Eco Friendly Housing

The state Attorney General's Office has declared unfounded the charge that Jerry Sanders had corrupt dealings with Sunroad developer Aaron Feldman.

The public radio show This American Life had a great program on the housing bust on Sunday. It was called the Giant Pool of Money and it detailed how Wall Street's search for higher yields translated into the foreclosure crisis the country is presently experiencing.

None of this will be new to readers of Hot Property, but the stories told here are amazing. There's the borrower in Ohio with poor credit and who never made more than $45,000 a year but nonetheless got a mortgage for nearly $500,000. As he described it: "I wouldn't have loaned me the money. I know criminals who wouldn't have loaned me the money."

There's also the tale of the mortgage salesman at a boiler room type outfit in New York who tells of first class treatment in night clubs, $1,000 bottles of Champagne with sparklers on them, and hobnobbing with celebrities. Not surprisingly both of these people are now fighting foreclosure on their homes.

For folks who really enjoy listening to things online, Congress is holding hearings at 2PM eastern time tommorrow on the impact of foreclosures on local communities.

Mervyns, the mid-tier department store chain in California and the Southwest, plans to open five new store locations, sell certain other store locations, and launch an e-commerce Web site, the company announced today.

Denver's Ohlson Lavoie Collaborative has been chosen as the architect of record for the design of the 8.1 million-square-foot Cairo Financial Center on 15 acres in Cairo.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Metropolitan area capital markets group has been retained to market Centuria at Fort Lee, N.J., the master-planned mixed-use redevelopment, for sale.

The massive explosion on Monday took place at the site of the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel, a 1,190 facility under construction.

It's official. Just one week after news emerged that New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority's deal with Tishman Speyer for a proposed $1 billion redevelopment of Manhattan's Hudson Yards had collapsed, the MTA has awarded a joint venture consisting of Related Cos. and Goldman Sachs the developments rights for endeavor.

On Capitol Hill this week, lawmakers are set to continue to grapple with the best response to the rising tide of home foreclosures. But the Bush administration says it has a solution in place: A nine-month old mortgage refinancing program run by the Federal Housing Administration.

Senate Banking Committee leaders said Monday that they have come to a deal on a housing bill that would prevent foreclosures, create affordable housing and revamp oversight of two of the mortgage market's biggest players: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Big home improvement chain Lowe’s posted weak numbers today, a 19% decline in earnings, same store sales were down 8%. The stock dropped 2%. It was already 30% off its peak from last year. A couple of interesting points were made about the housing market.

The company says it monitors sales in what they consider overpriced and not-overpriced housing markets and the sales slow down is now spreading from the already hard hit states (Florida, California, Arizona, Nevada) to the other places that didn’t have huge home price run ups such as the Midwest. In fact the few markets still doing well include oil-rich Texas and Oklahoma.

The company said the difference in sales declines between the overpriced home markets and not-overpriced was declining. Meaning everybody’s doing worse. The company has been tailoring its product mix more toward home improvement projects that require relatively little work. They have a new carpet promotion, for example. Major fix up projects like cabinetry are down.