FINANCING YOUR PURCHASE OR RENOVATION: For those interested in obtaining financing for purchase of a home or remodeling, I have recently come across two interesting funding sources.

The first is http://www.prosper.com which allows you to borrow money from other people rather than banks. When you enter your information into the web site, it gives you a credit rating and a debt-income ratio. You can post the amount you'd like to borrow and the interest rate you'd like to pay and lenders (regular people who want to lend money, not banks) can bid for your loan. these loans cxan be used for purchase or repairs or pretty much anything.

The second is a HUD loan I was not aware of that allows you to borrow small amounts for renovation. You have to live in the home you are remodeling. This is called the Streamlined 203(k) Limited Repair Program. A link is available from the resources page of http://www.dunnrealtor.com

For more links and financial programs, visit http://www.dunnrealtor.com and click on RESOURCES.

(p.s. no warranties are made or implied by Eric Miller or Dunn Real Estate Services)

Existing-home sales in most states were down from year-ago levels in the fourth quarter. In the fourth-quarter, metro area single-family home prices, examining changes in 149 metropolitan statistical areas, (2) show 71 areas had price gains from a year earlier, including 14 metros with double-digit annual increases, and 73 areas had price declines; five were unchanged.

The national median existing single-family home price was $219,300 in the fourth quarter, down 2.7 percent from a year earlier when the median price was $225,300. The median is a typical market price where half of the homes sold for more and half sold for less. For all of 2006, the median price rose 1.4 percent to $222,000.

A new comparison of annual single-family home prices in metropolitan areas shows that typical sellers experienced healthy gains on the value of their home over the last five years in almost all 131 available areas, even in areas with recent price declines.

The biggest total sales increase was in Indiana, where existing-home sales rose 13.7 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005. In Arkansas the fourth-quarter resale pace rose 11.1 percent from a year earlier, while Texas experienced the third strongest gain, up 6.2 percent.

Over the last five years, metro areas with the largest single-family price gains include the California areas of Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, up 155.3 percent, and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, up 142.3 percent, followed by the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach area of Florida, up 135.4 percent.

In the fourth quarter, the largest single-family home price increase was in the Atlantic City, N.J., area, where the median price of $339,800 was 25.9 percent higher than a year ago. Next was the Salt Lake City area, at $223,600, up 22.7 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005. The Trenton-Ewing area of New Jersey, with a fourth quarter median price of $289,000, increased 18.9 percent in the last year.

Median fourth-quarter metro area single-family prices ranged from a very affordable $78,400 in Elmira, N.Y., to nearly 10 times that amount in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area of California where the median price was $760,000. The second most expensive area was San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, at $733,400, followed by the Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine area (Orange Co., Calif.), at $690,700.

In addition to Elmira, N.Y., other affordable markets include the Youngstown-Warren-Boardman area of Ohio and Pennsylvania, with a fourth-quarter median price of $80,000, and Decatur, Ill., at $89,200.

In the condo sector, metro area condominium and cooperative prices – covering changes in 58 markets – show the national median existing condo price was $220,900 in the fourth quarter, down 2.1 percent from the same period in 2005. Thirty-one metros showed annual increases in the median condo price, including seven areas with double-digit gains; 27 metros had price declines.

The strongest condo price gains were in the Austin-Round Rock area of Texas, where the fourth quarter price of $160,000 rose 16.5 percent from a year ago, followed by the Newark-Union area of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the median condo price of $352,600 rose 16.4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005, and Springfield, Mass., at $160,400, an increase of 14.6 percent.

Metro area median existing condo prices in the fourth quarter ranged from $102,600 in Wichita, Kan., to $580,300 in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont area. The second most expensive reported condo market was Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, at $402,000, followed by the San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos area of California at $358,200.

Other affordable condo markets include Bismarck, N.D., at $103,500, and Greensboro-High Point, N.C., at $119,100.

Regionally, the Northeast saw an existing-home sales pace of 1.04 million units in the fourth quarter, which was 6.6 percent below a year ago. The median Northeastern resale single-family home price was $274,600 in the fourth quarter, which is 2.5 percent below the same period in 2005.

After the Atlantic City and Trenton-Ewing areas, the strongest price increase in the Northeast was in Pittsfield, Mass., with a median price of $220,600, up 4.7 percent from the fourth quarter of last year, followed by the Albany-Schenectady-Troy area of New York with a median price of $198,700, up 4.1 percent.

Total existing-home sales in the South were at an annual rate of 2.49 million units in the fourth quarter, down 8.5 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005. After the gains in Arkansas and Texas, the next strongest increase in the South was in Kentucky, up 5.6 percent from a year ago, while Mississippi rose 2.0 percent.

The median existing single-family home price in the South was $181,700 in the fourth quarter, which is 3.7 percent below a year earlier. The strongest increase in the South was in the Beaumont-Port Arthur area of Texas, where the median price of $120,000 was 15.1 percent above the fourth quarter of 2005. Next was Raleigh-Cary, N.C., at $226,300, up 14.5 percent from a year ago, followed by the Cumberland area of Maryland and West Virginia, with a 14.4 percent gain to $98,000.

