Northwest Living | Bellingham Real Estate Market

The Building Industry Association of Whatcom County honored several of its members for their contributions to Whatcom County and the local building industry at the Annual Installation Banquet on Wednesday, Dec. 16.

Builder of the Year: Gary Honcoop of Roosendaal-Honcoop Construction was awarded the 2009 builder of the year. Gary and his Partner Roger Roosendaal have been building new homes in Whatcom County for over 30 years and have been members of the Building Industry Association of Whatcom County since 1991.

They are currently building new homes in Liberty Park, located in Ferndale Washington’s east side. They currently have three brand new homes under construction and one pre-sale as well. All three homes are one story becuase of the shortage in the new homes market for one story homes currently. Stop by and see what’s going on in their North Bellingham (Ferndale WA) location.

Some of the other awards handed out at this years Annual Installation Banquet also include the following:

Built Green Builder of the Year: Csaba Horvath of Astal Construction. Horvath has served as an active participant in Built Green since 2006, winning the 2008 Built Green Washington, Western Washington Custom Home of the Year award, a statewide honor based on resource efficiency, design, quality and craftsmanship.

Built Green Associate of the Year: Robert Stockmann, of Pinnacle Inspections for championing Built Green and Northwest EnergyStar as a verifier and advisor through his contributions to Built Green and the Program Development Committee.

Associate MRC Member of the Year: Scott Alderson of Nibs Construction for his contributions to the Master Remodeler’s Council and involvement with this summer’s MRC service projects.

Remodeler of the Year: Pat Rose of Rose Construction. Rose has been an active member of MRC and volunteered time working in the home show, participated in the 2009 service projects retrofitting access for a disabled community member, and in 2009 won three local Remodeling in Excellence awards.

Associate of the Year: Stephanie Artino, of Metcalf Hodges. A member of BIAWC since 2004, she was recently elected to the BIAWC board.

Most Valuable Political Player: Charlie Hudson of Hudson Remodeling was chosen for his leadership with the Governmental Affairs Committee over the past several years, and specifically for research and contributions in Whatcom County’s ongoing dialogue regarding land rights and affordable housing. Hudson will serve as the 2010 President of the Building Industry Association of Whatcom County.

Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Bellingham New Homes

Seattle WA - According to Forbes Magazine Seattle ranks 15 out of the top 100 metropolitan areas for the fastest-recovering cities from the current recession. That’s not to say they have recovered yet, but are poised to do so as we come out of the recession.

The top cities on this list have diversified industry’s and relatively stable housing fundamentals that have provided local residents with comparatively secure standards of living. Seattle was ranked 5th overall on the Forbes survey for retail sales, and ranked high on gross metropolitan product (GMP) growth in the past year, and a low home foreclosure rate. Add up these three measures alone and Seattle would have easily been one of the top 10 cities on the survey.

What’s more, Seattle area home prices never ascended to the unsustainable levels the rest of the country hit at the peak of the housing bubble. Thus, it didn’t crash as hard. These factors have toughened the local economy against a recession that is inextricably tied to real estate.

To form this list, Forbes Magazine ranked the 100 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas — geographic entities that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines and uses in collecting statistics — in five categories: unemployment rate, GMP (a measure of the size of a city’s economy), foreclosures, home prices and sales rates.

Forbes ranked September unemployment rates (the most recent available by metro) using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; the percentage of a metro’s homes in foreclosure with September data provided by RealtyTrac; and the change in GMP between the first and second quarter of 2009 from the Brookings Institution’s Metro Monitor. They also included the second-quarter 2009 year-over-year change in Freddie Mac’s Conventional Mortgage Home Price Index — a measure of housing price inflation — and the average days on the market for properties currently on sale, to measure sales rates. They then averaged the scores for each measure to arrive at an overall ranking.

The magazine stated that ”areas where home prices don’t fluctuate wildly are particularly well-positioned to ride out this recession, because they were spared the domino effect of foreclosures, lost jobs and lost productivity”.

Seattle was the number one city on the entire West Coast & in the Western Region as a whole. The next West Coast cities on the list were Silicon Valley’s San Jose, California in at number 56 and then Portland, Oregon right behind at 57.

