Posts Tagged ‘CNBC’
‘A Great Time to Buy,’ Real Estate Mogul Corcoran Says
Real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran says it’s ‘a great time to buy.’
NEW YORK — It’s so thrilling to hear an expert back up what you’ve been saying all along. In this case, it’s real estate mogul and reality TV star Barbara Corcoran weighing it on why it’s a great time to buy.
Appreciation in property values, she said Wednesday on CNBC, would be stronger than the numbers are suggesting.
“It’s going to go much higher than people anticipate,” she said.
Sure enough, the Case-Shiller home-price index has shown consistent growth over the past several months and an increase of 3 percent from last year — and that’s in a soft economy.
The Case-Shiller index is backward-looking, data-heavy and conservative gauge of what home prices have already done, so it’s not subject prone to wild speculation.
With mortgage rates this week around 3.4 percent for a 30-year loan and 2.84 percent for a 15-year, Corcoran is the latest expert to suggest buying real estate, joining the likes of billionaire investor Warren Buffett and Billy Procida, Donald Trump’s original apprentice.
In her interview, Corcoran was asked whether prospective buyers who are able to borrow should borrow as much as they can. She agreed.
“You have 30 percent reduction in sale price. You have cheap money around,” she said, adding that in nine out of 10 real estate markets, buyers are likely to be outbid on a housing purchase at least once.
Corcoran, who built a $5 billion New York real estate business with $1,000 and now stars in ABC’s “Shark Tank,” also said that homeowners looking to upgrade should take notice.
“Right now, if you’re upgrading to a bigger house, even if you’re selling at 10 percent off, you buy your new house at a 10 percent off,” she said.
Addressing the popularity of multi-family housing, Corcoran said buyers would do well to look at another segment of the market.
“I would first go out and buy a beachfront property,” she said. “Go out and buy a second home. It’s the last piece of the real estate market that has yet to hit bottom.”
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NYC Real Estate ‘Can’t Get Cheaper,’ Former Trump VP Says
Owning a Home Regains Appeal (Photo by Bruno J. Navarro)
NEW YORK — Buying a home within 100 miles of the metropolitan New York area stands to be a strong investment that “can’t get cheaper,” a former apprentice of Donald Trump and real estate mogul Billy Procida said this week on CNBC.
“At the end of the day, all of the country’s wealth was made through homeownership. Now, of course, we have fallen as far as you can fall. It can’t get cheaper because we’re way below replacement costs,” he said in a televised interview. (Watch: Billy Procida Says Owning a Home Regains Appeal.)
Founder of Procida Advisors and Procida Funding, Procida has been called Trump’s “original apprentice” due to his 10-year letter-writing campaign for a job with the famous developer and reality-television star. He worked his way from an unpaid position to vice president with the Trump organization.
Procida had advice for those thinking about buying real estate.
“If I’m talking to a consumer, a first-time homebuyer, a couple looking to move, I say if you have 5 percent or 10 percent of the value of the home you’re looking to buy, you should be buying because you’re going to look back 10 years from now and go, ‘Thank god I did.’ When liquidity returns to the market you will see things shoot up, and that will happen in two or three years,” he said.
The developer and mogul also urged staying within one’s means when buying.
“Would I be trying to reach today? No,” he said. “Would I be going out to middle of nowhere to buy? No. If you are buying a house because it is near where you work and you are going to stay there for a while, there is nothing like homeownership to build wealth. That’s a fact.”
For those who don’t have a down payment, Procida advised renting something cheap to build up savings. “Too many young people, I see, graduating from college go for their lungs and get no savings and they will never be able to buy anything. If you can get the deposit, interest rates are at all-time lows.”
This week, the average rate for a 30-year mortgage rate was 3.59 percent, just slightly above its all-time low.
Based in the New York metropolitan area, Procida also said he had a new investment vehicle: “Our new fund is called the 100-Mile Fund because I want to be investing 100 miles from right here because there’s no more land. Everything’s built out.”
For the big picture, Procida struck an optimistic note.
“The good news about America and our banks is sooner or later they will flood the market with liquidity and things will go crazy again, and you will go, ‘You know what? I’m not going to refinance this time and take everything out of my house and go on vacation.’ That’s where everybody got in trouble. It wasn’t that the house is not a wealth creator. It is,” he said. “They have nowhere to go in my opinion but up from here.”
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Home Sales Approach Two-Year High
Existing Home Sales Near Two-Year High (Photo by Bruno J. Navarro)
NEW YORK — It’s not your imagination: The real estate market is hot again.
Sales of existing homes grew almost to the highest rate in two years, while prices saw the biggest increase since 2006.
Last month, existing U.S. home sales increased 3.4 percent to an annual rate of 4.62 million units, according to the National Association of Realtors.
That rate was the highest since May 2010.
Anecdotally, sales activity has picked up in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, as previously forecast. I expect the data to show significant gains when it becomes available.
At the same time, home resale prices nationwide soared to a median of $177,400 in April, up 10.1 percent from a year earlier.
“That was the biggest year-over-year increase since January 2006,” according to Reuters.
Mortgage rates, too, continued their downward trend.
The average rate for a 30-year loan dropped to 3.79 percent, a Freddie Mac survey showed.
That was even lower than the record low set earlier this month.
As always, if you’re looking to buy, sell or rent a home in New York, please let me know.
UPDATE: The data gets a boost from federal statistics, which show similar gains among new homes.
The Real Deal writes, “Sales of new single-family homes rose 3.3 percent month-over-month in April 2012 and 9.9 percent year-over-year, according to a release issued by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. April saw new home sales at a seasonally adjusted rate of 343,000 units.”
Does Report On Rentals & Sales Suggest a Bubble?
A view of the Manhattan skyline.
NEW YORK — A unique trend is emerging in housing prices and rentals, according to a report from Zillow that has not yet been released.
“While it seems that rents are rising at the expense of home values, the opposite is true. A thriving rental market will stimulate home sales, as investors snap up low-priced inventory to convert to rentals. That, in turn, will lower the number of homes on the market, which will eventually help put a floor under the value of all homes,” says Zillow chief economist Stan Humphries.
