Lumber Market Ready for Short-Term Rally According to Bob Book, senior market analyst for TJ&R Trading in Chicago, lumber prices are bottoming out and will experience a rally lasting until the normal fall slump. Adverse weather conditions this spring in major markets delayed construction projects and hampered shipments to job sites, discouraging retailers from increasing the amount of wood normally purchased during the season. Several analysts say that increased housing production later this year could put pressure on lumber prices into the autumn. Shinu Murthy, president of Futures Technology in Pike, Ohio, agrees that there could be a small price rally, but he maintains that “the trend has changed” for the North American lumber market, with lumber production up from last year’s level and U.S. demand flattening. (www.barrons.com)
Barrons (5/23/05); Lester Aldrich [Return to top]
As Pressure Increases, So Do Ways to Curb Polluted Runoff To address the problem of polluted runoff from development, Prince William County, Va. persuaded D.R. Horton to use an innovative storm-water management technique for its 155-home Hopewell Landing community in Gainesville. Most of the back yards being graded for the luxury homes will have sunken gardens filled with moisture-loving plants and mulch to absorb rain. The streets will be five feet narrower than usual, to reduce paved surfaces. The homes will be flush with the street, resulting in shorter driveways. And instead of curbs and gutters to carry rain to a near-by stream, deep trenches full of shrubs and stones will line the road to filter water. The standard technique for handling storm-water runoff is the drainage pond, but these are becoming unpopular because they do not filter pollutants and, if not property maintained, can collect sediment. Home owners complain that they are ugly, are breeding grounds for mosquitoes and are unsafe for children. (www.washingtonpost.com)
Washington Post (5/23/05); Lisa Rei [Return to top]
Cities Hope Signs Shame Lax Home Owners Dayton, Ohio has joined a small number of cities across the country that try to pressure property owners into cleaning up rundown vacant homes by posting large signs identifying the owners and how to contact them. “We’re basically calling it shaming,” said Bill Nelson, director of the city’s building services department. “Even if it has only marginal success, the impact will help some of our neighborhoods.” Dayton has so far posted two signs, which are five feet by three feet long and bolted onto the front of the house. Officials in Peoria, Ill. have put up five similar signs since they began posting them a few weeks ago and the effort has already produced results. Owners of two of the properties have made significant improvements, including repairs to a porch that was missing its roof and some of its floor. When it was used for a couple of years in the mid-1990s in Lynchburg, Va., the approach prompted action in about half the cases, according to a city official. Of the 2,700 vacant homes and commercial properties in Dayton, about 10% have been neglected to the point that they are considered nuisances. (www.sfgate.com)
San Francisco Chronicle (5/26/05); James Hannah, Associated Press [Return to top]
State Native Plays Role in Fair Housing Ruling A ruling in April from a judge in Vermont is the first to make clear that discrimination against victims of domestic violence constitutes sex discrimination under the Fair Housing Act because women are most often the victims of this crime, according to Lenora Lapidus, director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s Women’s Rights Project. The plaintiff in the case received an eviction letter from her landlord shortly after she called the police and had her husband arrested for brutally attacking her one night. People who work with domestic abuse know that it is common for landlords to decide to turn out women who are the victims of violence that happens on their premises. The Department of Justice notes that women living in rental housing experience three times more violence from their partners than do women who live in their own homes. (www.wvgazette.com)
Charleston Gazette, West Virginia (5/20/05); Susan Williams [Return to top]
Counties Get Tax Bonuses With Condo Conversions Apartment owners that haven’t sold or converted their units to condos could be facing much higher property tax assessments in South Florida, according to Jack McCabe of Deerfield Beach-based McCabe Research and Consulting. Multifamily properties in the region have been consistently selling for two to three times their taxable value, not because of their rental rates but because of the prices they can be sold at as condominiums. Rental property owners haven’t prepared for a big jump in their taxes, which could eat into their bottom line until they eventually pass that expense on to their renters in the form of higher rents. Units valued as rentals at $60,000 could see their values rise to $200,000 or more as condominiums. (www.bizjournals.com)