In the Midwest, total existing-home sales declined 8.6 percent to a 1.43 million-unit annual level in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier. The median existing single-family home price in the Midwest was $161,800, down 4.2 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005.

The strongest metro price increase in the Midwest was in the Davenport-Moline-Rock Island area of Iowa and Illinois, where the median price of $116,400 was 6.6 percent higher than a year ago. Next was Dayton, Ohio, at $119,500, up 5.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005, and Rockford, Ill., at $121,500, up 5.7 percent in the last year.

In the West, the existing-home sales pace of 1.28 million units was 17.8 percent lower than the fourth quarter of 2005. The best performance in the region was in Alaska where existing-home sales rose 0.4 percent from a year earlier.

The median existing single-family home price in the West slipped 0.4 percent to $355,100 during the fourth quarter. After Salt Lake City, the strongest increase in the West was in the Salem, Ore., area, at $223,100, up 14.9 percent from fourth quarter of 2005, followed by Farmington, N.M., at $183,000, up 14.0 percent, and Spokane, Wash., at $189,200, up 12.2 percent from a year ago.

Source: NAR

An article from Bankrate.com has some advice quite a few folks moving to Pittsburgh have taken. If you live in a high-priced market, especially one with dropping prices, get out! Take your equity and run.

"Extra equity is an added benefit to the American dream. You can manage this equity in one of several ways. You can sit on it and hope that the real estate market in your area doesn't tank. You can tap your equity and use it -- generally not a good strategy since you have to pay it back. Or you can cash it out and move to an area where the housing dollar buys more for the buck."

Many who have cashed out ended up with enough equity to pay cash for their new home. A mortgage-free lifestyle is great for those who wanted to have more travel time, create artwork or even start a business.

"A low or nonexistent mortgage also provides lifestyle benefits such as the ability to pursue a hobby, travel or simply the luxury of working less and playing more. Two-income families with children may consider having one parent stay at home."

Pittsburgh isn't the only place where you can buy a home for less, but when my friend asked me the other day what would be my favorite city to live in the U.S., I hesitated responding with New York. "What if you factor in cost?" Then I'd have to answer that what Pittsburgh offers is pretty close to the top. I suppose factoring in cost, that's why I am here.

It’s a curious name, the Shrinking Cities Institute. Kent State University near Akron recently founded this initiative which is expected to address the problems of the minority number of big cities which continue to shrink rather than grow.

As you might have heard, Pittsburgh falls into this category.

A commentary by the Rand Institute’s Barry Balmat and Peter A. Morrison that appeared in the Post-Gazette in 2004 observed that Pittsburgh's population declined nearly 10 percent during the 1990s, in sharp contrast to the 13 percent nationwide population increase. Since 2000, the city's population loss has continued unabated.

That’s just the facts, not the commentary, however. The juice of the story is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We’ll get to the why of that in a bit, but first a little on the thought about what to do with shrinking cities.

Pittsburgh has its problems, and those problems are exemplified in our neighbor, Youngstown, Ohio. Like Pittsburgh over the past half-century Youngstown has been presented with dramatic population loss. Unlike Pittsburgh which had somewhat of a diversified economy, when the steel industry left, the economy left with it. When officials released the Youngstown 2010 Plan (the last plan updated a 1951 plan in 1974) it didn’t cover the usual growth management, rather covering “managing decline.”

Finally, someone says it. The emperor has no clothes. It’s time to “begin drawing the map of a smaller city.”

The movement now barely known as “Shrinking Cities,” started in Germany. It wasn’t the slow decline of the steel industry there, rather the removal of a certain long-standing wall that left many East German cities virtually vacant. It gave Youngstown an idea American cities never had on their own. Why not shrink?

What does that mean exactly? A web page on a “Shrinking Cities” conference at Cleveland State University offered some insight. Shrinking a city could include the demolition or dismantling of under-utilized housing and other building stock, the removal of redundant streets, and downsizing of municipal infrastructure to correspond to declining population.” In Detroit, Saint Louis and other shrinking cities that may mean cutting off services to underutilized areas and giving people there incentives to move out then returning them to nature. In Youngstown that means considering relaxing zoning rules to allow small horse farms or apple orchards and offering incentives for people to move out of abandoned areas.

Is Shrinking something for Pittsburgh to think about? I don’t know the complete answer to that, but I could point out many streets where there are houses you can’t give away. I’ve spent several afternoons on the phone looking for someone to take a free house and have not yet been successful at finding a taker. Do we need so much space for so few people? Can we encourage “clusters” of nice urban areas and leave unused space for wildlife or even farms and orchards?

In Pittsburgh the downtown population is increasing even while the city and region continues to shrink (we’re apparently the only shrinking region these days—in other places only the cities shrink). That means people are moving around inside the region and the underutilized areas are continuing to depopulate. It would be an attractive option in my view to start returning some of these areas to nature.

