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San Clemente Man Tells Council He is New Miramar Owner

Barry Baptiste Tells Council He is New Miramar Owner

JULY 17, 2013

Barry Baptiste, of San Clemente, speaks to the City Council on Tuesday about the ownership situation at the Miramar. Baptiste said he and his company have purchased the property from Marc Spizzirri following a lawsuit and the latter man’s bankruptcy filing. Photo by Jim Shilander

At the conclusion of a presentation to the City Council on potential redevelopment options for the Miramar Theatre and Bowling Alley, San Clemente resident Barry Baptiste dropped a bombshell on the body. He, not Marc Spizzirri, is now the owner of the Miramar.
Baptiste said as the result of a lawsuit against Spizzirri in 2009, he had been awarded a judgment against a limited liability

company controlled by Spizzirri, which gave him control over 99 percent of its assets, including the Miramar. The other 1 percent is currently held in the name of Spizzirri’s wife, but Baptiste said he expected to be awarded that final percentage next month. Baptiste said he had grown frustrated with Spizzirri appearing before city boards and being referred to in the press as the owner of the Miramar.

After a story in the July 11 issue of the San Clemente Times about a presentation before the Planning Commission, an anonymous letter-writer sent documents to the paper indicating Spizzirri had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In a phone interview, Spizzirri confirmed that he had indeed filed for bankruptcy and said his ownership status had changed.

Baptiste told the council he was presently working to get caught up on some of the development options for the theater and bowling alley.
After a presentation by design consultant Matt Jennings on potential uses for the Miramar, council members expressed hope that something could be done at the site.

Mayor Bob Baker asked Baptiste to meet with City Manager Pall Gudgeirrsson and other city officials to confirm his new status as owner, and catch up on development options.

Jennings told councilwoman Lori Donchak the cost of refurbishing the facility was “more than likely a couple of million” dollars, but would ultimately depend on what the owner decided to do with the property.

Rising prices and falling inventory across the country

Inventories are declining, and prices are rising, according to a recent report from Movoto Real Estate, a brokerage with a presence in 30 U.S. states.

Examining data from Multiple Listing Services in 34 cities across the nation, Movoto found year-over-year declines in June’s inventory in 32 of the 38 cities it tracks. The most drastic declines took place in Sacramento (-54.5 percent), Detroit (-47.1 percent), and Boston (-46.7 percent).

Over the same time period, price per square foot increased in all but two of the cities Movoto observes. The exceptions were New Orleans (-2.2 percent) and Chicago (-3.2 percent). Sacramento topped the list with a 68.1 percent price-per-square-foot increase.

Highlighting just the West Coast, Movoto found a year-over-year decrease in inventory but a month-over-month increase.

A composite of 14 major metros on the West Coast reveals

an 11.9 percent yearly decline in inventory in June, according to Movoto.

In contrast, listings rose month-over-month from 12,218 to 13,698.

West Coast cities with the steepest inventory decreases year-over-year in June were Salem, Oregon (-25.4 percent), Bellevue, Washington (-24.5 percent), and Los Angeles (-24.5 percent).

San Jose, California (19.2 percent), and San Diego, California (3.6 percent) were the only two of the 14 cities in the index to experience rising inventories over the 12-month period.

As inventory declines, price per square foot is on the rise. However, the two cities with growing inventories are not left out of this trend. San Diego and San Jose take the second and third places, respectively, in the ranking of cities by price increase over the year.

Price per square foot increased 20.8 percent in San Diego and 18.4 percent in San Jose.

The only city to beat these two was Los Angeles with a 28.6 percent increase. As of last month, the price per square foot for a home in Los Angeles is $432. This is the second-highest price per square foot on Movoto’s June index for the West Coast.

However, San Francisco outpaced all other cities with a price per square foot of $655.

Prices were also generally up over the month, according to Movoto, rising from $251 per square foot to $253 per square foot.

Mortgage rates recede after dramatic jump

Following last week’s dramatic spike, mortgage rates reversed course this week, according to surveys from Freddie Mac andBankrate.com.

Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey showed the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) averaging 4.29 percent (0.7 point) for the week ending July 3, down from last week’s two-year high of 4.46 percent. Last year at this time, the 30-yearFRM averaged 3.62 percent.

