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“With summer just around the corner, many New Yorkers' thoughts are turning to the Hamptons, and local real estate agents are thriving.
"The market is incredible. It's the best couple months we've had, probably since 2003," a vice president of the East End offices for the Corcoran Group, Rick Hoffman, said. He says high-end properties are selling fast, but rentals are doing even better.
"The last 30 days for the rental market was incredible," Mr. Hoffman said. "We will have a record rental this year."
Seasonal rentals, which run between Memorial Day and Labor Day, can range from $20,000 outside of the village to upward of $900,000 for three months of oceanfront property. Local agents say it's the most expensive properties that are hard to come by, but that news has hardly been discouraging. According to Mr. Hoffman, about 80% of Corcoran's active rentals are off the market — that's 10% more than a year ago at this time — and bargain shoppers are nowhere to be found.
"People use to accept the sort of big old ‘mildew manors,'" Mr. Hoffman, who has been working in the Hamptons for more than a decade, said.”
“U.S. homebuilders may trigger a ``correlation crisis'' similar to the credit sell off in 2005 when Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. lost their investment-grade credit ratings, according to Bank of America Corp.
The ratings cuts to the automakers triggered losses for banks and hedge funds holding the riskiest parts of collateralized debt obligations, securities that package bonds, loans and credit-default swaps and use the income to pay investors.
An increase in the perceived risk of default by homebuilders such as Dallas-based Centex Corp. and Lennar Corp. in Miami could cause similar losses this year, Bank of America analysts Glen Taksler and Jeffrey Rosenberg wrote in a report today. Construction company profits have plunged since the five- year U.S. housing boom ended a year ago. Rising inventories of unsold homes and reluctance by potential buyers wary of falling prices has stifled sales.
``We see increasing risk signals that remind us of the run- up to the 2005 correlation meltdown,'' the analysts wrote in the report titled ``The Correlation Crisis of 2007?''
“The recent wave of defaults in the subprime mortgage sector that sent shocks through Wall Street has caught the attention of Congress.
More than 2 million people with subprime loans are facing foreclosure this year and nearly 20 percent of subprime mortgages issued between 2005 and 2006 are projected to fail, according to a December 2006 study by the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonpartisan research and policy organization.
Foreclosures in the subprime mortgage market are expected to cost American households as much as $164 billion in lost equity from 1998 through 2006, the center reported.
Meanwhile, at least four subprime lenders have filed for bankruptcy since late December and many others closed last year.
Observers of the credit industry place the blame on predatory lenders and borrowers ignorant of the loans' terms and conditions.”
“Consumers spent more in February while construction spending rose by the largest amount in 11 months, the government said Friday, in reports that should dispel some of the concerns about the health of the economy.
The Commerce Department reported that consumer spending, bolstered by strong income gains, was up 0.6 percent last month, the best showing since December. Personal income also rose by 0.6 percent. Both figures were double what analysts had expected.
In a separate report, the department said that construction spending rose by 0.3 percent last month, the best showing since a 1 percent jump in March 2006. Until the February increase, construction had either fallen or had been flat since the big rise last March.”
“Meanwhile, inflation remains too high for the comfort of some Fed officials. From a year ago, policy makers' preferred price gauge climbed 2.4 percent, compared with 2.3 percent the prior month. The last time the year-over-year rise exceeded 2.4 percent was in April 1995.
Fed policy makers, including Bernanke, have said they'd be comfortable with inflation in a 1 percent to 2 percent range. The central bank on March 21 kept the benchmark overnight lending rate at 5.25 percent for a sixth straight meeting.
Forecasts
Economists had forecast a 0.3 percent rise in spending, which accounts for two-thirds of the economy, according to the median of 74 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from no gain to a 0.5 percent rise.
Disposable income, or the money left over after taxes, rose 0.5 percent after rising 0.8 percent the previous month. Adjusted for inflation, disposable income rose 0.1 percent after a 0.6 percent increase. ”
“DATING is fraught with disappointments, so you can imagine how delighted a single woman might be to find someone like Albert Podell — particularly after she Googles him and learns how rich he is. Last year, Mr. Podell, a 70-year-old lawyer, gave N.Y.U. Law School $2.9 million. He goes out four nights a week, to the opera, symphony or theater. He is well read. He says he has traveled to 162 countries.
Then comes that magic evening when the woman is ready to go back to his place.
“It’s totally unchanged, like it was when I went to law school in 1973, a time warp,” Mr. Podell says of his small one-bedroom in SoHo, a description that seems plausible, given the hot pink living room with the futon seating and the fraying contact paper on the kitchen cabinets.
