Commercial & Residential Property Blog

U.S. home prices rose for the fifth month in a row in October, but the recovery continues to be uneven with only 11 of the 20 metro areas tracked showing gains.

An affiliate of USAA Real Estate Company acquired Broadstone Parkway, a Class A urban fill mixed-use development comprised of 333 residential units and 39,167 square feet of ground floor commercial space located at 5005 Galleria Drive in North Dallas/Addison from Bank of America. The purchase price has not been disclosed.

Homes are now cheap.

No, not everywhere in the country (more about that later). And, even after the latest Case-Shiller data, it’s anyone’s guess when they might actually turn around and start rising steadily again. It could be years.

The Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco awarded $35.3 million in Affordable Housing Program (AHP) grants in the second round of the 2009 competition. The AHP grants, awarded to 49 projects that address the unique needs of individual communities, will produce 3,458 affordable housing units in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Oklahoma, and Texas.

The green building movement is targeting a goal once thought virtually unattainable: zero net energy use.

While the trend is nascent, dozens of “net zero” and “near net zero” developments — projects designed to use only about as much power from the public grid as they can save or produce on their own — have sprung up across the U.S. over the past five years.

Sales of new homes plunged unexpectedly last month to the lowest level since April, a sign the housing market recovery will be rocky.

The 11 percent slump from October’s pace shows that consumers are taking their time following an extension of a deadline for first-time buyers to qualify for a tax credit. The incentive was set to expire at the end of November, but Congress pushed back the date to April 30 and expanded the program to include current homeowners who relocate.

The housing market is in the midst of a rocky recovery, but it’s too soon to declare an end to the worst real estate slide since the Great Depression.

That became clear Wednesday, when the government reported that sales of new homes dropped a sharp 11.3 percent, surprising and disappointing forecasters who had expected an increase.

LoopNet, Inc., which operates the largest online commercial real estate marketplace, remains the clear leader in online visitor traffic among commercial property marketing and information services web sites, according to comScore, a leading Internet traffic measurement service. LoopNet.com generated 9.1 times the traffic of its nearest competitor in November 2009, according to the most recent data released by comScore. This is a significant gain from the year to date average of 6.4 times that comScore reported through October 2009.

Behringer Harvard announced today its acquisition of Calypso Apartments and Lofts (Calypso), a 177-unit multifamily community on a 3.7-acre site at 2801 Alton Parkway in Irvine, approximately 38 miles southeast of Los Angeles and three miles from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California.

Florida’s existing home sales rose in November, marking 15 months that sales activity has increased in the year-to-year comparison, according to the latest housing data released by Florida Realtors®. Existing home sales rose 61 percent last month with a total of 14,026 homes sold statewide compared to 8,694 homes sold in November 2008, according to Florida Realtors. Statewide sales of existing condos increased 111 percent last month compared to November 2008’s sales figure.