The 15-year FRM averaged 3.39 percent (0.7 percent), down from 3.50 percent the previous weekAdjustable rates, meanwhile, stayed more or less on track. The 5-year Treasury-index hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) averaged 3.10 percent (0.7 point)—up from 3.08 percent—while the 1-year ARM averaged 2.66 percent (0.4 point), unchanged from the last survey.

“Fixed mortgage rates fell over the holiday week as market concerns over the timing of the Federal Reserve’s pullback in bond purchases eased somewhat,” said Frank Nothaft, VP and chief economist for Freddie Mac. “Rates are still low by historical standards and should continue to aid in housing affordability and the ongoing recovery of the housing market.”

Bankrate’s weekly national survey showed similar trends, with the 30-year fixed falling to 4.48 percent and the 15-year fixed dropping to 3.62 percent. Meanwhile, the 5/1 ARM rose to 3.48 percent.

While rates did ease, they’re still a far cry from where they were just two months ago.

“As recently as May 1st, the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 3.52 percent. At that time, a $200,000 loan would have carried a monthly payment of $900.32. With the average rate currently at 4.48 percent, the monthly payment for the same size loan would be $1,011, a difference of $111 per month for anyone that waited just a little too long,” Bankrate said in a release.

Tips To Be A Smart Homebuyer

Back in those olden days (i.e., the 80’s), wise house hunting and smart real estate decision-making required a short list of skills.  

You needed to have an eagle-eye, because there was no web where you could search for homes online. Your agent would look up listings in a big book, or more often you would just drive by a nice-looking home with a for sale sign in front and call the agent up to inquire about it.

You needed to have stamina, because there was no internet which would show you pictures of homes’ interiors - if you wanted to see inside a home, you needed to go inside the home.  

You needed negotiating skills. Then, agents were sought-after more for their home-finding help than for negotiation advice.

You needed a strong sense of your own vision, aesthetics and style. HGTV did not even exist.  Neither did the genre of home design and decor magazines (exception: Architectural Digest, which was not exactly providing affordable or accessible home design tips - then or  now)!

Today, you still need all of these skills. But there’s a short list of additional skills that have been necessitated by the evolution of the real estate and mortgage market. Here is a handful:

1.  Self-control. There’s a lot of hullaballoo about multiple offers, above-asking sales prices and crazy amounts of cash being thrown at sellers, these days. So much, in fact, that some industry observers and participants wonder whether the frenzied market that led to the last market crash might be repeating itself.  

There is evidence that can be cited to bolster arguments in both directions. But one thing all can agree on is this: no one can make anyone spend more on a home than they can afford.  As a home buyer, you must be the ultimate arbiter of what you spend and only you are responsible for controlling yourself to avoid overspending.  Your agent might tell you that you need to go higher for a particular home - and they might be right - but if that “higher” would overextend your personal finances, it’s your responsibility to refuse to go there.  

That might mean you have to rejigger your house hunting price range lower. It might mean you have to compromise on the number of bedrooms or even neighborhood. All of these require that you exercise the skill of self-control. Don’t fight the realities of either the market or your budget. The sooner you accept them and start strategizing around them, the sooner you’ll end up in a home - and the more smart, sound and sustainable your home ownership experience will be.

2.  Math.  You can’t control yourself and your spending without first understanding what you can and cannot afford. Almost every modern house hunter knows that they are supposed to decide for themselves what they can and cannot afford. But in practice, many still view their mortgage qualification limit as the true upper limit on what they can spend for a home.

• If that is what you’ve been doing, stop it. Get real about flexing some very basic math skills, no matter how much you hated math in school. 
• Sit down with your spouse, your bills, your bank account statements and maybe even your financial planner or CPA.
• Get clear on what comes in and goes out every month, and how much cash you can afford to put into your home up front (down payment, closing costs, and move-in expenses) and how much you can afford to spend on housing every month. 
• Then, take that information to your mortgage professional and ask them to give you some financing scenarios that use what you can afford to back into the corresponding home purchase price range. 
• Finally, take that to your agent and work with them to use that range to set your home search price range.  If you live in a place where most homes sell for more than asking, find out how much more - then search in a range that much lower than you want to spend, so you can afford to offer enough to be successful.

