In a traditional market, a segment of home owners with rising incomes and growing families would sell their older places and use the profits as downpayments on larger, more comfortable homes. But in California’s San Diego and Riverside counties, real estate agents and analysts say that with house prices well down from a 2007 peak, potential move-up buyers carry mortgages larger than what they could get selling their houses. Even among home owners with some equity in their houses, they must have enough profit to make that next purchase. A home owner looking to sell a smaller house for $300,000 would have to sell for $130,000 more than is owed on the property to make a downpayment on a larger $500,000 home, said Louis Galuppo, residential real estate director of the Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate at the University of San Diego. Gwen Leevers, a real estate agent in Temecula, recently said she had no move-up clients, nor did several other agents in Southwest Riverside County. “To sell their property and move up, they would have to have equity in their property,” Leevers said. “Very few recent buyers are able to move up.” Some home owners have decided they don’t want to move up. Potential home buyers worry that the national economy is about to get worse and fear losing their jobs. Others have decided they like their house enough to stay put. “I think there’s a lot of people who, a few years ago, thought they were a candidate to move up and now they find their house is adequate and they don’t need to move up,” said Jim Klinge, a Carlsbad real estate agent. “Even if they have a four-bedroom and three kids, you might think they were bulging at the seams. They’re finding they can make do.” (www.nctimes.com)
North County Times (8/21/11); Eric Wolff, McClatchy-Tribune Regional News

Home prices in some of the nation’s hardest-hit metro areas have fallen far below pre-bubble levels, stirring concerns that properties in those markets are undervalued. In a recent analysis, real estate firm Zillow Inc. studied the correlation between home prices and annual incomes over the 15-year period that ended in 2000, before home prices began to surge. For decades, price-to-income levels have moved in tandem, with a specific housing market’s prices rising or falling in line with local residents’ incomes. Many economists say that makes the price-to-income ratio a good gauge for determining whether housing is undervalued or overvalued for a given market. Zillow found property prices in one-third of 130 housing markets across the nation were undervalued, when compared with residents’ current income and the pre-bubble trend. For the U.S. as a whole, home prices were around 2.9 times incomes from 1985 to 2000. But during the housing boom, values increased at a much faster rate than incomes. The price-to-income ratio peaked at around 5.1 in 2005. Home prices have since fallen so that on average, nationally, prices are around 3.3 times income, or about 14% above the historical trend. Prices have fallen much faster in certain markets. In Las Vegas, home prices are now 25% below their historic price-to-income trend of 2.7. During the housing bubble, that ratio more than doubled to 5.6. Home prices have been falling for the past five years, and by March, prices were just 2.1 times household incomes. Home prices are undervalued by 35% in Detroit; by 18% in Modesto, Calif.; and 13% in Fort Myers, Fla. (www.wsj.com)
Wall Street Journal (8/17/11); Nick Timiraos

Builders specializing in communities for active seniors over 55, such as PulteGroup’s Del Webb brand and D.R. Horton, are offering new home designs featuring snore rooms near the master bedroom for couples who can’t always catch a good night’s sleep together due to different schedules, nocturnal habits or medical conditions. As many as 23% of married couples don’t sleep side-by-side through the night, up from 12% in 2001, according to research cited by Del Webb. “The chat we hear about on the sales floor is often about nocturnal sleeping habits,” says Andy Pfeifer, vice president of sales for PulteGroup in Tennessee. “What we’d see happen before we offered our new floor plan option was that one spouse would be relegated to a secondary bedroom. Del Webb and D.R. Horton don’t specifically refer to snoring but market the new areas as optional “dual owner suites” (Del Webb) or “alternate dual master suites” (D.R. Horton). Both builders say these elements don’t typically change the overall size or price of a home. At Del Webb, for instance, a dual owner suite may mean trimming a little garage storage space or slightly reducing the size of a walk-in closet. (www.today.msnbc.com)
Today/MSNBC (8/8/11); Jane Hodges

A recent NAHB study found that the front porch may again be a standard feature on many homes by 2015. James Crisp, architect with Crisp Architects in Millbrook, N.Y., and co-author with Sandra Mahoney of “On the Porch: Creating Your Place to Watch the World Go By,” agrees that porches continue to be one of the most popular design features for clients. “It’s rare these days that we don’t find a way to get a porch on a project. Absolutely if we’re doing a new home, but often in additions also,” he said. “Most people want a porch that’s big enough to sit on,” he said, and a lot of people want porches big enough to fit a table and chairs to eat on. “The bottom line is it has to make the house look better, and that’s pretty easy,” he said. Front porches, in particular, he explained, must accentuate the entryway. “It’s all about proportions, but a gable right over the front door always has that effect.” (www.poughkeepsiejournal.com)
Poughkeepsie Journal (8/11/11); Jackie DiMarzo

Over the last few years, in cities from Oakland, Calif., to Clemson, S.C., well-intentioned foraging enthusiasts have mapped public fruit trees and organized picking parties. Volunteers descend on generous home owners who are happy to share their bounty, sometimes getting a few jars of preserves in return. There are government efforts to turn abandoned land into food, too. In Multnomah County, Ore., officials offer property that has been seized for back taxes to community and government organizations for gardens. But with more and more properties in foreclosure and large stretches of vacant lots available in some cities, a new, guerilla-style harvest is taking shape. Robby Astrove works with Concrete Jungle, a fruit-foraging organization in Atlanta that in 2009 began building a database of untended fruit and nut trees on commercial and public land. The group donates most of the food to agencies that feed the hungry. Although Astrove and his colleagues have harvested abandoned community gardens and he has planted pear and fig trees on empty commercial property, the organization cautions volunteers against trespassing and does not pick fruit on foreclosed properties. Still, he thinks it is a great idea, especially for cities like Atlanta, where one in 50 homes is in foreclosure. Already, he said, there is an underground network among the homeless who work in the gardens and trees around vacant homes, he said. “It’s a perfect storm of vacant properties and people who need a quality food source and an unused resource,” he said. (www.nytimes.com)
New York Times (8/14/11); Kim Severson

Adding solar panels to a house is becoming less expensive, and many in the industry say the cost of tapping the sun’s power for a home’s energy needs will be even more affordable in the years ahead. “The price of solar has come down as the industry ramped up,” said Monique Hanis, spokeswoman for the Solar Energy Industries Association. Similar to other electronics, when a product is produced on more of a mass scale, its price drops, she said. The cost of solar panels to produce electricity for a home, plus the cost of their installation, is currently between $25,000 and $35,000 for an average home, Hanis said. For a solar water heater system, the cost is between $4,000 and $10,000, she said. The cost of solar panels alone is down 30% when compared with last year, she said. Installations of residential solar energy systems have more than doubled in the past two years, she said. That’s partly because of the lower costs and also because of new financing options that help eliminate upfront costs to customers, according to the association. (www.marketwatch.com)
MarketWatch (8/22/11); Amy Hoak