There’s a lesson to be learned from the cities at the top of the list, some of which aren’t economically thriving, but all of which are well-equipped to emerge from the recession in a similar position to where they started. Rather than chasing rising home prices or apparently plentiful jobs in one-industry towns, families looking for long-term economic stability should seek spots where industry is diverse and housing price shifts are benign…like Seattle, Washington.

However, I believe that Western Washington has a lot more going for itself with it’s natural beauty and quality of life we share in this region vs most of the cities ahead of us on the survey list.

Jerry Campbell - The Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Bellingham Real Estate

WASHINGTON — Senators agreed Wednesday to extend a popular tax credit for first-time homebuyers and to offer a reduced credit to some repeat buyers. 

The tax credit provides up to $8,000 to first-time homebuyers but is set to expire at the end of November. The Commerce Department said Wednesday that new homes sales fell 3.6 percent in September, and some industry representatives blamed uncertainty about the tax credit. 

Senators agreed to extend the existing tax credit for first-time homebuyers while offering a reduced credit of up to $6,500 to repeat buyers who have owned their current homes for at least five years, said Regan Lachapelle, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. 

The tax credits would be available to homebuyers who sign sales agreements by the end of April. They would have until the end of June to close on their new homes, according to a summary of the legislation being circulated among lawmakers. 

Senators were still negotiating the expansion of a separate tax credit that lets money-losing businesses get refunds for taxes paid in previous years, providing them with an immediate source of cash. 

Senators in both political parties were hoping to add both tax provisions to a bill that would give people running out of unemployment insurance benefits up to 20 more weeks of federal aid. The Senate could vote on the overall bill as early as Thursday, but lawmakers were still haggling over several unrelated amendments Wednesday evening. 

Popular bills like the one to extend unemployment benefits often attract amendments that would have a difficult time passing on their own. 

Republicans were demanding that they be given a chance to offer amendments to restrict federal aid to the beleaguered community activist group ACORN and on requiring that people receiving unemployment insurance be processed through E-Verify, an Internet-based system that employers use to check on the immigration status of new hires. 

Majority Democrats have refused to add the amendments. 

If the Senate passes the bill, it would go to the House, which passed a similar bill extending unemployment benefits last month. House leaders have also said they support extending the tax credit for homebuyers. 

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., has been negotiating for several weeks with Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., to craft an extended tax credit for homebuyers that would pass the Senate. 

Lawmakers didn’t release a cost estimate for extending the tax credit, though similar proposals were projected to cost about $10 billion. 

Industry representatives said uncertainty about the tax credit is hurting new home sales. September’s decline was the first since March. 

It takes 45 days to 60 days to close on a house, making it unlikely a sale made today would be consummated by the end of November, said Lucien Salvant, spokesman for the National Association of Realtors. 

“Buyers right now have an incentive to hold off, not knowing whether the credit will be extended,” Salvant said. 

About 1.4 million first-time homebuyers have qualified for the credit through August. The National Association of Realtors estimates that 350,000 of them would not have purchased their homes without the credit. 

The tax credit for money-losing businesses is a favorite among Republican lawmakers. Businesses could get tax refunds by using losses from 2008 and 2009 to offset taxable profits made in the previous five years. Under current law, they can only offset profits from the previous two years. 

The provision would help a variety of industries, including retailers, manufacturers and home builders, though it’s expensive. 

“It’s clearly a way to put cash in the hands of some major economic players,” said Clint Stretch, a tax policy expert at Deloitte Tax. 

A similar proposal that was ultimately dropped from the economic stimulus package enacted in February would have cost nearly $20 billion over 10 years. Lawmakers are working to reduce the price tag. 

“Because everybody is so cash strapped, this is a good way to get refund when businesses need it for operating expenses,” said Rachelle Bernstein, vice president and tax counsel for the National Retail Federation.

Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Bellingham Real Estate

The U.S. housing market has started to recover from the most far-reaching crisis since the Great Depression, data released Thursday shows.

Sales of previously occupied homes rose for the third month in a row in June, the National Association of Realtors reported. That hasn’t happened since early 2004, during the boom.

“The turnaround in the housing market appears finally to be here and indeed may be gaining some speed,” wrote Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors Inc.

Stocks jumped on the news, with the Dow Jones industrial average rising above 9,000 for the first time since early January.