South Florida Business Journal (5/23/05), Ed Duggan [Return to top]
Supply of Oil-Based Paint Thins as New Rule Takes Effect Consumers and painters in the mid-Atlantic region are switching over to latex paint because of a largely unpublicized regulation restricting the sale of oil-based, or alkyd, paint in order to reduce ground-level ozone pollution. As they dry or sit out in the open, oil paints give off volatile organic compounds that interact with the sun and create ozone pollution. According to Christopher Recchia, executive director of the Ozone Transport Commission, an organization created under the Clean Air Act to help Eastern states develop regulations to prevent further diminishing of the ozone, alkyds create 170,000 tons of emissions a day in the region and are “comparable to some of the industrial plant sources.” Not all painters are wedded to oil-based paint, because it smells, is harder to clean up and it dries so hard that it can crack. Also, there have been great strides in the quality of water-soluble latex paint in recent years, in part because manufacturers have known for at least a decade that this regulation was coming. Oil paint accounted for 16.5% of the market in 2003, down from 18% in 1997, according to the Commerce Department. Similar rules have been in effect in California for a while, and laws are being prepared for the Northern states. (www.washingtonpost.com)
Washington Post (5/24/05); Margaret Webb Pressler [Return to top]
Duke Breaks Ground on Smart House Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering has broken ground on a $1.2 million, 4,500-square-foot Smart House that will provide living space for 10 undergraduate students and serve as a facility for researching smart, integrated technology for the residential market. Features in the highly automated, two-story house will include systems to filter out unwanted background noise; voice-command lights, music and temperature; efficient cooling systems; monitors to measure power consumption on a room-by-room basis; security cameras that provide facial recognition analysis; and indoor environmental quality monitors to create a low-toxin, low-pathogen environment. The house will have a green roof to control water runoff and use embedded fiber optic strands and acoustic emission sensors to detect any movement, cracks or breaks over time in the structure and foundation. The Smart House Web site is www.smarthouse.duke.edu. (www.triangletechjournal.com)
Triangle TechJournal (5/24/05) [Return to top]
Web Site Lets Buyers Track Home Construction Home Tracker Extranet — a password-protected Web site controlled by Skogman Homes in Cedar Rapids, Iowa — provides home buyers with costs in real time, an updated building status report and digital photographs showing the progress of construction. Chris Skogman, project manager for the company, says that the service has enhanced communications throughout the construction process and is being used by 95% of the builder’s customers. “Our phone time is down considerably,” he said, “and our response time is up. We used to have problems when most of the decision-making stage was conducted over the telephone. Many customers couldn’t take calls at work, and we couldn’t get a call until the next morning.” The system allowed one home buying couple to e-mail the project manager from 3,000 miles away that there wasn’t supposed to be a hearth in the basement fireplace and receive a response the same day. A spokesman for NAHB reports that builders in other parts of the country have offered progress photos of homes under construction, but to his knowledge, Skogman Homes is the only builder offering the complete package included in HomeTracker. (www.gazetteonline.com)
Cedar Rapids Gazette (5/1/05); George C. Ford [Return to top]
Florida Wins Big in Bid for Appreciation With 1,000 people a day relocating to Florida and speculators investing in pre-construction condo units, the state has overtaken California as the top dog in the nation’s real estate madhouse. The Sunshine State now claims eight of the nation’s top 10 markets for existing housing appreciation, according to the National Association of Realtors®. At the top of the list is Bradenton, where the median home price was up 45.6% between the first quarter of 2004 and the first quarter of this year; followed by West Palm Beach and Sarasota, each up about 36%; Ft. Lauderdale, 32%; Orlando, 29%; Melbourne, 29%, Miami, 28%; Ocala, 27%; and Ft. Myers, 26%. By contrast, median home prices were up only 6.9% in Chicago. Meanwhile, Fannie Mae has been test marketing 40-year mortgages and has decided to step up its purchases of the loans. The mortgages aren’t expected to account for a significant share of the mortgage market, but they might be attractive to borrowers who are looking for slightly lower payments stretched out over a longer term. (www.chicagotribune.com)
