12, 2006
From the isn’t-it-ironic department: National City Corp., which says Treasure Coast homes are overvalued by 77 percent, ...
July 7, 2006
Stat of the week: 31,000 Number of affordable housing units needed in Palm Beach County by 2010. Quotes of the week: “We’re ...
June 30, 2006
Stat of the week $100 That’s how much the median home price in Palm Beach County rose from May 2005 to May 2006, according ...
June 29, 2006
Same chapter, different verse from a powwow on South Florida’s economy in Palm Beach Gardens: Frank Nero, head of Miami-Dade ...
June 27, 2006
ZipRealty, the California-based firm best known for giving commission rebates to buyers, plans to open its first Palm Beach ...
June 26, 2006
North Palm Beach real estate investor David Sprague offers a case study in why Palm Beach County sales volumes have cratered: ...
June 23, 2006
OK, OK, I’m sure you’re as tired of the phrase McMansion as I am. But here’s one more reason to invoke ...
June 20, 2006
At monthly meetings of the Boca Real Estate Investment Club, President David Dweck used to tout Palm Beach County properties ...
June 19, 2006
A consumer group labels the real estate industry a “cartel” - an epithet most frequently associated with Colombian ...
June 15, 2006
Good news and bad news from the widely watched “State of the Nation’s Housing� report from Harvard University’s Joint ...
June 14, 2006
The latest sign that the air is leaking out of the bubble: Condos are being marketed by guys standing at busy intersections ...
June 13, 2006
Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast remain among the nation’s most overpriced housing markets, according to the ...
June 1, 2006
Anybody remember positive cash flow? That was the quaint, circa-2000 concept that an investor could buy a house and rent ...
May 30, 2006
Palm Beach County’s foreclosure rate is higher than that of the nation as a whole, according to a new study by RealtyTrac. ...
May 24, 2006
After reading Eve Samples’ story Sunday about speculators’ broken dreams, I couldn’t help but remembering ...
May 23, 2006
In the mood for a supremely geeky look at the real estate boom? Check this study by Christopher Cagan of First American Real ...
May 18, 2006
A new study says the housing affordability squeeze eased ever so slightly in the first three months of the year. The National ...
May 17, 2006
Looks like Cendant Corp., which ponied up $160 million for Arvida Realty Services back in 2002, is getting its money’s ...
May 16, 2006
I’ve got the perfect solution to the housing affordability squeeze employers, buyers, politicians and, yes, journalists ...
May 8, 2006
Lots of talk but no action on the property tax front. The 2006 legislative session generated a dozen proposals for reforming ...
May 5, 2006
For many Realtors, comparing the housing boom to the dot-com bubble has been strictly verboten. That sort of talk is only ...
May 4, 2006
Remember when the Treasure Coast was a sleepy little area, when you could buy a vacant lot in Port St. Lucie for $5,000? ...
May 3, 2006
Is the real estate market headed for a soft landing or a crash landing? Is it a bursting bubble or a deflating balloon? OK, ...
Jeff Ostrowski
Alexandra Clough
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