Home sales rose 3.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.89 million last month, from a downwardly revised pace of 4.72 million in May. Sales were up in all four regions of the country.

It was the highest level of sales since last October and beat economists’ expectations. Sales had been expected to rise to an annual pace of 4.84 million units, according to Thomson Reuters.

In another encouraging sign, the share of foreclosures on the market is shrinking. About one out of three homes sold in June was foreclosure-related, down from nearly half earlier this year.

And the glut of homes up for sale dwindled to 3.8 million. That’s a 9.4-month supply at the current sales pace and another important sign of a recovery. When the market balances at a 7-month supply prices should begin to stabilize, the Realtors’s group said.

That probably won’t happen until next year because of a backlog of foreclosures that have yet to come on to the market. The median sales price was $181,800 in June, down 15 percent from year-ago levels but up slightly from $174,700 in May.

Nevertheless, prices have risen for three straight months in about half of the 55 major metropolitan areas tracked by the Associated Press-Re/Max Housing Report, also released Thursday.

Jerry Campbell - The Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Bellingham Homes For Sale

Roosendaal-Honcoop Construction, Inc., a Whatcom County general contractor, is celebrating its 30th anniversary with an open house Saturday, April 18. The public is invited to enjoy food and beverages from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on April 18 at Roosendaal-Honcoop Construction’s Liberty Park residential community in Ferndale, just a  half mile west of the intersection of Northwest Rd and West Smith Road.

Roosendaal-Honcoop Construction is owned and managed by lifelong county residents Gary Honcoop and Roger Roosendaal. The company offers experience in residential construction, both homes and remodels, commercial, industrial and pre-engineered steel construction.

Roosendaal-Honcoop Construction has successfully completed several residential communities in the Ferndale area: West 54th Lane, Byers Lane, Bellaire Estates and Myers Estates. The company has also built 14 homes on Westview Drive in Lynden and now is focusing on Ferndale’s latest flat-lot neighborhood, Liberty Park. Visit libertyparkhomes.com on line today.

With both partners still active in the business, Roosendaal-Honcoop Construction now has 30 employees. By developing and implementing educational programs and safe operating practices, company employees have worked more than 10 years without a time-loss injury. Via the Bellingham Herald. 

The company headquarters is at 5977 Guide Meridian in Bellingham. For more information, call (360) 398-2800.

Jerry Campbell - The Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Bellingham Home Builders

Initial construction of U.S. homes unexpectedly surged in February, after falling for eight months, according to a government report released Tuesday.Housing starts rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 583,000 last month, up 22% from a revised 477,000 in January, according to the Commerce Department. It was the first time housing starts increased since June, when they rose 11%.

Economists were expecting housing starts to decline to 450,000, according to consensus estimates compiled by Briefing.com. Still, starts are down more than 47% from February 2008, when over 1.1 million new homes broke ground.

New construction of single-family homes, considered the core of the housing market, increased 1.1% to an annual rate of 357,000 versus 353,000 in January.

February’s increase was driven by a nearly 80% increase in construction of multi-family homes. New construction of buildings with 5 or more units increased surged 80% to 212,000 from 118,000 in January. 

Applications for building permits, considered a reliable sign of future construction activity, rose 3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 547,000 last month. Economists were expecting permits to fall to 500,000.

While the surge in new construction was a welcome sign for the nation’s battered housing market, analysts warned that the increase could be short lived.

“With new home sales still falling and the months’ supply at a record, there is no reason for homebuilding to rise,” wrote Ian Sheperdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in a research note. “This is a temporary rebound, not a recovery.”

New home construction surged in the Northeast, jumping nearly 89% last month. Starts also increased in the Midwest and the South.

In the West, where the housing market was overbuilt in the boom years and where there is a glut of foreclosed homes, starts declined nearly 25% versus the previous month.

Jerry Campbell - The Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Bellingham Real Estate

Bellingham WA - in a recent survey more than half of the real estate agents who responded think the national real estate market will finally hit bottom sometime early in 2009, according to the Campbell Communications marketing-research firm. Fifty-two percent of agents who took the survey said the country should see the bottom of the housing market in the first six months of 2009. Additionally, 7.7 percent said prices have already bottomed out, and 16.5 percent believed that the bottom will happen in 2010 or later.

