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Atlanta house prices and sales rise in September

(author unknown) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:23:37 PDT

The price of houses in metro Atlanta rose about 8 percent and sales jumped nearly 25 percent in September, according to the National Association of Realtors. In its monthly report on the national and major metro housing markets, NAR said Atlanta’s median house price in September was $111,500, down 15.7 percent form September 2010 but up 7.9 percent from August 2011. September sales were up 24.7 percent. Nationally, sales dipped 3 percent from August to September, but were 11.3 percent above in September 2010...

Condo Nation: Why So Few Americans Are Buying Homes

(author unknown) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:45:00 PDT

“People are moving out of Mom and Dad’s basement finally, but they are renting or buying apartments rather than homes,” says one economist.

Atlanta's multi-family rental market sees a revival

Arielle Kass — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 02:10:07 PDT

Emory Point was ready to break ground years ago, but the frozen credit markets kept the $250 million Clifton Road development at bay.

Behind the Numbers: Housing Starts Up

Dawn Wotapka — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:10:43 PDT

Housing got some good news today: Construction of homes and apartments increased 3.5% from a month earlier, the Commerce Department said Thursday.

That’s right. Increased.

It gets better. Newly issued building permits, a gauge of future construction, rose 8.7% from a month earlier to an annual rate of 612,000, the highest level since December.

Construction of single-family homes, which made up about two-thirds of all starts, rose by 3.7% from a month earlier. Construction of multifamily homes with at least five units climbed 2.9% on a monthly basis.

The news helped rock shares of home builders. Hovnanian Enterprises Inc. recently traded up 3.8%, while industry giant DR Horton Inc. gained 2.4%.

To be sure, this is hardly the end of the sector’s five-year slump. Just Wednesday, the National Association of Home Builders said its closely watched housing market index sank three points to 13 out of 100 in June. (Zero is really bad, while 100 is perfect.) Pretty depressing.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what industry watchers had to say:

Patrick Newport, economist, IHS Global Insight: “The bottom line: Single-family home construction remains stuck near the bottom, and the near-term outlook is for more of the same.”

Jade J. Rahmani, analyst, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods: “New home construction and most housing data remain broadly subdued. Anecdotal evidence and mortgage application data suggest choppy May and June selling conditions. Mortgage credit remains tight.”

Steve Blitz, economist, ITG Investment Research: “The housing construction industry overall continues to run at depressed rates with month-to-month volatility in the data that means nothing in terms of indentifying a trend.”

Paul Dales, economist, Capital Economics. “The increase in housing starts in May would have been larger if it wasn’t for some floods and tornadoes preventing homebuilders from breaking new ground. As postponed projects begin and reconstruction gets underway, housing starts will rise further in the coming months. But the headwinds of high excess supply, low household formation and stiff competition from foreclosed properties mean that any rebound will be modest.”

Gwinnett publishes detailed budget online

David Wickert — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 05:53:48 PDT

Gwinnett County’s 2011 budget is now available for viewing on its web site. The 360-page document details the $1.3 billion budget approved by the Board of Commissioners in January. It also provides information on all county departments and funds, plus an overview of the county’s demographics, history and economic climate.

A thawing effect for new retail

(author unknown) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:14:03 PDT

During the painful economic downturn new retail development virtually came to a ”screeching halt”. Two recent announcements are encouraging indicators that the environment is improving. Streets of Buckhead now called Buckhead Atlanta is to be developed by Oliver McMillan. Prospect Park, still called Prospect Park, is to be developed by North American Properties. Both projects have had wide media attention and much public interest because of their high profile locations. Both were stalled after the start of...

Ga. DOT Board re-elects leaders

(author unknown) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:17:37 PDT

The State Transportation Board Thursday re-elected Rudy Bowen of Gwinnett County to serve as the board’s chairman. Bowen, a retired businessman elected to the board in 2007, will begin his second year as chairman on July 1. Also Thursday, board members chose Johnny Floyd of Cordele to serve a second year as vice chairman. Floyd served nearly 20 years in the Georgia House of Representatives before being elected to the transportation board in 2008. The 13-member board sets policy for the state Department of Transportation, which has a budget of...

Region must ax 73% of projects from transportation wish list

Ariel Hart — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:23:39 PDT

The regional transportation sales tax just lost a couple of I-285 interchanges. Or a new northeast MARTA stop or a half dozen major arterial widenings -- or whatever else the region would have chosen to build with $235 million.

Rising Cost of Construction Materials Puts Contractors in a Bind

(author unknown) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 07:07:00 PDT

Rising Cost of Construction Materials Puts Contractors in a Bind

Home Builder Sales Expectations Fall Back to Record Low

(author unknown) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 07:02:00 PDT

After six months of holding steady the National Association of Home Builder's sentiment survey fell three points in June to 13, as builders face not only competition from distressed properties, but rising costs of materials.

