Michael Hobbs's (michaelhobbs) Blog

  In the prior month, the Los Angeles city attorney’s office filed a complaint accusing a major bank for failing to maintain more than 170 foreclosed properties in the city. The attorney’s office claimed that the properties were blighting neighborhoods, decreasing property values and encouraging ...

    The recent housing data reports show that all three major composites ended the second quarter of 2012 with positive annual growth. As the housing market continues to recover, there are those who may wonder what effect that recovery will have on the recently booming apartment sector, which ben...

Last week, the federal housing regulator, FHFA and mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announced that it will employ new short sale guidelines for banks to follow as part of the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s Servicing Alignment Initiative. The guidelines are supposed to make ...

Yesterday, the question was posed, what is household formation anyway and why does it matter? The general sense is that people have a kinda-sorta understand of housing formation and that they've heard it matters.  Yet, for the majority of real estate practitioners, they may not use the specific t...

So, what is household formation anyway and why does it matter?

Some good news from the commercial real estate market.  The percentage of delinquent commercial properties held by banks has decreased in the last two years, according to Trepp LLC, a research firm out of New York. In Chicago, the delinquency rate dropped 0.06% in the second quarter compared to t...

Trivia Time: What percentage of homes constructed in 2010 received an energy star label? 5%, 10%, 25%, 50% If you guessed (or knew it was) 25%, then you're in the money, green money that is. In states like Arizona, Ohio, Nevada and Iowa, the numbers are 50%. As of January 1, 2013, the state of Il...

Rents keep rising in the Chicago downtown apartment market.  According to Appraisal Research Counselors, a Chicago-based consulting firm, the average net rent at top-tier, or Class A, downtown apartment buildings went up to an all-time high of $2.57 a square foot.  This is an increase of 2.6 perc...

  Developers are betting big on residential skyscrapers, building them at record breaking heights and selling them at record prices the Wall Street Journal reported. Very-tall residential high-rises began growing in popularity 10 to 15 years ago during the building boom, when dozens of new high-r...

  Last Week, Six federal financial regulatory agencies issued a proposed rule to establish new appraisal requirements for “higher-risk mortgage loans.” The proposed rule would implement changes to the Truth in Lending Act enacted by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of...