The place is also dimly lighted, which, once you examine the kitchen nook in daylight, is probably not such a bad thing. The cabinets hold nothing but a six-month supply of powdered milk for Mr. Podell’s cereal, so that he can keep his trips to the supermarket to a minimum; the Formica countertop is peeling; the stove has been disconnected from the gas feed. (Mr. Podell, who usually eats out, sees no reason to waste fuel.)
All these things have proved detriments to love, but none so effectively as his sheets. Mr. Podell likes the ones from the ’60s and ’70s that tell a story: sheets with intergalactic battles or pink hippopotami or the Beatles. Since these are no longer available in adult-bed sizes, Mr. Podell’s sheets are now 30 to 40 years old. The fading is such that a person who saw one in a Salvation Army bin, having lost everything she owned in a fire, would remind herself that there was no reason to be desperate. The fading, however, was apparently not the reason that the sheets became a deal breaker.
“I was dating this very nice woman, I thought,” says Mr. Podell. “I was ready and she was ready to do the big deed. I take her to my apartment, go into the bedroom, and fling back the sheets, and she said, ‘My husband had these sheets and he was a mean-hearted son of a bitch and you must be like him and I’m leaving.’ ”
“The city makes available free Web-based maps showing things such as land zoning, the frequency of different types of crime, wildfire risks, airport-related noise levels and the location of sewers.
Much of the data can also be downloaded and viewed in free software such as Google Inc.'s Earth application. This allows you to zoom through a three-dimensional depiction of Portland, with relevant locations -- such as sites zoned for commercial use -- highlighted in color.
The PortlandMaps.com site is one of several initiatives across the country that use new mapping technology to open up troves of government data tied to specific locations.
The maps could potentially help people decide where to live, for example, as well as assess development projects requiring community approval. Businesses, meanwhile, could make better decisions about locating their outlets. And the mapping tools are so easy to use that a wide range of employees could work with them, instead of just tech specialists.”
“The economy grew at a 2.5 percent pace in the final quarter of last year, healthier than previously thought but still largely caught up in a spell of sluggishness.
The new reading on gross domestic product, released by the Commerce Department on Thursday, was an improvement from the prior estimate of a 2.2 percent growth rate for the October-to-December period. However, it marked the third quarter in a row where the economy's growth clocked in at a lethargic 2 percent or better, reflecting the drag of the crumbling housing market on overall business growth.
Many economists expect the GDP will remain mediocre, hovering at around the 2 percent pace in the current January-to-March quarter. Gross domestic product measures the value of all goods and services produced within the United States.
Economists were expecting the fourth-quarter GDP figure to be unchanged from the previous 2.2 percent pace.”
“ Amid a 12 percent jump in U.S. foreclosure filings in February, civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson on Tuesday called on consumers struggling with subprime mortgages to take to the streets and urged the federal government to step in and help them secure their homes.
"What we must do now is begin to ask for some bailout of victims of this crisis," Jackson, president of Chicago-based Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said at a news conference at the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center.
Jackson was the second high-profile civic leader on Tuesday to raise concerns about the subprime mortgage industry, which makes higher-interest loans to consumers with spottier credit histories.
Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan vowed to push for legislation that will, among other things, require lenders to verify a borrower's ability to repay a loan, compel mortgage brokers to get the best deal possible for borrowers and prohibit prepayment penalties on all home loans.
More than 130,000 homes entered foreclosure last month nationwide. That's a pace of more than 1.5 million a year, which Jackson calls a "systemic crisis" demanding "some government remedy and protections."
"We must come together and engage in mass protests and make this an issue in the presidential debates," Jackson said.”
“A developer proposing a $2 billion, Vegas-style entertainment complex for Coney Island is desperately trying to convince City Hall to back it by shifting more than 900 planned luxury condo units away from the boardwalk and into one 40-story tower.
Project spokesman Lee Silberstein revealed at a recent community meeting that Thor Equities is considering confining the project's controversial residential housing to Stillwell Avenue's west side near Surf Avenue.
That's a change from the previous proposal, which called for spreading the housing out in four Stillwell locations within the proposed 425,000-square-foot amusement complex.
The new plan would dramatically reduce a 515-foot-high tower slated for the Stillwell boardwalk to a height similar to the nearby 262-foot Parachute Jump; that tower would contain time-share residences.
The revisions would allow riders of the nearby Cyclone roller coaster to retain Parachute Jump views.”
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