Are Businesses Fleeing the Suburbs?

Eric Jaffe — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 07:30:22 PDT

Crain’s is predicting the fall of the ”the suburban corporate headquarters campus.” At least that appears to be the case in the metropolitan Chicago region. A number of big companies — including Sears, AT&T, Motorola, and Sara Lee — are eyeing a return from their suburban compounds to the Windy City. The trend reflects a new “corporate mindset,” writes Crain’s in a special report:

As the 21st century enters its second decade, many companies are discovering the drawbacks of the isolation they sought. Hard-to-get-to headquarters limit the talent pool a company can draw on and feed a “not-invented-here” insularity that ignores major shifts in industries and markets.

The reason for such moves, writes Christopher Leinberger at The Avenue, is that the “millennial generation” insists on living and working in walkable cities:

Highly-educated young workers, the life’s blood of many industries, have been flocking to center cities in recent years. Trying to recruit this talent to Stamford, Conn., or Hoffman Estates, Ill. is exceedingly difficult. They are voting with their feet for a hip, high-density walkable lifestyle and a reverse commute to the ‘burbs is not in the cards for most of them.

Many social signs suggest that the walkable city is on the rise. Young Americans have expressed the desire to live in communities that blend urban energy with suburban comfort. This share of the population even appears to be losing its urge to drive.

But if Leinberger is onto a trend here, he has undermined his point by lumping together Stamford and Hoffman Estates. The latter is the current home to Sears and a northwest suburb of Chicago with a population of around 50,000. Stamford might lose the Swiss bank UBS to Manhattan, but the Connecticut city is still the eighth largest in New England — hardly worthy to be called a suburb.

Oddly, this convenient failure to distinguish between city and suburb is a mistake Leinberger has pointed out when made by others: If Jersey City isn’t a suburb, as he has argued when writing about migration into walkable cities, then neither is Stamford. I may be wrong here, but it would seem that the point of the walkable city movement is not to abandon the Stamfords of America in a race to New York, but rather to bring a little more of New York to places like Stamford.

Image: UBS via Wikipedia

Eric Jaffe is on Twitter

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Did Smart Growth Fuel the Property-Price Boom?

Matthew Strozier — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:52:53 PDT

: Associated Press; A new paper says smart growth thwarted efforts to meet housing demand during the boom.

Bankers, politicians, policy makers and even home buyers are usually painted as the culprits of the housing bust, but land-use planners don’t generally make that list. In a recent paper, though, Wendell Cox, an Illinois-based consultant and an adjunct scholar with the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis, argues land-use restrictions and planning policies like smart growth fueled property prices and became the engine of the housing boom and bust.

In other words, Portland, take a seat. Indianapolis, you’re free to go.

Mr. Cox writes: “Gross national house value increases and losses were overwhelmingly concentrated in metropolitan areas with more restrictive land-use regulations—known by a variety of names, such as compact city policy, growth management or smart growth. Many metropolitan areas with these land-use restrictions were not able to respond to the increased demand for home ownership caused by the greater availability of mortgage credit. The inevitable result was higher prices, which encouraged speculation and increased house prices even more,” Mr. Cox writes in “The Housing Crash and Smart Growth.”

Smart growth is generally defined as land-use policies that encourage mixed-use development that reins in suburban sprawl and long commutes by car. The aim is to preserve open space and farmland by pushing development toward public transportation and more walkable communities. (Mr. Cox has criticized smart growth before, and Thomas Sowell made a similar point in his book, “The Housing Boom and Bust.”)

Mr. Cox argues that the housing bust was concentrated in “prescriptively regulated” areas, or those with extensive barriers to development. These differ from “responsively regulated” metro areas, which allow development to meet demand. San Diego is prescriptive; Dallas is not. Portland is prescriptive; Houston is not. “If the prescriptively regulated metropolitan areas had instead had responsive land-use regulations, prices likely would have escalated at a much lower rate during the housing bubble,” Mr. Cox writes. More modest losses, he adds, “might not have set off the financial crisis, or it might have been less severe.”

From the peak of the bubble in 2006 to the Lehman Brothers’ collapse in September 2008, Mr. Cox writes, 11 heavily regulated metropolitan markets accounted for 73% of aggregate home-value losses, with an average loss of $175,000 per house. Homes in less regulated markets lost an average of $12,000 per house in value.

Not so fast, say defenders of smart growth.

Patrick Phillips, chief executive of the pro-smart-growth Urban Land Institute said it’s specious to pin the housing bubble on smart growth. “I think he’s teased out sort of one aspect and conflated that to represent the primary driver, and the primary driver of the housing bubble was the excess capital chasing real estate.” In fact, the housing bubble was fueled, Mr. Phillips said, by an unfounded faith that real estate prices would never fall.

