Maureen Mengel Blog

U.S. home prices rose a modest 0.5 percent from January to February , according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) monthly House Price Index (HPI). The HPI is also up 4.9 percent in year-over-year. The HPI is FHFA’s “weighted, repeat-sales index, meaning that it measures average price changes in repeat sales or refinancings on the same properties. This information is obtained by reviewing repeat mortgage transactions on single-family properties whose mortgages have been purchased or securitized by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac since January 1975.” Courtesy of FHFA. Overall, the index varied greatly from region to region. Prices fell 1.2 percent   in the Middle Atlantic division and rose 1.4 percent in the East South Central. The 12-month changes, however, were all positive — ranging from an increase of 3.5 percent in the West South Central division to 6.5 percent in the Mountain division. Email Veronika Bondarenko Article image credited to Shutterstock.com. ...

New-home sales rose 4.5 percent from February to March and are up 3 percent year-over-year to a seasonally adjusted rate off 692,000, according to data  from the U.S. Census Bureau and  Housing and Urban Development. Nationwide, 344,000 new homes were listed for sale, a modest rise from 336,000 in February. The median sales price of a new home was $302,700. Courtesy of U.S. Census Bureau. Such numbers reveal trends that have been unrolling throughout most of this year — amid  inventory turnarounds  and  a slowdown in home value growth , more people are slowly beginning to buy homes. At the same time, existing-home sales dropped by 4.9 percent after a major surge during the previous month. Email Veronika Bondarenko Article image credited to Radovan1/Shutterstock.com. New-home sales rose in March curated from Inman

A rare opportunity to buy a home at the Montage Residences Beverly Hills is now possible. Located on the sixth-floor, the condominium is currently the only one available for purchase at the property. Courtesy of Montage Beverly Hills A rare opportunity to buy a home at the Montage Residences Beverly Hills is now possible. Located on the sixth-floor, the condominium is currently the only one available for purchase at the property . In total, there are twenty full-ownership residences that comprise Montage Residences Beverly Hills . Residents of Montage Residences Beverly Hills are given full access to all the amenities offered at the adjacent Montage Beverly Hills , a Forbes’ Travel Guide Five-Star hotel . Offered furnished, the 1,917-square-foot home has two bedrooms and two full bathrooms and is the only two-bedroom option in the building. Courtesy of Montage Residences Beverly Hills Offered furnished, residence 6D is a 1,917-square-foot home with...

For those expecting  a rough homebuying season , there’s reason to remain hopeful. Realtor.com on Tuesday issued a revised forecast projecting a more robust market than originally predicted through the remainder of the year. As mortgage rates fall and more homes hit the market , Realtor.com has updated its homebuying forecast for the end of 2019. While the original forecast predicted mortgage rates to reach 5.5 percent by the end of the year, the adjusted forecast indicates rates will likely peak at 4.5 percent. The number of home sales, meanwhile, will experience a much smaller drop than initially forecasted. Realtor.com expects them to drop by only 0.3 percent instead of 2 percent. “The 2019 housing market is different than what we predicted in fall 2018, primarily due to an unexpected drop in mortgage rates in January 2019,” said Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale in a prepared statement. Courtesy of Realtor.com. Home prices are the only metric not predicted to ...

Chemically treated wood makes it able to store heat and become transparent. American Chemical Society With Earth Day taking place this week there's a strong focus on how to build homes that leave as small a carbon footprint as possible. Wood makes a great building material except for one thing: you can't see through it. If you want a window you have to rely on glass, which is expensive and also has a tendency to let in too much cold air. Researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have developed a way to chemically treat wood so that it not only becomes opaque—even completely transparent at times—but also stores and releases heat during the course of a day. The science behind it does not involve Frankenstein-esque maneuvers in a laboratory. Instead the researchers removed the lignin from wood samples, which left plenty of open, porous space inside the still-structurally sound pieces of wood (for their research they used silver bi...

No doubt about it, we’re in the age of hotel brand proliferation. New brands seemingly sprout almost weekly. Counting the precise or official number of hotel brands is difficult. By my conservative estimate, nearly 100 new flags with at least eight properties have been launched since 2008, conceivably pushing the total number of brands to more than 700. This dizzying array of choices doesn’t the make the decision about which flag to fly on a property any easier for hotel developers. How do you decide when there are so many brands to choose from? Marriott , for example, has 30-plus brands under its umbrella spanning all chain scale and star levels of the hospitality industry. A successful hotel project begins with the selection of the right brand for your marketplace, physical site and price point. Although the macro dynamics of the lodging business are strong, a microanalysis of the destination in which you want to build will ultimately dictates your brand choice. Here’s a road ma...