I find that many folks are simply resistant to doing this math because they don’t like math or are afraid of the truths the math will reveal about what they can (or cannot afford). Others are resistant to having these seemingly dry and difficult conversations. But the willingness to go there is essential to making decisions that will stand you in good stead through a lifetime of home ownership. Stop resisting,  Dive into the discomfort. It’ll be well worth it.

3.  Listening.  So many times, I’ve gotten emails from disgruntled home buyers saying their agent is not listening to them about what they want, and keeps showing them condos when they really want a single family home, showing them 2 bedroom homes when they want 4.

On the other hand, I also get notes from disgruntled home buyers saying their agent is not listening to them when they say what they can afford to spend, and keeps showing them homes priced beyond that range. 

Here’s what I think is happening: many buyers know their budget, but fight the reality of what that translates to in terms of what kind of home can be had for that money in their area. So, agents are forced to either: (a) show you a home you can afford within the range you’ve given them, which will fall short of your wish list, or (b) show you a home that checks the boxes on your wish list that is more expensive than what you’ve said you want to spend.

There is a third thing that can happen here, though.  You can listen.  Most agents won’t do either (a) or (b) above without telling you that the property reflects a compromise in specifications or in price. But you must be able to hear that over the hum of your wishes and dreams, or you will be perpetually disgruntled and frustrated in your house hunt.

And that’s not all you have to listen to - smart buyers listen to the numbers, listen to the market data, listen to the feedback inherent in unsuccessful offers, listen to their spouse or other partner(s) in co-buying, and listen to their children or other roommates-to-be in the property.  Successful buyers listen to the seller’s wants, needs and priorities and factor them into the mix, too. Listening doesn’t mean you have to cave or capitulate to what someone else wants, or even that you have to prioritize it over your own wishes. But it does mean that you respectfully process the other perspective, consider it and course-correct, if sensible. (Or not, if not.)  

4.  Discernment.   We live in a world of noise, for better or for worse. The noise of TV commentators hollering about what we can and cannot afford, while still other TV commentators noisily discuss home features and lifestyles with no regard to their monetary implications for real-life home owners. There’s the noise of news about the economy, the noise of our friends’ and parents’ opinions, the noise of our own inner fantasies that life will finally be perfect if we can just live in that style of house, or on that street, or in that subdivision, or with a house full of that furniture. 

Discernment is the skill of picking out what is useful, wise, right and important and being able to discard or disregard the rest of the noise. Doing your own math, creating your own vision of life in your eventual home and listening to only the wise counsel of those you know to have your best interests at heart are all discernment tactics. You might need to exercise vigilance against allowing the noise to spark panic, fear, paralysis or even over-optimism, over-confidence and over-spending. 

Home prices increasing

Forty-five of the top 50 metropolitan markets will experience yearly price increases during the second half of the year, according to Clear Capital’s Home Data Index Market Reportreleased Tuesday.

This widespread forecast of price increases “speaks to this move toward a more balanced, broad-based recovery,” said Alex Villacorta, VP of research and analytics at Clear Capital.

Bakersfield, California, is expected to lead national price gains with a 5.2 percent price increase through the end of this year.

Las Vegas comes in as a close second in Clear Capital’s forecast with a projected price growth of 5 percent. Las Vegas posted the highest quarterly price gain in the second quarter—an increase of 4.4 percent.

The Bakersfield metro posted a notable jump from 29th place in Clear Capital’s first-quarter report to first place in the second quarter report.

“This leap is an example of the fundamentals driving the overall recovery, Clear Capital said, adding also that Bakersfield “serves as a reminder that the recovery continues to unfold market by market.”

After, Bakersfield and Las Vegas, the top five metros for projected price gains through the end of the year are rounded out by Chicago; Sacramento, California; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with gains of 4.9 percent, 4.8 percent, and 4.4 percent, respectively.

Clear Capital expects the Cleveland metro to fare the worst for the remainder of the year with a 2.2 percent price decline.

Raleigh, North Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Denver, Colorado, are the only other metros out of the top 50 with anticipated price depreciations over the remainder of the year, according to Clear Capital. However, the analytics firm expects price decreases of less than 0.5 percent in each.

“At the metro level, we saw some subtle, yet notable trends unfold in June,” Villacorta said. “While price trends continued to diverge at the micro market level, they are for the most part positive.