Besides, places hardly known as hotbeds of land-use regulation, like Phoenix and Central Florida, have suffered during the housing bust, Mr. Phillips said. And Washington, D.C., a difficult place to build, is a rare market now seeing housing price appreciation. It’s also a mistake to treat individual markets as either highly regulated or not, since it might be easy to build in one neighborhood but difficult in another because of land-use regulations.

Furthermore, smart-growth supporters say that prices on the “suburban fringe” took a bigger hit, and have taken longer to recover, than denser “inner suburbs” or walkable city neighborhoods.

The price decline on the “drivable fringe” was generally twice as bad during the crash, said Christopher Leinberger, a developer of “walkable urban projects” and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “And it was that part of the market that is the least regulated,” he said. Smart-growth areas or walkable neighborhoods within metro markets had price drops but they ultimately “held their value, thank you very much.” The problem, Mr. Leinberger added, was that “we built too much of the wrong stuff in the wrong location.”

Smart growth can be abused by people looking to use it as a cover for no-growth, which then drives up prices, but that’s not its design, say defenders.

Mr. Cox, for his part, said in an interview that smart growth is “the only thing that explains the radical price difference between the markets.” Ultimately, by driving up the cost of housing, Mr. Cox said “the problem with smart growth is that it is virtually destroying the American dream of home ownership.”

So, readers, what role did smart growth play in the creating the housing bubble?

Without rail, how would you vote on transportation referendum?

Henry Unger — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 03:45:59 PDT

I have an important question for you.

AJC writer Ariel Hart is reporting that metro commuters hoping that a transportation sales tax on the ballot next year will bring train service far into the suburbs may be out of luck.

Some of the highest-profile projects proposed for the 1 percent sales tax may not be capable of completion by the time the tax ends in 10 years, weakening their chances for inclusion in the referendum, Hart writes. Potential projects include rail into Cobb and Gwinnett, and across the top end of I-285.

In a later development this morning, Hart is reporting that MARTA heavy rail from Lindbergh to Emory University or train lines to Turner Field or the Beltline streetcar could be up and running if the tax is approved.

Will you be more or less likely to vote for the tax if rail is included? How much more or less likely? Why?

- Henry Unger, The Biz Beat

For instant updates, follow me on Twitter.

Creating jobs depends on improving metro transportation

Henry Unger — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 02:49:54 PDT

There’s only one way to look at transportation, says Chris Cummiskey, chief of the Georgia Economic Development Department. Does it help or hinder job creation?

Chris Cummiskey

On the positive side, he said, Hartsfield-Jackson and the Savannah-Brunswick ports help enormously when he tries to woo companies here.

On the negative side, well, you know. You live it everyday. Traffic congestion in metro Atlanta is a considerable hurdle to overcome when he talks with prospects. That’s why he thinks it’s critical for voters to approve next year’s transportation referendum on a 1 percent sales tax to fund about $8 billion in projects in metro Atlanta.

“Unemployment is too high in Georgia,” said Cummiskey, 36, who was named to his post by Gov. Nathan Deal six months ago. “The referendum has everything to do with economic development — gaining jobs. It’s integral to the economic future of Georgia.”

That future depends on how Georgia plays its cards in the increasingly

Transportation panel reaching out to public

(author unknown) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:40:17 PDT

Atlanta-area elected officials responsible for choosing transportation improvements to be funded through a proposed regional sales tax will be reaching out to more than 1 million people starting next week. A series of telephone “town hall” meetings will use technology that will let members of a regional roundtable of mayors and county commission chairmen speak directly with residents of their communities about setting priorities for highway and transit projects. Residents will be phoned at random and invited to participate in the telephone...

Water deal with Tennessee gets new life

(author unknown) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:17:23 PDT

In politics, where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. That’s likely the case with the idea of Georgia trading a high-speed rail line from Chattanooga, Tenn., to the world’s busiest airport for access to water from the Tennessee River. It’s a swap that’s been talked about for years but never seemed to go anywhere. Until the last week or so. Georgia House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, got the speculation rolling by telling a radio interviewer it might be a good way to secure a bountiful supply of water for thirsty Georgians, just as the latest dry spell threatens to turn into another...

Mixed signs in second quarter construction outlook

Christina Zweig — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 09:02:54 PDT

RALEIGH, N.C. — In FMI’s Construction Outlook for the second quarter of 2011, there are signs that the economy is recovering — even for contractors — but you have to look hard to see them. The stock market has taken on a more bullish trend since the bottom of the recession, but that bull has yet to visit Main Street, which is struggling to fix the potholes, not to mention the infrastructure buried beneath the streets.