Chicago Tribune (5/22/05); Mary Umburger [Return to top]
New Technology in Drywall Can Prevent Mold at Home With success in commercial applications, Georgia Pacific is now rolling out DensGuard Plus in the home building market. The product is inorganic, paperless wallboard that prevents mold spores from colonizing on the edible surface. Instead of paper, fiberglass mats are placed atop the gypsum core, and the mold-friendly starches binding paper to the gypsum have also been eliminated. “It’s really all about removing the food source,” says Barry Reid of Georgia Pacific. “Once the paper is gone, mold has nowhere to go. It can’t eat fiberglass mats.” In industry mold tests, Reid says that no mold appeared on the fiberglass drywall after 28 days of constant exposure to heat, humidity and direct moisture. Mold can establish itself in as little as 24 hours with regular wallboard. Dens Guard can be primed and painted like other drywall, and the user can make walls completely inorganic by substituting fiberglass mesh tape in place of paper tape on wall seams. The wallboard is also good for basements, bathrooms, shower stalls and other areas where water sealing is needed, because the acrylic coating “stops moisture from going anywhere,” Reid says. (www.newburyportnews.com)
Daily News of Newburyport, Mass. (5/4/05); David Bradley, Associated Press [Return to top]
‘McMansions’ Spark Backlash in Wealthy Towns The affluent suburbs of Connecticut, Chicago and California are among the locations of a growing battle across the country to curb the size of expensive dream homes that dwarf those in the neighborhood. Tougher zoning regulations that reduce the size of new homes are being used to prevent new residents from tearing down modest size houses built decades ago and constructing homes that are double and triple the size on small lots, casting their neighbors in perpetual shade. The trend, called “mansionization” by planners, is especially prevalent in established neighborhoods in wealthy towns with a hot real estate market and little available space for development. Proponents say the larger homes increase the value of their smaller neighbors, but residents in the smaller homes worry about being priced out as their property taxes jump. (www.ap.org)
Associated Press Newswires (5/9/05); John Christoffersen [Return to top]
Buyers Are Not Discounting the Value of Mexican Real Estate An arrangement between Granada Hills, Calif.-based Fidelity Realty Group and Construmex, a unit of Cemex Inc. USA, enables home owners to use their equity to build, complete or buy a home in Mexico. The client buys the building materials from Construmex, which delivers them to the job site; it also provides blueprints, designs and computer models of the home. The materials and land cost considerably less in Mexico than they do here. While prices vary and coastal areas are more expensive, a two- to three-bedroom home in an inland community averages $25,000-$30,000. According to the Web site Mexonline.com, foreigners who want to live within about 62 miles of the border or 31 miles from the coast must participate in a fideicomiso. A Mexican bank is designated as the trustee, has title to the property and is the owner of record. As a beneficiary of the trust, a foreigner can then enjoy unrestricted use of land located in the restricted zone. “There’s no question about it that the Mexican government, even before the passage of NAFTA, has been trying to bring in more foreign investment,” said Chula Vista attorney Dennis Peyton, who is writing the third edition of his book “How to Buy Property in Mexico.” (www.dailynews.com)
Los Angeles Daily News (5/7/05); Gregory J. Wilcox [Return to top]
Cows Emit More Organic Gas Than Cars, Studies Say As the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District in California decides how much pollution comes from the area’s $4 billion dairy industry, two out of three advisory group studies have reported that cows remain a bigger source of organic gas than cars. Based on an earlier estimate, dairies produce more than 38 tons of reactive organic gases each day — almost a ton more per day than light- and medium-duty trucks, which are the second highest source. The dairy industry contributes almost 10% of all such gases emitted in the Valley, where 3.5 million people live in what environmentalists consider one of the country’s most polluted air basins. The gases combine with oxides of nitrogen from cars and other sources and bake into ozone, the main ingredient in summertime smog. “We’ve believed all along that livestock-related emissions are a major part of the Valley’s problem,” said lawyer Brent Newell, a longtime dairy critic who works for the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. “There’s a need to take regulatory action quickly.” (www.fresnobee.com)
Fresno Bee (5/7/05); Mark Grossi [Return to top] | 