Traditionally, by the time you get to March, you’re entering into the spring-summer homebuying season, and that’s when sales pick up. If interests rates are still under 6% by then and home prices are still soft, we should start to see some improvements in our local Bellingham real estate market. Sales this year have been down about 32% across the board, if you include all of Whatcom County’s home sales.

So if the survey is correct, then what the real estate agents are saying is that as sales pick up, prices are also going to firm up or solidify at some point. I think locally as we approach the end of 2009 and the spotlight starts to shine on the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics we will most definetly see our Whatcom County real estate market return to normal.

In the survey, more than 2,500 real-estate agents also identified the three most resilient markets in the nation for selling homes. They mentioned that if they had to pick three states in the country that are large states and where property values really haven’t declined that much and employment has held up, the three states that would fit that criteria would be Texas, North Carolina and Washington state. It seems like every article that has been written during the past three years always includes Washington State and the Puget Sound region as one of the top performing areas in the country.

The biggest problem were having in Bellingham is that buyers that want to buy have to sell their current Bellingham home first. This creates a challenge for both home buyers and home sellers in making successful transactions.

Some of the fears home buyers have are with the difficulty in obtaining financing and the thought that home prices will continue to fall. Most Bellingham Mortgage lenders that I have talked to though, say that locally, lending has not been anything near as bad as other areas of the country. Locally, you can get thirty year fixed mortgages at around 5.75%, which is pretty good coupled with lower home prices.

I think people are just waiting to hear that the market has hit bottom, and once that reasonates through the markets, that’s when you will see buyers return in numbers. Right now, home buyers just seem afraid to purchase a home and then have their home value decline immediately by 10 percent or so based on what is happening to other properties in some communities across the nation.

But I also belief that some sellers are are also a little unrealistic about what their home is worth on the market, pricing it well above the going rate. When your in a down market or soft market like this, the last thing you want to do is price your home above the market. If you take this approach and home prices continue to drop, the home seller will be chasing a down market and end up getting less than if they had priced it right to begin with.

Well, lets see what happens this coming spring and hope that our Bellingham real estate and Bellingham homes for sale markets will begin to return to something more normal.

 Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Bellingham Real Estate

Puget Sound, WA - When the U.S. housing market hit the skids, home builders in our area that thrived by offering large homes and expensive amenities began to rethink their home designs with an eye toward making smaller, less costly homes.

Three years into the downturn, that trend appears to be intensifying, as many builders scramble to make their wares palatable and affordable to new home buyers and compete with a market full of resale homes and deeply discounted foreclosed homes also on the market. The problem with builders shrinking their floor plans, is the basic fact they actually make less money on the new home because hard costs like lot prices, permit fees and sub contractor prices haven’t moved much at all. 

Puget Sound home builders are taking steps, as the industry seeks to stem losses due to falling home prices, tighter mortgage lending standards and skittish buyers. New home sales fell in August to the slowest pace in 17 years, while the median sale price fell 5.5 percent, but on the plus side sales were up 5.5 percent.

The trend in smaller homes is a reversal of more than two decades of expanding floor plans, during which median size single-family went from less than 1,600 square feet to more than 2,200 square feet.

That steady drive by home builders to deliver increasingly bigger homes peaked during the housing boom. Derided by some as McMansions, these super-sized homes packed with amenities helped drive up home prices even more.

Beyond competing with preowned homes on the market, declining home prices have also made it less profitable to build large homes. Builders need to factor in much more into the equation of building and marketing a home a lot more today than in the past ten years.

The only way to respond to the lower price environment … is to make the home smaller.  As you kind of reduce the floor plan size, we’re getting back to more the way things were historically, kind of undoing the excesses, not just from a price perspective but home size and fewer amenities.

In my Bellingham real estate market, a builder I work closely with, had to re-evaluate the size of homes and amenities in them to make them more affordable towards their demographic market of empty nestors and retirees. After a thorough evaluation of their market they have made the required adjustments to meet the price point that would attract those buyers, without sacrificing quality.

In some markets of Seattle I’ve seen homes, while smaller, feature large open spaces, a so-called great room often linking the living room and dining room area that might have previously been walled off. The homes also have a two-car garage standard and storage space.