At a national level, Clear Capital revised its 2.6 percent projected price gain over the year this year up to 6 percent. While lower than the current yearly gain of 8.6 percent, this forecast is still greater than historical norms, which rank between 4 and 5 percent.

While it is notable that some markets are experiencing double-digit gains, “[s]eeing the bulk of major metros move into positive territory is truly good news, even if their gains are still in the single digits,” Villacorta said.

Real Estate Recovery Myth's Unraveled

Like anything else, real estate has its urban legends, its stories that get told so often they seem like they must be true. But unlike urban legends about exploding Pop Rocks or the origins of Jennifer Aniston’s ‘Friends’-era haircut, real estate myths have the potential to create fear, panic, paralysis and all sorts of other decision glitches.

The recent market upturn, coming on the heels of 6 years of near-Depression, has given rise to its own set of real estate myths.  Here is a handful, along with some ways you can and should rethink them.

Myth #1.  It’s recovering too fast.  According to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home-price index, American home prices increased an average of 10.6 percent between March 2012 and March 2013. Twelve of the 20 major metro areas tracked had year-over-year median home price increases in the double-digits. The list was topped by Phoenix, San Francisco and Las Vegas, all of which saw 20 percent or greater annual home price increases.

That seems crazy fast, to some. So crazy, in fact, that it’s created the fear that the current market’s exuberance will re-create the steep incline and decline in home values that we all remember not-so-fondly from the last boom-bust cycle. 

Here’s the deal: markets have cycles, period. So I can guarantee you that the ups and downs will repeat, though hopefully not to such extremes. Part of what made the last down cycle so extreme was the fact that lenders were greenlighting massive home loans to borrowers without requiring them to document their ability to pay for the property over the long term. Buyers, in turn, overextended themselves regularly. Today’s loans are allowing people to buy without putting much down, but I haven’t seen almost any examples of the fully stated income or so-called “liar’s” loans that really got people in trouble. (Yet.)

Here’s the other thing: the data can be a bit misleading.  When an area’s home values have been very, very depressed for long, it simply doesn’t take that vast of an uptick to generate double-digit percentage point increases. When you look at the top five recovery markets, according to the Case-Shiller, four of them: Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami and Tampa – ranked among the hardest hit markets in the foreclosure crisis and resulting downturn. (San Francisco was the anomaly.)  When you look at other markets that skated through the recession relatively unscathed, like New York, you see the percentage point increase year-over-year was much less impressive/ less scary (depending on your outlook), at 2.6 percent.

Myth #2.  Investors are driving demand. In some areas, investors are buying up lots of low-priced homes. From big Wall Street investment groups to Mom-and-Pop investors, people who don’t plan to live in the homes they’re buying were responsible for about 20% of May home sales. But this number is actually on a downward path – investors were responsible for 22% of home sales in April, and investor activity should continue to decline as prices increase, putting a cap on the profits investors can realize. 

While investor activity is declining, buyer demand is increasing, as evidenced by increasing numbers of cash transactions, offers per property and speed of homes leaving the market. 

First-time buyers are responsible for 36% of current buyer activity and repeat homeowners for over 43%. Investors have been active, but by no means are they responsible for creating the intense buyer demand that now characterizes the market. 

Myth #3.  Sellers are stuck.  This time, let’s start with what’s true. Many, many sellers in hot markets are in the midst of an exasperating Catch-22:  they can finally sell their homes, which have been underwater for years. But now they struggle to buy, amidst the multiple offer mania – some report having to make offers on dozens of homes, or even having to rent a place until they can buy one.

As I see it, sellers aren’t stuck as much as they are being forced into being strategic about sequencing their transactions and setting up their deal points. During the recession, millions of sellers had no equity – or negative equity. That meant they couldn’t sell, which meant they didn’t have the money to buy – heck, many couldn’t even refinance. That’s what I call stuck. Now, they have the option to pull cash out to buy first, the option to refinance and stay put, and the option to sell – period.  So for my dollar, today’s sellers are nowhere near stuck, compared with the truly stuck sellers of yesteryear.

Most of the sellers who have recently, truly gotten stuck (i.e., sellers who’ve been forced to rent until they could successfully buy) ended up in that situation because they listed their homes first, unaware that the market truly had shifted and that their home would fly off the market. Now, we know. So, if you’re selling in a super-hot market, work with your agent to put a strategy in place. Consider buying first, if you have the means or can get them. Or list your home with a Seller’s Contingency or a rent-back agreement (where your home’s buyer rents it back to you for a short time), to buy yourself some extra time to score a new place.  Your agent and mortgage pros can help.