The costs of construction materials have been rising faster than the slow increase in construction activity would suggest. Recently, commodities investors woke up to the idea that the recovery may once again be delayed. Their concerns are justified when one considers the uncertainties in the news, including a slowdown in GDP growth to just 1.8 percent after a solid fourth quarter pace of 3.1 percent. Construction markets are also affected by national and global uncertainties including the ongoing political upheaval in the Middle East and northern Africa; the resurgence of concern over the European debt crises, particularly Greece; and the ongoing budget battle in the U.S. Congress.

The FMI report highlights include:
• Total construction in 2011 will climb 2 percent after declining 9 percent in 2010.
• Construction employment remained abysmal and little changed since the depth of the recession.
• The nonresidential sector will decline just 2 percent in 2011 after a 19-percent decline in 2010.
• Most of the areas showing growth, excluding residential, are in markets related to infrastructure.
• Sewage and waste disposal, and conservation and development construction will contribute to a positive climb in the nonbuilding segment.
• Power will continue to be a growing construction market (2 percent growth for 2011) as there is no sign that our need for more of it will abate. We expect growth to accelerate over the next five years as more attention is paid to renewable energy sources.
• The much-expected nuclear renaissance could stall once again as regulating bodies and engineers reassess safety measures based on the devastating results of multiple catastrophes at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant.

Download the complete report at www.fminet.com/media/pdf/forecasts/Outlook_2011Q2_FMI.pdf

Leaders in North Atlanta Area Meet About Transit

Sydney Busby — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:11:25 PDT

About 300 people representing both business and government sectors came to discuss the future of a regional light rail system that would connect the northern Atlanta suburbs Wednesday morning at the Cobb Galleria Centre.

The proposed Metro Atlanta Northern Crescent Transit would connect with existing MARTA rail lines and extend into Cobb, north Fulton and Gwinnett counties.

“This is about jobs, jobs, jobs,” said Brandon Beach, North Fulton Chamber of Commerce president and Georgia Department of Transportation board member.

A survey conducted by McKinsey & Company in 2008 found that by investing $26 billion to $46 billion in transportation infrastructure, including light rail, Georgia could increase its gross domestic product by $114 billion and create 230,000 jobs over the next 20 years.

Tad Leithead, chairman of the Atlanta Regional Commission put the project’s impact into perspective.

“As (Atlanta Mayor) Kasim Reed said, this is the biggest public works project we have ever considered in the state of Georgia,” said Leithead. “The Olympics was $1.8 billion in economic impact. This is three times that at least.”

The project seems to be favored by citizens in the impacted regions. Beach cited a recent survey of north Fulton residents. Of the respondents, 79.8 percent were in favor of a transit system.

“I’m convinced if it’s clean, safe and reliable, the most important being safe, people will take transit,” Beach said.

“In 2008 the University of Georgia did a survey research and did a comprehensive random telephone survey to reach a broad community sample,” she said. “There were 160 questions on transportation issues. And a majority of the respondents favor improving public transit over building news roads.

However, summit participants were realistic about what the proposed transit system would accomplish.

“Roads are not the enemy and we understand that,” said Brian Allen, director of the Gwinnett County Department of Transportation. “We still need roads in this region. We understand that that’s not going to be strictly transit. That’s going to have to have a mix of projects on it."

Steve Banta, CEO of Phoenix METRO Light Rail, and Pat McCrory, former mayor of Charlotte, N.C., both discussed how light rail transit systems were implemented successfully in their cities. They also offered advice to the assembly.

“It does take a lot of work,” Banta said. “And it starts with seminars and summits like this. People in the same room and talking about what needs to be done.”

Both projects took about 10 years to complete.

“I do want to let you know, all the people in this room; especially those who are 50 and over like I am, you’re doing this for the next generation,” McCrory said. “So they have the same economic opportunities and the same quality of life that you’ve had for the past 20 years in this incredible Atlanta region.”

Summit leaders explained that the next step in the process is passing the 2012 Metro Atlanta Referendum, which would allow regions across the state to raise a once-cent sales tax to fund all modes of transportation over a 10-year period.

According to the referendum’s website, this will be the region’s only opportunity for new transportation revenue in the near future.

The referendum goes on the ballot July 2012.

Report: Real estate market won't hit bottom this year

Inman_News — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:01:04 PDT

Nearly half of all sales are distressed

Atlanta job losses among highest

(author unknown) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 08:17:41 PDT

The nation’s top labor markets all took a hit during the Great Recession, but Atlanta was particularly battered, according to a new On Numbers analysis of the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Atlanta lost 176,500 jobs from April 2008 to April 2011. The metro's private sector job total was 1,932,600 in April 2011, ranking it 97th out of 100 markets and marking an 8.4 percent drop in private sectors jobs. All of the nation’s 100 biggest labor markets have fewer private-sector jobs today than they did three years...