Wall Street Journal - Maura Webber Sandovi - Investors priced out of trophy office properties in New York and Washington, D.C. are now often looking for top-tier buildings in cities like Seattle and Houston.One recent deal that drove home that point: the sale of the Russell Investments Center in Seattle by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. for $480 mill […]
Wall Street Journal - Stefanos Chen - Stone on Stone in California - Situated on 8.75 acres of craggy mountain terrain, this roughly 4,000-square-foot home in Ramona, Calif., was built on -- and built with -- solid rock.
HousingWire - Justin T. Hilley - Borrower demand for prime residential mortgages is strengthening, causing some banks to anticipate increasing their exposure to such loans over the next year.The Federal Reserve Board’s April survey of senior loan officers showed standards on prime residential mortgage loans and home equity lines of credit in the month were r […]
CNBC - Diana Olick - Big jumps in foreclosure activity in cities like Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, New York and Raleigh pushed the national numbers higher in the first three months of this year, according to a new report from RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure sales and data company.A majority of U.S. housing markets posted a quarterly increase in foreclosure ac […]
The Big Picture - Global Macro Monitor - Here’s an interesting data series we thought you might enlightening.Note the peak in manufacturing jobs in June 1977, which represented 22 percent of all nonfarm payrolls, to less than 9 percent of total employment today. It’s too earlier to claim victory with the current recovery in the manufacturing sector, but it i […]
HousingWire - Kerri Panchuk - Apartment rental rates in the greater Denver area shot up to a 10-year high in the first quarter as the region faced growing demand for a limited supply of rentals. Monthly rents in the area soared 4.5% between the first quarter of 2011 and the most recent 1Q period, according to research from the Apartment Association of Metro […]
Bloomberg - Louis Hyman - During World War I, as cities pulled every young man who wasn't a doughboy into their factories, the U.S. became an urban nation.After the war, there was a sharp and short depression in 1920 from which the cities quickly recovered, but rural America did not. That year, the census recordeed more people living in cities than in t […]
Calculated Risk - PMI was at 54.8% in April, up from 53.4% in March. The employment index was at 57.3%, up from 56.1%, and new orders index was at 58.2%, up from 54.5%.
Reuters - Ann Saphir - Two top Federal Reserve officials - one with a dovish, employment-focused bent, and the other a self-avowed inflation hawk - on Monday both said they see no need for the central bank to ease monetary policy any further. But the comments, from San Francisco Fed President John Williams and Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, do not mean […]