Myth #4.  Rates are through the roof.  Have mortgage interest rates gone up?  Yes.  Is the Fed signaling they intend to raise rates, too?  Yes - in 2015.  (Not exactly tomorrow.)

Last week’s reported 30 year mortgage rates were 3.94 percent, and 15-year rates were right around 3%.  Given that the record low rates clocked in at 3.31 (30-year) and 2.62 (15-year), even today’s higher rates are not worth your worry.  Nor is an increase of rates likely to cause all the pent-up buyer demand of the last few years to dissipate.  My Dad used to remind me that people bought homes when rates were 14% in the 80’s, and they will buy them now, even as they inch up – because they need and want places to live.  

Myth #5.  Foreclosures are a thing of the past. Through the recession, many banks and mortgage servicers began to hold hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes off the market to avoid flooding it, depressing prices even further than they already were. And even now, these institutions continue to trickle them onto the market, rather than creating a deluge of home inventory. Additionally, mortgage regulators now allow servicers to rent out REOs, versus selling them, and to hold them as long as 5 or 10 years following foreclosure, if needed. 

While we are seeing a steep decline in the number of newly foreclosured homes, we can expect to have a higher-than-average number of foreclosed homes – REOs – on the market for some years to come. This so-called “shadow inventory” had declined over 10% nationwide between January 2012 and January 2013.  And with the uptick in demand, we should continue to see this so-called “shadow inventory” of homes decline as banks take the opportunity to get these homes off their books.  

Price it Right the First Time

With house prices increasing across the country, sellers may think they can list their homes at a higher price and adjust if necessary. That may not be a good strategy. This is a post we ran last year by Ken H. Johnson, Ph.D. — Florida International University (FIU) and Editor of the Journal of Housing Research. To view other research from FIU, visit http://realestate.fiu.edu/.

The Research

Are there any negative effects from changing the listing price of a property? This question haunts Brokers/Agents as well as sellers of property every day. At present, there does not seem to be a consensus answer to this question within the professional real estate community. Fortunately, this question was scientifically investigated by John R. Knight. Unfortunately, few know the results of Professor Knight’s research.

In Knight, the impact of changing a property’s listing price is investigated. Additionally, the types of property that are most likely to experience a price change are also estimated. The findings from this research indicate that, on average, properties which experience a listing price change take longer to sell and suffer a price discount greater than similar properties. Furthermore, bigger price changes are found to experience even longer marketing times and greater price discounts. Finally, as for which properties are most likely to experience a price change, Knight finds that the greater the initial markup; the higher the likelihood that any given property will experience a listing price change.

Implications for Practice

Sellers as well as Brokers/Agents should therefore be aware of the critical necessity of getting the price correct from the start. Sellers wanting to over list will ultimately take longer to sell and will sell their property for less, on average, according to Knight. Brokers/Agents’ desire to take a listing and get the price right later will ultimately lead to their working harder according to Knight, and they are not doing their sellers any favors. Thus, an initial and detailed analysis of the proper price is much more critical than many originally thought.

Interestingly, I have found in my own research that the direction (up or down) of the listing price change does not matter. A listing price increase and decrease both lead to similar results found in Knight’s work – longer marketing times and lower prices. Therefore, get the price right from the beginning. It is best for all.

Another Real Estate Bubble???

The recent jump in home prices (near record month-over-month and year-over-year increases reported for May by the National Association of Realtors ) has led to speculation that the rapid surge in home prices could be the sign of a new housing bubble similar to the one that led to the Great Recession.

Is it? The not-so-short answer is, not yet.

Indeed, through May the median price of an existing single-family home has risen by double-digits for seven of the last eight months (and in the eighth, the year-over-year increase was 9.4 percent). For comparison’s sake, note that in the run-up to the collapse in 2006, the median price of an existing single-family home rose by double-digits year-over-year for 11 straight months.