What Shrinking Cities should not mean, however is a “suburbanization” of the city by tearing down every other house. That’s no more sustainable than a suburb or under-populated city. Cleveland had the right idea when it started to concentrate development in nodes like the Euclid Avenue district. Youngstown has gone a step further with a comprehensive plan for the nodes and the spaces in between with the goal of improving the sustainability and quality of life.

Back to the Rand Institute commentary mentioned at the beginning. Pittsburgh shrinking leads optimists to project a shortage of as many as 125,000 workers in metropolitan Pittsburgh as early as 2008. “What's noteworthy is that Pittsburgh's unfolding demographic future does contain opportunities.” Could that mean we will need the empty houses?

If we start eliminating homes there will be fewer and any economist will tell you smaller supply means more demand and higher prices. On the other hand, The Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania estimates there are approximately 18,000 vacant properties and land in the City of Pittsburgh, about 11.5% of the total housing units. If we start now to reclaim some of the land by “shrinking,” it would take quite some time to get to a small portion of the 18,000 houses.

Shrinking isn’t necessarily a solution, but could prove to be a practical and attractive component in preparing Pittsburgh for a new era as a smaller city.

Changing demographics and preferences may come to favor North City housing in the coming years. Smaller household size, rising gas prices and highway congestion may all add up to an increased popularity of urban housing that’s in close proximity to what the city has to offer. Along with these trends is another emerging factor, more and more workers can go where they want independent of employment.

A recent survey by a group called CEOs for Cities found that two-thirds of highly mobile 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees say that they will decide where they live first then look for a job.

Two-thirds of them choose place before job, and this preference was true across all life stages and genders (male, female, single, married, with children, without children). Women place greater emphasis on the location decision than do men, although a majority of men also say they choose place before job.

That’s not only important in terms of attracting people, but also in attracting companies who often base location decisions on where employees want to live. More, technology advances allow workers to stay connected from almost anywhere and employees are less loyal to companies, allowing them to move.

It’s critically important now that we build and work to meet these trends. A city’s best chance to attract these workers, the report said, is to focus on the most mobile of the group, those 25 to 34 years old.

Are our neighborhoods prepared to meet this demand? In some ways the answer is clearly yes. In others, there’s work to do.

For one segment of the population, we won’t have to do anything. It’s not hard to find people out there in other cities who want to live in Pittsburgh, if only they had a job. As employment becomes more mobile, it’s logical a portion will gravitate to Pittsburgh. The survey indicated young adults have a strong inclination to live downtown or close to downtown. That in itself would seem to favor our neighborhoods, especially Deutschtown, the Mexican War Streets and Allegheny West.

More, these young, mobile workers want a place that feels welcoming, offers professional opportunities, has reasonable commute times, access to excellent schools, is a great place to raise children, is a place people are proud to say they live in were among attributes young people looked for in a city.

On most of these counts I think we do fairly well. However, I was discussing the topic of “Pittsburgh Pride” with my marketing guru of a sister. She mentioned research that suggests the image of the city fluctuates significantly with the performance of sports teams. This is of course good when the Steelers are winning, however I’m not alone in recounting the times a Pittsburgh visitor has been asked “why?” as the first question from a local. I’ve lived in a number of cities and I’m here to say a large segment of Pittsburgh has no idea what it has: a beautiful, affordable metropolitan city with world-class architecture, art and culture art and as icing, great sports teams. If we don’t know why, we should have left a long time ago!

Self-image not the only area I see as needing improvement, however.
Te study also found that basic quality of life issues safe, clean streets and neighborhoods, can afford to buy a home, lots of parks and green space) ranked highest among attributes that young people looked for in a city. We don’t do bad on crime or green space, but general maintenance and cleaning could probably be improved. I recently created and posted a video on YouTube.com (search for newcolonist) of a walk up some of our city steps and walkways. The weeds were enough to scare off any visitor or potential resident. If we don’t care, why would anyone else? If a neighborhood looks nice, it is nice in a visitors mind.

Lifestyle attributes are also important to this demographic. “They prefer places where they can connect with others and have meaningful social interactions; that are interesting and diverse; and are environmentally responsible,” the survey found.

The most diverse parts of our city are the college areas of Shadyside and Oakland.

We may have an instinctual reaction that tells us college students are not interested in the Northside. We fail to realize the potential of significant transportation links to not only Oakland, but South Side, the Strip and Bloomfield.

The 500 and the 54c buses provide direct links to the Pitt Campus and a short walk
downtown can allow access many more routes.

Finally, and perhaps the most critical factor, “knowledge of city attributes is limited.” Young adults rely most heavily on personal stories from friends and family to form their perceptions about a place. They also use the Internet and personal visits to shape their opinions.

The internet presence of our neighborhoods is limited at best, leaving out perhaps the most important tool we have to attract the attention of this demographic segment. We can build all we want, but unless we tell them what’s here and why it’s great, they’ll never know.

Who lives in the exurbs? Apparently no one according to researchers at Florida-based Metrostudy. In an article published by Reuters the authors noted the prices of homes in the far-flung suburbs have fallen the fastest. Not only does no one want to live there now, but it turns out few wanted to live there when the market was hot--and primarily fueled by speculators.

READ THE ARTICLE