Sometimes the builder has to look beyond just the square footage and instead focus on the utility, efficiency and flexibility of the home. It’s all about creating a niche and differentiating your home from the competition. You could have a three-bedroom, 2,500 square-foot single-story home and all you had was wide hallways and bigger rooms. It wasn’t really giving (buyers) the utility.

The bottom line is that builders need to first get back to the basics: What people can afford is the type of home they’re going to buy. If you can add a few extra items to set yourself apart and still have decent margins on the sale, then consider yourself lucky.

Builders will continue to build smaller houses and that’s a function of price, because financing is more difficult to get today.

Home buyers’ tastes, possibly influenced by tighter mortgage lending, are also helping drive the changing trends in new homes.

Big formal entries, high ceilings and lavish light fixtures are also not as high a priority among many buyers these days. In the mid to lower range newer homes, fewer buyers are opting to upgrade from a standard laminate kitchen counter top to a granite counter top.

Builders have also had to downgrade the level of amenities and finishes built into its showcase homes, to reflect the base price of homes.

With move-up buyers, for a long time everybody wanted the biggest house on the biggest lot with the best view and all of the options. What we’re seeing today are instead homes being built instead with a lot fewer options and the size of home considerations.

Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Ferndale Homes For Sale

Sales of previously owned U.S. homes rose 5.5 percent for September 2008. This was the biggest gain since July 2003, and the inventory of unsold homes fell 1.6 percent. Sales additionally were up 1.4 percent from September of 2007, the first year over year increase in three years. Hopefully this is a sign the housing market could be stabilizing and we can finally reach a bottom. Were hopeful in my own local Bellingham real estate housing market. 

September sales of existing homes rose to a 5.18 million unit annual rate from the 4.91 million unit pace set in August. Economists had expected sales to rise to only a 4.93 million unit rate. The positive number is important because this is the highest number of sales since August of 2007. In a real estate market like this, a .25 (25,000 units) above the expert’s expectations is a nice surprise to the upside.

The increase in sales was spurred, in part, by a rise in foreclosure and other distress sales in regions of the country hard-hit by the ongoing housing downturn. The foreclosed units are making it’s way through the market & the faster we can get these through the market the faster we can get back to a market resembling something more normal. However, 82% of the sales were homeowners that were living in their homes and that’s a very positive sign.

Leading the way were home sales here in the West recording a 16.8 percent jump. The Midwest saw an increase of 4.4 percent and the South saw a 2.2 percent rise. In the Northeast, sales fell 1.2 percent.

In some regions like the West, the lower prices are seeing buyers return to the marketplace. This was a nice jump and hopefully this trend can continue because the first step in stabilizing the housing market is an increase in home sales.

A huge supply of unsold homes, tighter lending standards and record foreclosures have pushed down home prices. The number of homes unsold in the market also went down last month which was another good sign.

However, For the 12 months ending in August, U.S. home prices fell 5.9 percent, and the cumulative decline since the April 2007 peak is 6.5 percent, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index. The closer we are to a bottom we should start seeing more and more signs like this with buyers getting back into the market place. Via CNBC News.

Jerry Campbell | Muljat Group | Bellinghma WA | Bellingham WA Real Estate

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said on Friday Oct 10, that the U.S. housing market should begin to recover in the first half of 2009, according to an article he wrote for Emerging Markets magazine.

Greenspan wrote that “the recent slowing in the rate of decline in U.S. home prices is the first positive note in the year-long trauma and that eventually, frozen credit markets will thaw as frightened investors take tentative steps toward reengagement with risk. More conclusive signs of pending home price stability are likely to become visible in the first half of 2009″.

I would have to agree that once the housing market finds it’s footing, financial markets will be able to tackle the main issues related to this credit crisis. The question remains though on how much overall deleveraging is going to be required to get investors to again become committed holders, at modest interest rates, of the liabilities of the world’s financial institutions.

It’s at least assuring to know that Alan Greenspan, one of the smartest money managers in the world, sees an end in sight to this tail spin our economy has been in lately. I think the Northwest will be one of the first areas to recover since we had far less to do with subprime loans than most areas of the country.

Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham Homes For Sale