A real estate group says home prices fell in eight out of every 10 US cities in the third quarter of this year as heavily discounted distressed sales made up 30% of all deals.
But home sales continued their climb, with quarterly sales outpacing the second quarter and the previous year’s figures, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday.
The median sales prices of existing homes declined in 123 out of 153 metropolitan areas compared with the same period a year ago. Prices rose in the other 30 cities.
The national median price clocked in at $177,900, or 11% below the third quarter last year.
Prices in Fort Myers, Fla., plunging 40 percent to $98,000 from a year ago, the worst in the nation. Las Vegas saw its median price tumble almost 35 percent to $138,500 year-over-year.
The largest price gain, by contrast, was in Cumberland, Md., where prices jumped 19 percent to $122,100. Davenport, Iowa, followed with an increase of 14 percent to $115,600.
President Barack Obama signed a bill last week extending and expanding the federal tax credit. Now, buyers who have owned in their current homes for at least five years are eligible for tax credits of up to $6,500. First-time homebuyers -- or anyone who hasn’t owned a home in the last three years -- would still get up to $8,000. To qualify, buyers have to sign a purchase agreement by April 30, 2010, and close by June 30.
JJS: Actually, subsidies are not how to make housing affordable; they just prop up the sellers’ prices. To bring about permanent affordability, we need to take homes off speculative land. Where people don’t speculate in land, both land and any housing on it costs less. Speculators would rake in less, but there’s plenty of real work for them to do.
How do we make land undesirable as an object of speculation? We recover its rental value for public benefit. How do we make such land dues affordable? We de-tax buildings, and eventually sales and earnings, too. If you want to wield the power of taxation, do so to levy pollution, depletion, and exclusion from the commons.
It’s the policy of geonomics, and one leader wants to use it in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh Councilman Ricky Burgess said today that he will introduce legislation aimed at getting city colleges and universities to make negotiated payments to the city based on the land they occupy and the services provided to their students -- an alternative to the tuition tax proposed by Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.
“I think that our educational institutions have to participate,” Burgess said, “ in funding the services that are given to all of our constituents, including their students.” Presently, university- and college-owned land is tax-exempt. Meanwhile, the city incurs costs when it provides its services to students.
Some cities have similar agreements -- the schools in Providence, R.I., pay that city $2.5 million a year -- but it’s unclear that any schools pay their hosts anything like $16.2 million a year.
“We have universities that have endowments in the billions of dollars,” Burgess said. “It’s not a question of ability [to pay]. It’s a question of will.”
The universities have said they will fight Mayor Ravenstahl 1% tax on tuition bills, if enacted.
Ludhiana’s municipal corporation (MC) is mulling over an increase in the land rent, after getting a broad picture of the civic body’s land lying vacant that has either been given on lease or rented out to private individuals.
So far, MC (in India) has leased prime property at dirt-cheap rates to private individuals, most of whom are not even paying the rent due to the civic body [an injustice occurring in perhaps all nations]. Severe irregularities have been detected on the part of MC officers, who have not maintained proper record of prime land.
Commissioner Kanwalpreet Kaur Brar said revenue generation for the civic body could help MC deal with its financial crunch. “We have prime property that could prove to be a boon for us.”
About the missing files, she said they would take punitive action against officers who had failed to submit records to the civic body.
Brar added that they were planning to identify categories of buildings in the city so that action could be taken according to their status.
JJS: If Ludhiana is planning to tax buildings, that could backfire. Owners would cut back on quality. And as long as the city gets the land rent, it would spur owners to keep locations at their best use. A whole city using its land efficiently would keep location values at their peak, so the public treasury would have plenty of revenue for public services, possibly even a dividend for citizens.