An increase in prices itself does not signal a bubble. An unsustainable increase, not supported by other data, however, would. In the run-up to the 2006 collapse, the higher prices—which had been trending up for four years—led to a sharp uptick in construction wholly unsupported by demographics. Baby boomers were aging, transforming home buyers into sellers, and there weren’t sufficient numbers of “echo boomers” to replace them.

Nonetheless, in the last 12 months, the year-over-year increase in single-family starts has averaged about 26 percent, four times the average year-over-year increase in the 12 months just prior to the bubble bursting in 2006. When housing prices fell when the bubble burst, the construction jobs they supported disappeared along with hundreds of thousands of others as housing wealth vanished, seemingly overnight.

Even though the demographics haven’t changed—the 55-plus population is growing faster than the 25-34 population—builders in the last 12 months have completed 31 percent more single-family homes than they sold. Prior to the housing peak, completions were about 26 percent more than sales, adding to inventories and further depressing home prices.

While the “gap” between completions and sales was wider before the 2006 collapse than today, it has been expanding rapidly, growing in eight of the last 12 months.

So, what happened to the overall economy when the housing bubble burst? As prices and values dropped, so did consumer spending, a function of the “wealth effect.” According to some estimates, the decrease in home values reduced consumer spending by upwards of $400 billion and GDP by about 2.5 percent. That jobs fell as well only made a bad situation worse.

The slowdown in housing prices beginning in 2006 came just as baby boomers—born between 1946 and 1964—were approaching retirement, a time when they might be looking to use their homes as a retirement nest egg, finding themselves with more house than they needed. About a year later, employment began to sag along with wages and salaries, so there were fewer people with less money to spend on buying a home.

Despite the fact we still theoretically have more potential sellers than buyers, which should drive prices down, the inventory of homes listed for sale has remained low. That low inventory, combined with low interest rates keeping affordability high, has driven prices up.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a bubble unless sales increase with the higher prices, and they have even with regulatory changes in the wake of the housing collapse designed to stop banks from making loans borrowers could not afford. Just how effective those changes have been though is still open to question. According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent Senior Loan Officers Opinion Survey , mortgage demand is climbing and more banks are easing lending standards.

Those factors combine to drive prices still higher a cycle which, if incomes fail to keep pace, could inexorably lead to a bursting bubble.

Perhaps more significant than the question of whether we’re in or headed to a bubble and are we prepared for it to burst is what happens if prices again suddenly and dramatically collapse?

Many analysts contend the current prices are justified by low rates, which keep home affordable even as prices rise. This would suggest that as rates rise, prices will move in the opposite direction, a replay of the post-2006 economy. That’s not though what history tells us. If prices fall in response to higher rates, it would mean market behavior has changed, a phenomenon for which we may not be prepared.

Rising prices encourage fewer investor purchases and longer holding times

A recent industry survey found rising home prices are impacting investor activity in a few ways—most notably encouraging them to hold properties longer and to decrease their purchase activity.

The survey, conducted by ORC Internationaland released Wednesday byMemphisInvest.com and Premier Property Management Group, revealed more than half of investors plan to keep their investment properties for five years or more. One-third said they will keep their investment properties for at least 10 years.

Investors in these categories “realize the benefits of rising rents and low vacancy rates,” according to Chris Clothier, a partner at MemphisInvest.com and Premier Property Management Group.

“Cash flow is much more important than appreciation,” Clothier said.

Close to half—48 percent—of the investors surveyed in May said they will purchase fewer properties in the next 12 months than they did in the past year. This is up from 30 percent in the same survey conducted in August 2012.

Twenty percent of survey respondents said they will purchase more properties in the next 12 months than in the previous 12 months, down from 39 percent in the August survey.

Contributing to this trend, “[f]ewer foreclosures, rising property values and competition from hedge funds are making it tough to find good deals on distress sales,” Clothier said.

Rising prices are also affecting the method by which investors pay for their properties, according to Clothier.

Thirty-seven percent of investors said they will pay cash for their next property, up from almost 25 percent in the previous survey.

“Cash sales make sense when prices are rising. They lower investors’ costs,” Clothier said.

The increase in institutional investor activity may appear to be a hurdle for private investors, but the survey revealed a minority of investors—13 percent—have noticed an impact.

Fixed Rates Soar to Highest Level in Years

Encouraging economic data helped lift fixed mortgage rates to their highest level in the past year this week, according to surveys from Freddie Mac and Bankrate.com .

Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey showed the 30-year fixed rate rising to an average 3.81 percent (0.8 point) for the week ending May 30, up from last week’s 3.59 percent. Since the beginning of May, the 30-year fixed average has jumped up nearly half a percentage point.

The 15-year fixed-rate mortgage ( FRM ) also soared this week, rising to 2.98 percent (0.7 point) from last week’s 2.77 percent.

Adjustable rate movements were mixed. The 5-year hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage ( ARM ) averaged 2.66 percent (0.5 point) this week, up from last week’s average of 2.63 percent. The 1-year ARM averaged 2.54 percent (0.5 point), a slight drop from 2.55 percent in the last survey.

“Fixed mortgage rates followed long-term government bond yields higher following a growing market sentiment that the Federal Reserve may lessen its accommodative policy stance,” said Frank Nothaft, VP and chief economist at Freddie Mac.

“Improving economic data may have encouraged those views,” he added, referencing the week’s reports of increased consumer confidence and strong home price gains .

Bankrate’s weekly national survey saw the 30-year benchmark rate rising to 3.99 percent, an increase of 25 basis points week-over-week. The 15-year fixed was up to 3.21 percent.

Meanwhile, the 5/1 ARM rose more than a tenth of a percentage point to 2.81 percent.

Metro Area Home Prices Continue to Increase

Metro areas continued to post price gains in the first quarter, rising alongside national median price increases, the National Association of Realtors ( NAR ) reported.

Out of 150 metro areas the NAR tracks, 133 displayed price growth in the first quarter of this year compared to the same quarter a year ago.
In the last quarter of 2012, 133 metro areas also experienced price increases from the year before.

“Some of the previously hard-hit markets like Phoenix, Sacramento and Miami continue to experience a dramatic turnaround, while a new set of areas like Atlanta, Minneapolis and Seattle have begun to show strong signs of upward momentum,” noted LawrenceYun, NARchief economist.

The association also provided first quarter data on national median prices and sales.

During the first three months of this year, the median price for an existing single-family home rose 9.3 percent from the year before to $176,600. The year-over-year improvement represents the biggest annual gain since the fourth quarter of 2005, according to the NAR .

At the same time, existing-home sales, including single-family and condo, rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.94 million, a slight 0.8 percent increase from the previous quarter, but a 9.8 percent gain compared to the first quarter of 2012. First-quarter sales stood at their highest level since the fourth quarter of 2009 when they hit 4.95 million as a result of the homebuyer tax incentive, NAR explained.

Distressed homes, which NAR defines as foreclosures and short sales generally sold at discounts of up to 20 percent, continued to account for a smaller share of sales. Distressed sales represented 23 percent of first quarter sales, down sharply from 32 percent a year ago.

Even though prices are on the rise, Gary Thomas, NAR President and broker-owner of Evergreen Realty in Villa Park, California, says conditions remain favorable for buyers.

“Historically low mortgage interest rates and home prices that remain well below their peak mean most buyers can purchase well within their means, assuming they meet ongoing stringent credit standards,” he said.

According to the NAR report, to purchase a home at the national median price, a buyer making a 5 percent down payment would need an income of $36,500, yet the national median family income was $62,200 in the first quarter. The calculation assumes 25 percent of gross income would go toward principal and interest and a mortgage interest rate of 3.5 percent.

Despite affordability, the transition into homeownership is still a challenge.

“While we expect the single-family housing recovery to continue trudging along, the still-dropping homeownership rate and hot multifamily market suggest that the shift from ownership to rental is not quite over,” said Julie Zisfein, of Auction.com research.

On a regional basis, the NAR found the West led with the biggest annual jump in prices after the median price rose to $247,800, up 24.4 percent from a year ago. With low inventory continuing to limit sales, the region experienced 1.1 percent decline in sales from the previous quarter, while sales were up by just 0.6 percent from the year before.

In the South, the median price for an existing home rose 9.3 percent from a year ago, while existing-home sales grew by just 0.7 percent in the first quarter, but are up by 13.3 percent from a year ago.

Midwest experienced an 8.2 percent gain from the year before, while sales were up quarterly and yearly by 1.2 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

In the Northeast, prices rose by 2.9 percent from the year before, and sales posted a stronger 4.4 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 9.1 percent gain from the year before.